Breakthrough Reinvented: Bridging The Gap Between Technology And Innovation With Sterling Hawkins
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History has proven time and time again that the breakthrough of yesterday simply becomes a necessity of today. As people of the present, the responsibility of reinventing and reimagining the modern age falls to us. Internationally-recognized thought leader and top-rated keynote speaker on innovation, Sterling Hawkins, joins John Livesay in this episode and to share how he got started in the industry in a non-traditional way. Sterling explains the struggles of coming in blind in the industry, and provides some tips and strategies on what to prepare and focus on for you to gain firm ground. He discusses the different aspects needed to be considered in breaking through and how household companies overcame the challenges in their industries.
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Listen to the podcast here
Breakthrough Reinvented: Bridging The Gap Between Technology And Innovation With Sterling Hawkins
Our guest in this episode is Sterling Hawkins, who is an expert at innovation specifically in the retail space. He said, “Your breakthrough potential is connected to your tolerance for risk and that change is happening at such a pace that we don’t know how to cope with it.” He’s got some insights into how he personally copes with it. Finally, he said that discomfort is needed for innovation.
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Our guest is Sterling Hawkins who is out to break the status quo to create what’s possible for humanity in our time. He spent his career igniting new views and inspiring people to act on them. His journey has been nontraditional right from the beginning. Sterling grew up a fifth-generation retailer, having to master the intersection of human behavior and technology under extreme competition. In 2004, Sterling cofounded, launched and sold his first tech company, Convena, where he developed innovative approaches to beat the competition, handle high growth, and achieve performance no matter the obstacles.
He went on to be involved with the launch, growth or investment in over 50 companies. Sterling reviews over 1,000 new technology companies every year, further refining the keys to realizing breakthrough innovation. He gives back that experience as a mentor to leading entrepreneurs working through financial growth. He is the Founder of CART, which is a platform to drive the adoption of emerging technologies of Fortune 500 companies. He speaks and runs workshops around the world for Samsung and many other companies, including the United Nations. Welcome to the show, Sterling.
Thanks, John. It’s great to be with you.
I always like to ask my guests to tell their story of origin. We hinted at it with you being a fifth-generation retailer but take us back as far as childhood or school where you started to say, “I want to do something unique and nontraditional.”
I grew up in my family supermarket. I remember being 5, 6, 7 years old passing out cookies to people who were waiting in line for things and grabbing whatever we wanted to eat when we were kids. The selection is endless, especially the child. There was this defining moment for me at fifteen. I didn’t enjoy the life of a supermarket kid. My dad says to me, “You’re going to work here and we’re going to start you out at night crew this summer.” I’m like, “We don’t just get free food all the time and hang out whenever I want?” It’s a real awakening for me like, “This is work and this is how retail operates.” Looking back on it, it’s such a tremendous experience to be exposed to that level of things where I was doing everything from sweeping and mopping the floors to stocking the shelves. I worked my way up through managing most of the departments, which was a blast. It informs everything that I’m doing now because it was people-oriented.
You had that experience and your first real-life job was getting into marketing and branding, right?
[bctt tweet=”It’s very difficult to start a company without a lot of experience. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I wouldn’t recommend this to people but my first “job” was I started a company with my dad. It was called Convena and we said, “We’ve got a store to test things. Let’s develop some software and create a company that can deliver a personalized message to everybody shopping with us.” We built it together. We launched it in our family store. Long story short, we sold it to a group in the Bay Area, which brought me out to California and this is probably 2005 or so. It was quite a journey. We got acquired by a much larger company that went on to raise $550 million.
What’s one thing that you wouldn’t recommend doing? Is it because it was with your dad?
No. It’s difficult to start a company without a lot of experience. I tell people with entrepreneurship in general, which I’ve done a lot of. For a lot of people, I wouldn’t wish it on them because it is hard to get up every morning, making the bread, getting it done, selling it and marketing it. In fact, I’ve never had a real job in my life. You’re a jack of all trades and you get it at a point where you’ve got some support and help and you’re scaling things. You’ve got to be ready for that because there’s the sexy allure of the “entrepreneur” now. It is a phenomenal opportunity to create something new in the world. You just got to enter into something like that, acknowledging the risks you’re taking on and which you can step into.
I once heard somebody say, “You have a choice. You can work for somebody else for 40 hours a week or yourself for 80.” You’re also involved with this Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality Association. People would love to learn what’s going on in that world. When I was speaking at Coca-Cola, they were talking about using virtual reality to allow people to imagine what the coke machine would look like before it got installed in their store. That’s the baby steps of it. What do you see happening in that world?
We’re looking at over 1,000 new tech companies every single year and virtual and augmented reality is a major part of that. It’s one of these situations where the sky’s the limit and there are some great applications of VR but they’re niche. For example, a store owner being able to see a store stand or a new coke machine and what it looks like if you were to buy it. There’s a lot of gaming and I don’t think it’s reached quite that critical mass to get it in the market. It’s a lot of what I talked about, which is the turning points of innovation or the difference between the linear trajectory that most of us are on and most technologies start on and without exponentially possible.
Waze is now sending notifications like, “You’re within three miles of Domino’s Pizza. Here’s a coupon.” Google and Coca-Cola have partnered up so while you’re in the grocery store, they can tell you’re walking by the display in a grocery store and send you a coupon. That is all part of retailing, isn’t it?
That’s right. We live in a day and age now where technology is accessible to many people and it’s changing quickly that it becomes a new normal for us. A good example of that and most people are familiar with this. There used to be this massive industry called the taxi industry. The whole generation wouldn’t think twice about calling a cab. That’s what you would do in New York and other cities when you want to get somewhere without a car. They’ve spent a lot of years improving the taxi industry. They are going to take credit cards and then they’re going to improve the gas mileage and then they’re going to improve where taxis are around the city, state or wherever they are. They weren’t thinking about what’s exponentially possible and then along comes Uber. Whenever I was flying to a new city and there’s not an Uber there, I’m confused about what I’m supposed to do.
Breakthrough Strategies: It is a phenomenal opportunity to create something new in the world. Acknowledge the risks you’re taking on and which you can step into.
It’s like taking you back in time with a rotary phone or something. You’re like, “What’s a taxi stand?”
I’m like, “There’s no Uber in the city, how do you get to the hotel?” Within five years, it has become this new normal for most of us. That’s the world that we live in now where a technology that launched several years ago is almost expected by everybody a couple of years later.
We’re the perfect person to ask this question about because we’re both living in Los Angeles. You watch what’s happening when you get off the plane. LA was probably one of the first cities to have Uber. You had a choice as a passenger getting off a plane. You could go down the stairs and wait in line to get a cab the traditional way, or you could go upstairs like you were checking back in and wait with a group of people in mass ordering Uber and Lyft. It was a bunch of traffic but it was still cheaper than the cab downstairs. It probably would take you longer than a cab would because they weren’t all lined up and people had to get there so you had to wait up.
Convenience and price saving are worth having to wait longer than it would be faster just hopping in a cab. Now, the game has changed again. Everyone has to take a shuttle or walk a mile into a location with your luggage. That’s the last thing you want to do in the rain and the line for the shuttle is worse than any taxi line ever was. You get there and you have a choice. You can order the Uber on your phone while you get there and they give you a code or you wait and you get in the line to get a cab. I got to the Uber and I said to him, “Why would anyone ever take a cab?” Because there’s no longer a savings of time. The whole thing is even disrupted yet again.
Or money in a lot of cases.
