I Am No Limits With Brian Bogert
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
There’s a sleeping giant in every human. To awaken this giant, we need to help them grab what they believe is out of their grasp. Brian Bogert is the person that does just this. Brian is a passionate performance coach on a mission to help people prevail over the limits they’ve set for themselves. Brian disrupts the normative approach on how to create sustainable growth personally and professionally. He joins John Livesay in this episode to talk about his philosophies on how to embrace the pain to avoid suffering. Listen in as Brian shares his own story and how overcoming his triggers helped him acknowledge his limitless potential.
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Listen to the podcast here
I Am No Limits With Brian Bogert
Our guest on the show is Brian Bogert, who talks about how we need to get unstuck by moving and that moved people move people and when you embrace pain, you avoid suffering. Find out what he means. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Brian Bogert. There’s a sleeping giant in every human. Brian’s purpose in life is to awaken giants within and turn them into legends by helping them grab what they believe is out of their grasp. Brian is a heart surgeon without a blade. He does not start outside with what you need to do. He instead starts inside with who you are. In a world that is disconnected, Brian is revolutionizing how individuals, leaders and entrepreneurs deeply connect with their authentic selves to achieve the best version of themselves.
As a human behavior and performance coach speaker and business strategist, Brian disrupts the normative approach on how to create sustainable growth and lasting change personally and professionally. His philosophies on how to embrace the pain to avoid suffering, people before profits and who before what has helped individuals and companies discover and activate their limitless potential. Brian’s team have in led with intentionality as they are driven by their vision to impact one