Uber is still cheaper so I don’t understand why somebody would unless you didn’t want to deal with your phone. To your point, it keeps changing and it goes, “Eventually, in a few years, we’re going to build some way to get you here faster than the shuttles.” In the meantime, we’re trying to eliminate the traffic so this concept of how we move people and how we move product whether it’s an Amazon drone delivering your food to you now. Overnight is not fast enough anymore.
“I need it in an hour or 30 minutes.”
[bctt tweet=”Your breakthrough potential is equivalent to the amount that you put on the line. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Domino’s Pizza is doing this. They are using artificial intelligence to anticipate your pizza order to try and shave 30 seconds off the delivery time. People’s expectations keep going up and up. Let’s talk about what you’re doing at the Center for Advancing Retail and Technology or CART. Tell us what it does and what trends you see coming.
CART operates on this premise of most businesses, especially legacy businesses that have been around for 20, 30, 50, 100 years, they’re good at what they do. They’re good at getting toothpaste on the shelf or getting gasoline to the stations then into your car. They’re optimized for that and not much else. They’re condemned in a lot of ways to this linear trajectory of, “How can I fix, adjust and change something that I already have?” There’s nothing wrong with that. We have to do that as humans and as business people especially. The risk is the same thing that happened to the taxi industry where somebody comes in from the left-field and totally rethinks, reframes or solves a problem that you thought was cutting the cost of doing business.
What’s happening is if you overlay on that linear growth that we’re on, technology is on this exponential growth curve. There’s this new normal pace of change increasing every single day. The only way to future proof your business is to develop a culture, a group of people that can create and embrace change at a faster rate. CART is designed to do exactly that with a lot of the companies that we work with. We not only can work with them to accelerate the pace at which they make decisions and will do it by moving them through transactions, discussions and processes. They get to decisions about eleven times faster than they do otherwise but we also bring them new technology and tools that step them further into that innovation gap and gives them a chance to get a piece of what might be exponential growth playing with a virtual reality implementation or an autonomous vehicle. Maybe even 3D printed food or things. As they can connect to some of those technologies and they can do it faster, it positions them much better for the future.
“Because you need to be more agile than ever,” is what I’m hearing. With technology changing fast, you have to make faster decisions. How do you de-risk someone’s fears of making the wrong decision by making a fast decision? That’s traditional thinking. Don’t rush into any decisions and yet, you don’t hold on to that model in your head anymore if the technology is changing fast. Am I painting the picture of the gap accurately that you’re solving?
You are. What’s fascinating to me is that humans, you and I, are not built for that kind of change. Our biology, our feeling and even our thinking are tuned towards tomorrow being a lot like now. We feel a lot of anxiousness or anxiety or fear when it comes to presenting us or confronting us with something new, especially if it’s going to potentially, dramatically transform something or it’s going to cost a lot of money. The key with our clients and for everybody is your breakthrough potential is equivalent to the amount that you put on the line. If you put a little bit on the line, there will be a little benefit. If you put a lot on the line, it could be much more beneficial. To your point, you’ve got to balance those two things to say, “We’ve got enough skin in the game to make a small enough decision that if we were to lose it, we don’t lose everything. At the same time, it’s meaningful enough and inspiring enough that we’re going to work towards the potential breakthrough that this thing is going to bring.”
Do you have a story of one of your clients you’ve worked with at CART?
There are many stories. It’s funny because innovation, like entrepreneurship, can be very sexy especially as a consumer innovation, “I want the latest virtual reality goggles, watches and everything else.” It’s easy to do at an individual level, especially when you pay $100 to get one of these cool devices. For a company which is one of the biggest food manufacturers in the world, it’s a little bit different for them because they’ve been around for more than 100 years, at least some of their subsidiaries. They’ve gotten good at what they’ve done. To talk about implementing new technology, selling their products in a different way or getting them to the consumer in a different way. It totally contradicts because what they’ve always done has worked. I was working with them and we were looking at some social media tools, especially TikTok. Have you done a TikTok yet, John?
Breakthrough Strategies: Technology that was released five years ago has become normal and expected by the people of today.
I’m familiar with it, but there should be an age limit. There are certain clothes I shouldn’t wear and I should not be on TikTok. Let the kids have that one thing, but I know what it is. It’s going to be the next Instagram.
It’s taking over. Older generations are on it and companies are putting a lot of money into it. We’re having this discussion about this brand stepping into doing a campaign on the platform. They do some other things on social media. When you’re talking about it as possibilities like, “We could do this. We could do that. We could do something else,” it’s exciting and inspiring. There’s a lot of conversation in the room. As soon as you get to that critical point where you say, “Of all those possibilities, let’s pick one. Let’s pick a possibility and let’s start framing up the contract for what that is going to look like.” At that point, you’ve got to put something on the line. In their case, it was a little bit of money. It’s not bad and it’s not wrong. It just becomes a little more serious when you sign on the dotted line to say, “We’re going to commit to doing this.” That’s the only way to realize new possibilities, which is to put yourself on the line.
Would you say that your breakthrough potential is connected to your risk tolerance then? Would that be accurate?
Yeah.
One of the things that you touched on is we’re not built to take on this much constant change. It’s stressful on our bodies and our own brains. The growth and change at an exponential rate that’s never been experienced before can take a real toll on people’s mental health, stamina and physical health. You are someone who is working on your own self-development and growth. You’re teaching yoga. Can you share the importance of that as someone who’s traveling the world speaking and the stamina that’s required for that at any age? You had literally, from my observation, Sterling and why I respect you so much, is you’re walking your talk. You’re modeling for people how to embrace this disruption and constant innovation and still stay physically centered and calm. Any thoughts on that?
It looks better than it feels on a day-to-day basis. It does take a significant amount of effort, will and everything else. To some degree, discomfort is necessary for any innovation. For myself and for people, we can grow from the level of discomfort. I might be worried about a $500 decision but if I get comfortable there, then maybe I can stretch it and make a $5,000 decision a couple of weeks from now. What we’re doing is we’re acclimating to more levels of stress and faster change. Biologically, what’s happening is the cortisol that gets into our blood when we get nervous, anxious, confronted or excited in some shape or form is it starts to go away as you acclimate to these levels of endurance or performance.
What I try to do is continually push that edge of what I can acclimate my body and myself to be comfortable with. Inevitably, it’s going to push me right up against things where I’m uncomfortable. I do these crazy things like skydiving, shark diving and any physical activities where I’ll get confronted. By choosing that discomfort, being able to step into it and grow from it gives me the capacity to not only do all the things that I’m doing now but expand the difference that I can make in the world. I’m not special. It’s the human capacity that everybody’s got the ability to do.
[bctt tweet=”Innovation, like entrepreneurship, can be very sexy. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
This concept of, “As soon as I get into a comfort zone, I’ll be comfortable,” and it is counterintuitive but that is not the case. Your comfort zone is like being in a velvet rut. You get depressed because you’re not stretching and challenging yourself to tolerate something new. Students who think, “As soon as I get out of school, I never have to read another book or learn anything new,” are in for a rude awakening. You’ve posted on Twitter and things that you’ve spoken at the Technology Innovation Gap and spoken with leaders of a supermarket called Hy-Vee.
It’s a great group of people out in Des Moines, Iowa.
Can you share what’s going on in that huge supermarket world? What gaps are there between technology and innovation that was going on at that event?
I can’t share specifically. Supermarkets are one of these legacy businesses in often cases that have gotten good at sourcing products, distributing them out to their stores and creating decent experiences to shop those stores. What they’re confronting is, almost cliché at this point, Amazon and everybody that are selling things online as well as with these different delivery mechanisms whether it’s drone delivery, autonomous vehicles or anything else. Retail, especially when a lot of industries are under this huge pressure, Hy-Vee included reinventing the experience, what the store means, and how to satisfy the consumer’s wants and needs. One of my favorite parts about retail is it’s at the heart of most societies, satisfying our wants and needs, feeding us, getting us clothes and everything else and reveals part of most everything.
Do you remember the time when you could not pump your own gas?
I do remember that.
When they started asking people to do self-service or full service and you have to pay more, people were mortified. They’re like, “What? I’m paying someone to pump my own gas so I don’t have to get smelly gasoline on my hands.” We’re starting to see that in grocery stores where they’re not incentivized. What I find fascinating is you’re not saving any money by bagging your own groceries. Supposedly, it saves you time if you do it faster is the reason to do it but I’m thinking to myself, “There’s no financial incentive like there was with gasoline.” It’s like, “Help us save overhead and bag your own groceries and bring your own bags, by the way, too.” “Why don’t you pick up lettuce while you’re at it?”
Breakthrough Strategies: A human’s biology, thinking, and feelings are tuned towards tomorrow being a lot like today. That’s why we get anxiety and fear when there’s something new.
It’s a notoriously low margin business, especially supermarket retail. As they get crunched by more people buying some of their products online, they’re looking for, “Where can I save pennies?” That leaves us bagging our own stuff in a lot of cases.
What do you think about Amazon’s test? There are still a lot of hotels. You go into the hotel, there’s a minibar, you pick up a drink and you go, “I don’t want it.” You put it back and say, “Sorry.” You picked it up and you buy it. They figured out technology-wise to be able to let somebody pick something off a shelf in a grocery store and read the label and say, “I’m not buying that.” It puts it on your phone as a purchase and takes it off when you put it back in. To me, that is revolutionary. That’s a huge leap of, “I can pick touch something and not be committed to buying it.” We are eliminating union paid jobs of thousands of people who’ve been checking people out of grocery stores for decades. Do you think that’s going to take off?
I do. It’s a brand new experience and a good one. By the way, have you been into any of these stores?
I would love to.
Whenever you’re around once, check it out because whenever I’m in there, you go in, you take the products off the shelf and you just walk out. I have this sinking feeling that I’m stealing and it’s uncomfortable.
It is because we’re trained that way, “Where are the handcuffs?” “John, can you come to bail me out? You’re my one phone call.”
It’s still funny because I’m walking out with the product visible in my hand like, “I’m not trying to take something here. I’m doing it by the book.” As soon as you get used to that, a couple of things happen. One is you’re now rooms for shopping in most other places because you can walk into stores and you have to wait in line. It creates this new normal as Uber did. Secondly, it doesn’t feel like you’re buying anything. People tend to buy more things. The same thing happened with credit cards, by the way. As soon as you don’t have to take cash out, you spend a little more money.
[bctt tweet=”The heart of companies is what they stand for, who they are, and what they believe in. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
The same is true with me. I’m like, “Did I order that on Amazon? What in the world is in this box?” I’ve already forgotten I’ve ordered it and you do a little more impulse shopping with Amazon.
What was fascinating about Amazon is how they’ve gone from a company that sold books online to now they’re doing everything. The heart of companies is what they stand for, who they are, and what they believe in. Amazon has got this great mantra that says, “Day one.” Whether you’re on the first day on the job or you’ve been there for 7, 8, 9 years, you walk in like it’s your first day. The genius of it is on your first day of a job, you’re looking for how to do things differently and why they do those things. You’re questioning things, you’re looking for where you can add value and you’re a little bit uncomfortable. They created an entire culture of people that go in every day looking at things new and asking questions like somebody is starting out. It’s given them this fantastic growth in arms into everything.
It sounds like they’ve got a great culture where it’s safe to ask questions and you’re not going to hear, “This is the way we’ve always done it. Therefore, we don’t even discuss it.” That’s the opposite. I’ve talked about this when I give keynotes. It’s focused on “one thing first” and people forget Amazon just sells books. Many startups want to boil the ocean like, “Look at all the things we’re doing.” Imagine if Amazon launched with all the products they have now. People will be completely overwhelmed by buying toilet paper and books. They were known as an inexpensive way to get books. First, you got the social proof before they started expanding. That lesson is true, whether you’re an entrepreneur or not. Be known for one thing first and then you can expand beyond that, but it doesn’t, in any way, shape or form diminish the fact that they still sell books and they’re now selling everything else. As a speaker, anytime at branding, you’re more known for one thing first and then you can speak to other things. The easier it is for people to go, “This is who Sterling helps and what problems he solves for them.”
Apple has done a good job at that as well. Their mantra for a lot of years was, “Think Different.” That’s certainly uncomfortable if you’re the one person in the room that thinks differently than everybody else. They’ve built the whole culture that your point started with one thing and has mushroomed into all sorts of different devices and industries that they’ve disrupted.
You give a lot of different keynotes around innovation thinking and the innovation gap. What I love about your takeaways on the innovation gap is, “You have to first let go of everything you think you already know,” which is so Zen. I love that.
It is difficult to do.
It’s because you’re like, “What?” and that’s our entire identity into our knowledge. Only when we let go of what we think we know can we discover what’s possible. You have to take the audience on a journey because they’re already resisting letting go of what they know before you can start getting them to imagine new ways of doing things.
Breakthrough Strategies: Retail is under a lot of pressure to reinvent the experience of what the store means and how to satisfy a consumer’s wants and needs.
It is a blast every time. Speaking is one of my favorite things in the world to do and to step in front of a group of people that more often than not tends to be cynical about whatever it is that they’re doing and rightly so, the world is a hard place. To break through that force field to discover some new things is a blast.
How can someone reach out to you? If someone wants to hire you as a speaker, find out about CART or even have you come in and do a workshop, what would be the next step for them to explore?
SterlingHawkins.com is the best place. CART’s website is AdvancingRetail.org. I’m searchable on most social media except TikTok. I’m not there yet.
Any last thoughts, a quote or a book you want to leave us with?
It was great spending some time with you, John. I know we go back several years now but then having this conversation, I appreciate being on your podcast, who you are and the difference you’re making out there in the world.
Thanks a lot. That’s Sterling Hawkins, everybody, breakthrough innovation. If you want to watch somebody walk their talk, follow him on social media and explore having him come and speak at your next event.
Important Links
- Sterling Hawkins
- CART
- Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality Association
- Hy-Vee
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Compete Every Day: What You Can Do Differently With Jake Thompson
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
There’s so much that goes into actually becoming competitive—in sports, in business, throughout your industry. But the best place to begin is by sorting yourself out, and making sure you’re ready to get where you want to go. Jake Thompson is the Founder and Chief Encouragement Officer at Compete Every Day, a lifestyle brand that helps leaders stay motivated, and reach their career, fitness, and life goals. Jake sits down with John Livesay, and gets into the nitty-gritty of what makes you a more competitive individual, and what makes your business ultimately more competitive. Hint: It’s all in you, all the time.
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Listen to the podcast here
Compete Every Day: What You Can Do Differently With Jake Thompson
Our guest is Jake Thompson. Jake teaches people how to compete every day so they can reach their full potential. He’s got experience as an athlete, an entrepreneur and a speaker, and he’s learned how to change a few choices that everybody makes so that they can be closer to the career, health and life that they were created to reach. The world’s most successful display of a specific mindset and the five traits of a winning competitor is what allows everybody to overcome the challenges we all face in life. He’s got book called Compete Every Day, the seven things leaders do differently so that they can win both in their career and in their life. Jake, welcome to the show.
John, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
I want to ask you like I do most of my guests to take us on your own story of origin. You can go back as far as childhood, high school, college, whatever it was, how did you get to be you?
I grew up in a small town out in East Texas, Piney Woods. For anyone that’s ever seen or are familiar with Friday Night Lights, that is Texas small-town football through and through. We’re about 12,000 to 13,000 people. The town shuts down and packs into the stadiums on Friday nights. I grew up with a massive love for football, sports and competition. I left East Texas and came to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex for college fully with the intention of being a sports agent. I was passionate about staying in that career. It was a competitive industry. I found love working at an internship for a few years. I got my Master’s degree. Then getting into that space and spending a few years in there, I realized that wasn’t what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
I read a book about the importance of story, ironically enough and how the actions we take, the things that we do, tell others what we believe not only about ourselves, but about the world around us. If we’re constantly pursuing things that only take care of ourselves, that are only padding our own bank account, if we’re not doing anything to make impacts beyond us, then we’re selling ourselves short. We’re selling our story short. I was challenged at that point in my early twenties to evaluate what I had been focused on, what I was telling everyone was important versus how my actions were showing others what was important.
I started going down this path that led me to the idea of Compete Every Day and this brand has started. I came up with the brand message at the end of 2010 while I was doing marketing consulting with a number of companies in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Eventually, it led me to putting some money into a few boxes of t-shirts and tank tops and selling them out of the back of my car back in 2011 as a side hustle with the one message that, “I believe you’ve got what it takes to show up, compete against your own previous best and I want to remind you of that and motivate you to keep doing that every day.”
Becoming Competitive: You burn yourself out and exhaust your energy by focusing on things outside your control.
There are a couple of things I want to click on that. First of all, this concept of only competing with yourself versus other people. I used to be a competitive swimmer. They’d line you up in heats and you have this race and I remember there’s always a guy that beat me. In breaststroke, you pull your head up out of the water and you take a breath and put it back down and then they measure your time to the thousandth of a second at the touchpads, and I beat him by less than a second. I said, “How did that happen?” They said, “You stay focused on the wall and he turned his head to the right to see if he was ahead, and that half a second of looking caused you to win.” I went, “I wonder if that’s true in life and in business, staying focused on our own progress.” It’s easy for us to start comparing ourselves to other speakers, other companies, “What are they doing? Maybe I should change.” Let’s talk about your insights on how you help people take those lessons from athletics, into the business world where we’re not competing with anybody else but ourselves.
That example is beautiful. I love that. If you haven’t seen that swimming example as well, there’s a wonderful picture of Michael Phelps in one of his Olympic Trials swimming. You see the competitor looking into the lane to his left and Phelps ended up winning that race beggarly and they show the importance of comparison. For all of us, it’s easy, all around us. There are other speakers, companies, and people doing what we’re doing or what we want to do. We need to look everywhere. We need to do exactly what they’re doing. In all reality, what that causes us to do is be like a track star swimmer who’s facing and going toward the finish line straight ahead. Anytime you turn your shoulders or your head, turn your focus off, you slow down. Your body is not designed to go at peak speed forward if you’re looking at somewhere else or if you’re twisted. The same applies to our life, we burn ourselves out and exhaust our energy, honestly, by focusing on things outside of our control.
[bctt tweet=”Being responsive is a competitive advantage.” username=”John_Livesay”]
A lot of my work is talking to people about how do we not only turn the focus inward? What do we control? Every day we control our actions, attitudes and efforts. Those three things regardless of what life has our attitudes, actions, and efforts are always up to us. It’s our choice every day, what attitude we’re going to have. It’s our choice what efforts we’re going to give and it’s our choice what actions we take or we don’t take. For us, once we start to understand it, then we look at what we’re going to do. One of the examples I love using with sales teams is this idea of three yards and a cloud of dust. If you’re familiar with football, it’s the old 1920s, ‘30s South football before they ever threw the ball. A snap and run three yards downfield. You can go from your own one yard line all the way down the field to the opposite end zone and score by doing that. However, it’s not sexy.
No one is putting you on SportsCenter for highlight reels because you didn’t make this crazy, amazing play. However, that’s ultimately what success is. It’s putting your head down, it’s doing one little thing every single day consistently moving that ball that gets us down the field toward our goals. You can’t do that if you’re looking everywhere else. What are we controlling every day? What’s the 1 to 3 things that we’re doing to advance that ball that are on us? We’re not waiting on someone else to make a decision. In sales, this is a perfect example of prospecting, putting out content, contacting people. It takes a second person to make that sale but it’s 100% on you, how many much outreaches you’re doing, how many things you’re creating, how much help and stories are you telling the world to help drive inbound sales as much as you are doing the outbound.
I like what you said there about, “Let’s focus on what we can control, not what we can’t control.” You and I are both keynote speakers. We get typically called in, they like our video, our agent has got us an interview, we do our best to tell them what we’re going to do and then we wait. Anybody who’s been in sales, you go in, you make a presentation, they have other people they have to see, there are a lot of people that have to make it. Their timeframe is different than our timeframe, 9 times out of 10. Getting that job, that sale is our number one priority and then making a decision is not their number one priority. I would love to hear what you do to follow up without being pesty or pedantic like, “Checking in to see if you’ve made a decision.” As if they forgot to tell you one way or the other. If we could give that to the readers, that awareness of, “I can’t control when they make the decision, but how I interact with them, I can control.”
You 100% can. One of the things that I’ve learned or trained myself in this area is the idea of a quick response. If someone were to immediately reach out to you about a gig, sometimes you’re like, “I’m not going to pick up the phone and call them right now or email them back right now, that’s going to make me look I’m desperate.” I’ve switched that thinking to where you can say, “I’m effective and I’m going to be efficient in my time. If you’ve reached out on your computer, I want to jump on this opportunity to help you.” It’s getting that limiting belief out.
From a follow-up, when we get off the phone immediately, the first thing I’m going to do is send an email with a recap of everything we talked about and a personalized video. I’m going to pull out my phone, shoot a quick video talking to you. Especially as a speaker, someone that’s in sales, I want to add some energy, some color, some commentary to the conversation we had on the phone by showing you my face, by showing how I’m going to present to you in person, that I’m excited about it and feel like, “I’ve got this cool video in an email that is personalized, it’s not some standard thing.” It’s going to help you tell that story a little bit better about what you do and how you stand out.
I’ll set a follow-up. When we’re on the phone I’m going to ask, “When would be a great time on your timeline to touch base with you?” You’re going to use like, “Give me that ballpark.” What I’ll do is I’ll shoot them a note on the day, “Following up as promised on this date. I’m going to touch base with you at this point.” If I haven’t heard back, it’s usually about three days later, I’m going to give them a call at that point. I’m going from email, touching base as I promised, following up with a phone call that’s going to allow us to have that conversation on your timeline. Then if we need to, let’s hop on another call, video call and whatnot.
[bctt tweet=”What is the best attitude, action and effort?” username=”John_Livesay”]
For me, it’s always that personalized touch of, “Let’s hop on a call and then let me send you a video with that email follow up.” If it’s someone of, “The timing is not right now.” For us, it’s a timing game on speaking and it maybe 6 months or 8 months from now before we’re ready or perhaps in a month or two, it’s already off their plate, it still may be our top priority but it’s not theirs. I’m going to send them a little packet in the mail, “Here’s some information about one of my programs. Here’s a note.”
What’s always helpful is if you’re someone that will go above and beyond and you’ll find these people on Facebook, on LinkedIn and Instagram and what they’re talking about, what they’re doing, then you have a talking point. If you’re a big sports fan then I can say, “Congrats, your team won. Their state rival wanted to send you this information so your team is set up to win the same way this year.” Something that’s not pestering them but you’ve also touched them in multiple different ways to tell that story, not only, “Here is how I can help you, here’s how I talk about these certain things, teach these certain things. I want you to see how I behave in our interactions that reinforce I’m someone that’s accountable, gritty, persistent, all the same things I want to teach your company how to behave.”
There are several things you said there that are great. In fact, we’re going to tweet this out, “Being responsive is a competitive advantage.” Unlike in the dating world where you might be seen as needy, “I’ll call you back after the date three times,” it’s the opposite here, and that’s fantastic. Also, I like the concept of personalizing something. I always tell people, act as if you already have the job. When I was up for a speaking job at Redfin, which is a real estate company, I thought, “I’m going to call and pretend I’m selling my place and see how they treat me. I’m going to call a competitor and see how I get treated before the interview.” They went, “What did you find out?” You say, “If I do that much preparation for the interview, imagine how much I’ll do if you pick me.” You connect those dots for people.
The other thing you said that I love is, “I saw your team won, congratulations. Let’s help your team and business.” You connect those emotional dots of winning, which is what your brand is all about. I’ve done the same thing, if I’m going to be speaking to a client, I’ll look them up on LinkedIn and say, “I see you worked in San Francisco, China, and now you’re in Europe. That’s an impressive career.” Some little thing that lets them know that you’ve taken a minute to know something about them personally is strong.
How many invitations do we get on LinkedIn or by email of people that’s a standard copy and paste, there’s no awareness of what we do? I laugh because the company name is Compete Every Day and I get all of this email about, “We own gyms and fitness professionals.” They’re selling me equipment if you’re a gym owner, and I’m like, “You didn’t even look at my profile.” A little bit of research, even the tiniest bit helps you stand out and tell the story that you’re invested in this process, this relationship. It’s not a, “Wham bam, thank you, ma’am. Quick, let me get you sold and out the door. Next person up.” You care about continuing on that story.
Becoming Competitive: Great players in sports aren’t so wrapped up in their failure. They immediately decide their next play.
How did you come up with the name, Compete Every Day, for your book and website?
The brand, ironically, took a few different iterations. I always was a competitive guy. I was a smaller kid in sports. For me, a competition was the opportunity to prove I belonged, more than anything I wanted to show I could outwork you and outsmart you, no matter what your talent was. The older I got, the more I started to realize the comparison game we all play is exhausting. There’s always someone ahead of you. There’s always someone behind you. If you’re constantly competing against everyone else, not only you’re going to burn yourself out, but you’re going to be lost because your identity is tied up in every single one of those head to heads, versus saying, “Who was I yesterday? How am I going to show up better in my work today? How am I going to show up more focused, more present with my coworkers, my family? How can I compete?”
[bctt tweet=”Your attitudes, actions, and your efforts are always up to you.” username=”John_Livesay”]
When I started exploring this path, it was the idea of looking at all areas of your life, your health, your relationships, and your career. What would happen if someone were to show up and compete to be their best in every single area? Honestly, I laughed, the first iteration of the company I called Stacked and I was like, “That’s a terrible name.” It had the core philosophies of the idea of stacking them on top of each other and pursuing greatness. Genuinely, I was on a ski trip with two friends and tinkering with designs and sketching things and I said, “What about Compete Every Day?” Both guys were like, “That is you. That fits your personality. You’re the most competitive driven person we know, run with it.” That was December of 2010. It took 6 to 7 months to try to play with things to figure out, what is the best fit for this message?
You referenced Michael Phelps and when I was selling advertising, I had Speedo as a client. They invited him to an event because he was on their payroll as a spokesperson and I got to ask him. As a former competitive swimmer, you can imagine what a thrill that was as an athlete yourself, “I’ve got to meet Tom Brady or something.” What would you ask them? I said, “Everyone says you’re a great swimmer because of your physique. You’ve got these big lungs and your feet are like fins. I bet there’s something else.” He said, “Yes. My coach asked me early on if I was willing to work out on Sundays and I said yes. We’ve got 52 more workouts in the near competition because everybody takes Sundays off.” I thought of that story for you when I saw your brand name, Compete Every Day, because I went, “Most people don’t think of competing. We certainly take Sundays off.” I thought, “What a great little nugget of that for you and your world of athletes.” Is there a professional athlete that you have met or want to meet? What would you ask them if you haven’t met them yet?
Probably, I have a laundry list that I would want to meet. Michael Jordan, obviously, being one of the greatest. I’m fascinated by the stories I’ve heard about him. We’ve all heard the story that he was cut from his high school varsity, and then everybody’s like, “He’s just Michael Jordan. He’s the greatest player ever.” He wasn’t always, he was a good player. In college, he did extra work. The Carol Dweck mindset profiles that if he didn’t follow shots to the basket during games, he would force himself to run sprints after the game, do extra practice. When he got to the NBA, he still was not the greatest player of all time. He was good. It was only by going through the adversity of the Detroit Pistons three years in a row, that he changed his workout routine. He changed how he trained, how he bulked up, how he played the game, encouraged more of his teammates to step up their game from a mental perspective and then went on the run of two different three-peat.
[bctt tweet=”The difference between nervousness and excitement is your preparation. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
He would be someone I would be fascinated to learn how he approached the idea of his habits. What did he see? How did he create the habits he created? What held him accountable to it? He has one of the greatest work ethic drives that we’ve ever seen and it was too much for a lot of people to deal with. I’m curious how he built those. What fires stoked him to develop the right habits and then how he’s stuck to it. A lot of us have habits we want to start. We have things we consistently want to do, but we don’t have that resolve to stick with it for years.
Speak to the level of lessons you learn from sports as it relates to confidence in business. For example, if you’re a baseball pitcher, you’re not going to be perfect and yet do you lose your confidence for the next pitch? They don’t say, “No. I remember who I am.” What lessons have you learned in athletics that can help people with their confidence in business?
There are two areas to that question. The first is, “What’s the next play?” That’s the terminology I use with athletes of asking, “What’s the next play?” There is going to be a bad play that happens in sports, you’re going to throw an interception, you’re going to get a home run hit off of you, just the same as you’re probably going to give a presentation. That sucks. You may lose a deal. Something bad is going to happen. At that point, it’s behind you, and great players in sports aren’t wrapped up on, “I do an interception. I missed the shot.” They’re taken out of the moment. If they’re like, “That happened. What did I learn? What am I going to do differently? What’s the next play?”
For us in life, it’s an idea of getting out of our own head. Most of us, like we talked about when we’re swimming, if we look into the left and the right at everyone else we slow down. The same applies when you’re trying to look behind you at what has already happened in the past, you slow down, you’re taken out of the present. For us, something bad is going to happen but at that moment, you have to say, “What’s the lesson and what’s the next play?” Get your eyes back to the present moment. The second thing is the difference between nervousness and excitement is your preparation. Simply done is preparation. The best way to prepare is by getting your reps set.
You build confidence one choice at a time, one day at a time. It’s like getting your reps. A pitcher is going to throw thousands and thousands of fastballs throughout the course of their career. A quarterback is going to make many passes. All of these basic drills that we see athletes do, they’ve done them time and time again, which makes them good at them in the middle of the game. The same, a lot of us go into sales meetings and presentations and we’re like, “We’re going to wing it.” What that does is it creates more nervousness in us, we’re trying to pull from things and our presentation isn’t as sharp.
[bctt tweet=”The preparation allows you the opportunity to improve.” username=”John_Livesay”]
If we put in the reps of preparing, just like we do when we speak, I had someone talk to me about the presentation, she’s like, “That looked natural.” I’m like, “That 45-minute talk, I’ve given twenty hours’ worth in the last year. All of those little bits, I’ve told those for hours and hours. That’s 60, 70 hours’ worth of content that you saw. The reason I’m able to do that is because I’ve done all the prep, I’ve got all the rep.” The only way we get better at work is by getting our reps in. Most of us are concerned about what we’re going to look like in the beginning. I don’t want to look like, “I’m at this certain level and my company, I can’t look like I don’t know what I’m doing or I’m trying to learn something new. That would look bad on me.” No. Successful people are saying, “I don’t care if I look like a rookie. I don’t care if I look a little bit foolish trying something new. I want to get better.”
Athletes, actors, everyone practices and rehearses and yet sometimes salespeople who’ve been doing it for a while, “I don’t need to practice my presentation.” It’s not going to be customized in and they might stumble and they might confuse people, they aren’t doing the work, especially when the stakes are high and there’s a big potential win. It shows when people have put the preparation in it and when they haven’t.
The preparation allows you the opportunity to improve in the moment. If you think about football, when a play breaks down and a quarterback has to scramble and improvise on the fly, they still know where everybody is on the field. They may have to change where they are, where they’re rolling to, but they still know. When you get up to do a talk or you give a presentation, you know all your story, you know your bit, but then something can happen in the audience, or the client does something and you’re like, “That’s a perfect analogy for this.” You can use that in the moment to tie it in and still continue to flow through the conversation because you’ve rehearsed, you have those reps and you’re well-prepared. Otherwise, if you saw that, you would see it and dismiss it and you would lose the opportunity to tie something in immediately on hand and on purpose.
Becoming Competitive: Grit is the ability to really go get your goals, but more than anything it’s the decision you’re going to put forth 100% effort every single day regardless.
Good actors will do that all the time, they’ve done all that rehearsal and then when the cameras are rolling, there’s a moment where they say something or react something that’s authentic because they’ve done all the prep. Arthur Ashe, the famous tennis pro said, “The key to success is confidence and the key to confidence is preparation.” It’s full circle back to you, Jake. I love your message and what you’re saying and how you let us apply it in our everyday lives. You talked a little bit about grit and I know that’s a big foundation of your talk and your book. Tell us what we can do if we don’t think of ourselves as someone who has grit and how do you define it?
Angela Duckworth does a phenomenal job in her book of defining grit as the ability to pursue goals with relentless inner fire. It’s that propensity to pursue it, that no matter how long it takes, how hard the road is, you’re willing to endure. Duckworth does a good job in her book of showing that talent will factor into success, there’s talent in all of us. You put effort and how much effort you put forth is twice as important, which is why there are people in sales that are incredibly talented communicators and storytellers that are lapped by people with less talent, less natural communicative abilities, but far greater effort. They’re putting in the effort to improve their communication, how they tell their story, how they prepare for their presentations. Effort is a big deal.
For me, grit is the ability to get your goals, but more than anything, it’s the decision that you’re going to put forth 100% effort every single day regardless of how you feel from day one until the day you get there. What that looks like from day-to-day is going to vary, but it’s going to go back to you maintain your grit when you’re focusing on what you control which is today, my attitude, actions, and effort. I’m not worried about tomorrow. I’m not worried about six months from now. I’m only focused on what I’m doing today.
We all get demotivated. We all burn out when we start saying, “I’ve been working on prospects for a month, two months, I’m not getting the leads.” What you don’t see is you’ve been planning some good seeds that are taking more time to develop. A lot of people are going to quit right then instead of saying, “What have I learned from the process? How do I keep planting seeds this year? How do I keep cultivating those relationships so when the opportunity arrives, I’m ready for it?”
Grit is relentless inner fire. You have one of those comments on the t-shirts that you sell on Compete Every Day, outwork your talent. To me, that’s what you define grit as.
It doesn’t matter how good it is that you’re born with, what talents and natural abilities you’re born with, what matters is what you do with them and what you choose to build. That’s a core tenet. One of the chapters of the book is all-around effort and how successful people I’ve seen aren’t as reliant on what they’re born with but continually build it. Even if they were born with unworldly talent, they still choose to outwork it, which has made them legendary in their field.
It’s been fascinating and inspiring. I can see why you’re a great speaker. The book, I can’t wait to get my hands on Compete Every Day. Any last thought or quote you want to leave us with, Jake?
The biggest one that I always go back to is the fact that our careers and our lives are worth competing for. If you’ll be someone that would commit to yourself, not anyone else but just to yourself, to start showing up every day doing the little things and writing the story that you want for your life, success awaits you. It may not be immediate, it may not be a year from now, two years from now but over time, it will start to develop the story that you leave behind on this earth is the one that matters and the one that you wanted.
What a great place to end. Thanks again.
Thanks for having me.
Important Links
- Jake Thompson
- Compete Every Day
- Angela Duckworth
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Habits For Success With G. Brian Benson
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Self-esteem and valuing yourself can help you be comfortable just being yourself and avoid being pushed around. In this episode, John Livesay, aka The Pitch Whisperer, chats with Habits for Success author, TEDx speaker, and coach G. Brian Benson about following his intuition and leaving the family business to pursue a life of balance and creativity. If you’re running out of creative juices, learn how G. Brian goes out of his comfort zone and tries different sporting endeavors that lends him excitement and a sense of accomplishment. Also discover how physical and mental clutter affects your vibrational energy and how you can operate from a healthy perspective.
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Listen to the podcast here
Habits For Success With G. Brian Benson
Our guest is G. Brian Benson, who is an award-winning and bestselling author on self-improvement. He’s a child’s book author, he’s a filmmaker and TEDx speaker. He is a four-time IRONMAN triathlete and cross-country bicyclist. Brian knows the value of hard work and never giving up on his dreams, a message that he shares with audiences through each of his creative expressions. Brian’s brand new book, which I’m happy to say I’ve read and loved, Habits for Success: Inspired Ideas to Help You Soar, is an Amazon number one bestseller and was selected as a 2019 Book Excellence Award in the motivational category. Brian, welcome to the show.
John, thank you. It’s a pleasure.
I like to ask my guests to tell us all their own stories of origin. You can go back as far as a kid, high school, college or wherever you want. Did you start off saying, “I want to be an actor,” or “I want to be an athlete?” How did all that begin?
I grew up in Salem, Oregon and growing up, I love sports. I love history. I was independent. I did my own thing and I was creative in different unique ways. I didn’t know what I wanted to do other than to be a Portland Trail Blazer when I was in grade school but that didn’t work out because I’m only 5’8” and probably not fast enough. I went to college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do the whole time I was there and I graduated and tried to run the family business. I did that for eleven years. I felt in the back of my mind that there was something else I was supposed to do that was my mission but I had no idea what it was at the time. After eleven years of being there, I told my dad, “I’m finished. I don’t feel I’m growing anymore and I feel I needed a new challenge.” He was understanding. I ended up taking a year to be able to leave because we decided to sell it and we had to go through that whole process, which was tough because I was ready to hit the road.
Let’s talk about that. What was the family business?
We had a golf center, which was a driving range, a retail store and a nine-hole par-three course.
You also talk about in your book, Habits for Success the importance of patience, you had to experience it and then were able to run it and live it. It’s one thing to tell people and give advice, learn to be patient. You are told you don’t have to do something you’re not passionate about and then you still have to be patient for a whole year until it gets sold, how did you find the patience for that?
It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Not only was I ready to get going with my life, but I also picked up a staph infection in my knee, not sure how and it was misdiagnosed. It caused a lot of problems. I had to have it drain ten different times until finally, they sent me to another doctor and he said, “You need to have an emergency surgery tomorrow to wash this out or you’re going to have a problem.” It was a nightmare in that regard as well. I sat down one day while all of this was going on, contemplating my future and I knew that I was feeling out of balance. I told myself, “Write five things that you feel will help keep you in balance at this moment.”
I did that and I put the paper in my wallet and I would refer to it occasionally and it helped, my intuition said, “Expand the list and write a book.” I had never written anything before but I did that and in about six weeks, I wrote this simple little book called Brian’s List: 26 1/2 Easy to Use Ideas on How to Live a Fun, Balanced, Healthy Life!, it gave me some direction, it was interesting. I self-published it and right at about the same time that I left the business. I moved to Reno, Nevada to be with my son who was in the Tahoe area, who was entering high school and connecting with him and helping him through that process and I started to reinvent myself.
Habits For Success: Truly enjoy the process of creation and trust that it will reach an effect.
It’s curious to know what those five things are, I see them in your book. Some of them are, “That’s good.” The secret is the combination, almost like a little mini checklist or do you have something in there that I haven’t seen but most people put in? I’m going to let you tell us what the five are.
Some of them we think about that, but it’s easy to forget. One is to drink enough water. That’s a sneaky one. I made sure I was drinking enough water. Two is to make sure that I was getting enough sleep. The third one is to make sure that I was getting some daily exercise and that was tough while I was going through the knee problem, but I needed movement and that helps me. Another one is to make sure that I was getting some alone time every day because I’m outgoing but I’m an introvert and I need time to refill my cup. The final one, make sure that I was being creative. At that time, I had not got to anything that I’m doing now. I wasn’t writing. I wasn’t doing anything like that. At that time, playing my guitar was a creative outlet.
That last one is important, you’re like, “I’m going to make time to exercise and going to make time to make sure I’m hydrated, maybe even find some time I can be alone. I can go to the sleep thing, most of the time I can do that, wait a minute, am I making time to be creative? I’m putting out fires all day at work and then I feel like I do that at home.” Especially if you’re a leader or want to grow as a person. This need, just because you’re alone doesn’t mean you’re having time to be creative. There’s a difference between alone time and creative time and I wanted to double click on that.
I learned this more in my journey, which we’ll probably tap into a little bit here going forward. Creativity is important. It’s like connecting with God, the source, the universe or whatever you want to call it and it’s a form of meditation. It’s a great way to feel good about yourself. It’s a great way to slow down and just be. You don’t have to be Van Gogh if you’re painting or you don’t have to be Walt Whitman if you’re writing, but in your own special way, it’s an outlet that is important.
You said another gem there, Brian, which is let go of thinking that what you’re creating isn’t good enough to spend time doing. Don’t have any attachments to having to produce income or winning the awards or anything else. You’re creating it for you and if nobody even sees it or hears it, that’s okay.
It’s interesting because initially, that was the case. However, as I kept going down the road and creating more stuff, then I started putting more attachment to it and held more expectations to it and that started to cause some problems for me. Even though it made a difference in a lot of ways, it probably helped solidify my foundation and keep moving forward. If it didn’t do something that I felt like it was supposed to do, I’d be depressed for a couple of weeks. I went through this roller coaster of the creative process and how I was reacting to what I was creating. Finally, a couple of years ago, after releasing my first kid’s book, it had a good release but then for some reason, I don’t know what I was expecting, I ended up with this depression. I said, “If it’s going to be like this anymore, I don’t want to do it.” From there on, I tried to truly enjoy the process of creation and trust that it will reach and affect whoever it’s supposed to and the rest is out of my control.
[bctt tweet=”Intuition is the language of the soul. Make time to be creative. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’m fascinated that you used the word going on a roller coaster because I talk about that all the time, helping people get off a self-esteem roller coaster of only feeling good if their numbers are up and bad if your numbers are down. As if our identity is contingent on an outcome and then we feel like, “I’m not worth anything if I’m me. I need to have all these achievements and they have to constantly be topping myself and impressing people nonstop just to get to acceptable.” As opposed to, “Who I am is enough, whether I create something or not, whether it gets accolades or not.”
Not be obsessively checking your ranking on Amazon or how many views you got or how many likes on a social media post or whatever. You can do to constantly go like, “I’m not feeling okay about myself. I feel even worse because I didn’t get a like on something that I thought was brilliant.” It will drive you crazy. I love helping people get off that self-esteem roller coaster. You are big on intuition and then you have a line in here which is, intuition is the language of the soul. Tell us a story of how you’ve let your intuition be your guide if you don’t mind.
It’s been my guidance so much. When I first got into triathlons, I was listening to it without realizing and I was listening to it until looking back. It was definitely a watershed moment for me but I had a knee injury in college. My kneecap got knocked out of place playing mud football and it sucked. I had to have surgery and I was nervous. I played a lot of sports in high school. I set a goal to do a short triathlon when I got done to have something to look forward to while I was rehabbing. I started feeling good about myself, I lost a few pounds and started to change my life. Intuitively, I felt drawn to the sport of triathlon. I wasn’t sure why, but I even wrote my first poem and it’s not good based on a person racing the IRONMAN and this was three years before I ever did one. Once I stepped to the starting line in that first short course race in 1987, I’d finished it and I felt alive and empowered. I ended up doing four more that summer and then ten the next summer and in the third season, I did my first IRONMAN. I felt destined to do that.
You talk about how intuition can communicate with us in different ways. It could be feeling restless, which is fascinating because some people don’t realize that your intuition is trying to talk to you. This concept of even a gut feeling or sometimes you become ill. If our body is not getting our attention with the other things, it’s like, “I’m going to make you slow down enough so I could maybe get your attention to listen if you’re home with a cold or something even worse.”
Sometimes we get smacked hard because we aren’t paying attention or we’re too busy in our lives to listen to it. It’s no accident that my first book, even though it was accidental, was all those different ways to stay in life balance because it taught me how to be aware of what kept me in balance and what threw me out. Which in turn, the more that I can institute balance into my life, the easier it is to let our intuition come through.
What advice do you have for someone who’s like, “I’m not in touch with my intuition and I feel out of balance.”
I’ll definitely try to get them to start thinking about what they’re doing. Start documenting your life and try to identify it and it might take the help of a coach to help be an accountability partner and to look at it with fresh eyes to see what one might be doing. With Habits for Success, habits can work both ways. You get habits going that aren’t that healthy for us and it becomes a part of our system that we forget about anything else. You have to identify it and become more self-aware of how you’re living and then you can start to eliminate and institute different ways to go about things. That’s the best place to start.
Habits For Success: Tearing up another crumpled paper ball for the pile.
You talk about helping people get over their fear of failure and how important resilience is, any stories around your own failures and how you picked yourself back up?
For me, failing can mean a variety of things, but I’m going to jot back to what we were talking about the expectations at the ends of things. For me, I put my expectations high that when something didn’t do what it was supposed in my mind, even though it did wonderful things, I felt I was failing.
That’s an insight right there. We are mostly the ones labeling something a failure more than the outer world.
Anybody else looking from the outside and maybe the different things that are creative, they’re going, “That’s amazing,” or “How’d you do that?” I would love to have one of those things. I’m driven and I feel I know where I’m headed that it’s like I’ve got tunnel vision or I had tunnel vision. I’m trying to be patient and step back and allow things. It messed with me and it put all these undue weights on my shoulders and pressure. Failing in the traditional sense is healthy even though we can beat ourselves up and feel like failures, but it builds character. It can help us become more empathetic. It humbles us. If you’re coming with the right intentions, it can force you to dig deeper and hone something that you’re working on, maybe a blessing in disguise. It can teach us new ways to do things. Failing isn’t that bad. We make it bad, we put this stigma on it.
As opposed to, “This is feedback.”
It’s information.
This power of saying no to things you don’t want to do, a lot of people have trouble saying no. They feel guilty. They find themselves doing things that they don’t want to be doing and resenting doing it and not showing up all because they don’t want to say no. What advice can you give us on how we can break that habit of not saying no?
This could be a little bit deeper answer than you might’ve expected but it all stems from maybe, sometimes our own self-esteem. What I’ve learned, I’ve had to work hard at learning how to love it except myself. As we’re climbing that ladder, if we’re not valuing ourselves as much as we should, we will say yes to a lot of things that we shouldn’t and let people push us around a little bit, hypothetically speaking. The more that we can find that place of accepting ourselves for who we are and what we have to work with and finding the value in ourselves, it becomes easier. Everything else starts to fall into place and we start to do things that we want to do and we start to respect ourselves more.
This concept of play that we all have as a kid somehow goes out the window as we get older. You’re a parent so you probably have seen, “I can play with my kid.” That’s okay, but in the business world or when we get stressed out, the last thing a lot of people think about is, “Let’s go have some fun.” I can’t. I’ve got to worry about the bills or what somebody said to me or this deadline I have to meet. How can we remind ourselves of the importance of play and how that can help us reduce our stress and be productive?
For me, I try to hike almost every day and that’s a form of play. It puts my mind at ease. For some reason, nature has this vibration that helps us. Nature is perfection so whenever I step into it, I relax and my creative juices start flowing and as a form of exercise. It’s important to do that. If you’re in the office and you can’t get out to do that, maybe put a little Nerf hoop up or something in somebody’s office and if you get a ten-minute break, go in and shoot some baskets. There are many different things we can do that snap us out of that.
[bctt tweet=”You don’t have to be Van Gogh if you’re painting, but just in your own special way, you can be creative. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Being a little playful, even if it’s a big meeting, there’s nothing wrong with being playful with someone so that it lightens the mood for everybody a little bit.
Figure out some little office game, pool or whatever, that gets everybody involved and that breaks the tension. What’s the point of life if we’re not getting some of that? It’s easy as a kid, but it’s even more important as an adult.
This concept, especially living in Southern California, traffic and being late and stressed out and lost, my big nightmare is being late and lost. You have a whole chapter about leave ten minutes early, tell us what that means, beyond the obvious.
In LA, it’s going to be like, “Leave a half-hour early.” Whenever we are racing to get someplace, it’s a stressful drive and not only that, you get to the place and you arrive disheveled mentally. If you can leave ten minutes early, which is not a big deal, maybe once in a while it is but switch your routine up. You can enjoy the ride over there. You go in there relaxed and everything is fine. You’re ready to go with whatever you need to do when you get there. It makes total sense to me. Especially here in LA, there’s such frenetic energy on the roads.
A lot of people feel like, “My time is not important if I’m there early waiting for someone,” or “What am I going to do?” That’s part of the weirdness for some people is, you can be alone with yourself for ten minutes and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.
It’s frenetic enough and if you’re going to someplace late, freeways here, it’s a horrible experience.
This concept of, we all want more clarity in our lives and we certainly want clarity when we’re pitching, because the confused mind always says no. One of the things I like about what you’re talking in Habits for Success is, clarity is not just a mental thing but our environment. If our environment is cluttered, then we keep looking at that clutter and it’s difficult for our brain can feel clarity. Is that what you’re insinuating here?
Absolutely. There are many different ways that we can have clutter in our lives. Your office, if your office has papers everywhere and stuff is messy, that’s subconsciously a weight on your system. I’m all about having a tidy place. If you play a lot of music, loud music or do busy stuff, if you’ve got the TV going all the time in the background, that’s mental clutter and that’s another intuition.
I’ve always been fascinated when some people turn the TV on the minute they walk into a hotel room. I’m like, “Do you need to have that background noise the whole time?”
That’s not to say it’s okay to chill a little bit while watching TV.
Let’s have the news be our wallpaper, I’m like, “Oh boy.” There needs to be a start and a stop time for that. We don’t realize the cumulative stress that provides. The news is edited and if it bleeds, it leads, it’s a constant source of, “How can I agitate you and tell you things that are scary, whether it’s a storm or some other tragedy?” We need to be our own filter and if we’re depending on an outside source to tell us how we should be feeling, the news is not going to be the place to begin. Unless you’re onto the Own Channel or something, it’s not designed for that. It’s designed to get people to go, “Let’s pay attention so we stick around to watch a commercial.”
Everything’s vibration and there’s higher vibration stuff and lower vibration stuff. Most of the stuff we’re talking about is lower vibration and it’s hard to operate from a healthy perspective when you’ve got lower vibrational energy surrounding you.
Let’s talk about your TEDx Talk and how that came about. I think that’s a fascinating story for people and tell us what the title is and how you came up with that.
Habits for Success: Inspired Ideas to Help You Soar
The title is Be Yourself to Free Yourself (Finding Your Personal Freedom). I was aware of TEDx Talks when I was approached to do one, I have never thought about maybe doing one, but a gentleman I briefly met in Nevada rang me up when I was here in LA. He said he was curating an event and he said, “You’d be a good addition. Would you like to do it?” I didn’t know what I talked about, but I go up and said, “Yes.” I had three months to get ready and write it.
That’s not a lot of time, because the amount of work and practice that goes into that is huge.
Not only that, for some reason, the TED Talks, you know it’s going to be videotaped and they’re for posterity. It adds a whole level of pressure and I hadn’t done much speaking at that point. I’m happy how it turned out. It’s my journey since I left my family business, trying to share the story and then I weave it through five points that I learned and utilized. The first one is to listen to your intuition, be open to whatever comes your way. Number two is to step out of your comfort zone. Three was to stay in life-balance. Four is to have fun and enjoy the ride and five is there are no rules, expect the unexpected.
That’s a big one, because everyone’s brought up with tons of rules as a kid and the concept of giving people the freedom to say, “This is your life,” just because you have a family business and it’s expected, the rule is, “You will do this.” You broke that rule and you continue to break other rules and more importantly, what I see you doing, Brian, whether it’s with your coaching, your speaking or your wonderful book Habits for Success, is you’re giving people permission to break rules that aren’t working for them anymore.
Thank you. I feel I was put in this to be a living example to help give permission to people to be themselves. I’ve had to work hard at it myself and I’ve done the work and I paid attention. It all falls into the point of learning how to love and accept yourself.
The book is called Habits for Success. Is there any last thought or quote you want to leave us with?
Be yourself to free yourself.
Thanks, Brian. To follow you on social media is, G. Brian Benson. People can find you that way. What you’re doing, the energy you put out, being in your presence when we had coffee was a calming experience and it lets other people calm down and possibly listen to their own intuition. Congratulations on this wonderful book.
Thank you, John. I appreciate you.
Important Links
- Habits for Success: Inspired Ideas to Help You Soar
- Brian’s List: 26 1/2 Easy to Use Ideas on How to Live a Fun, Balanced, Healthy Life!
- Be Yourself to Free Yourself (Finding Your Personal Freedom) – TEDx Talk
- G. Brian Benson – Facebook
- GBrianBenson.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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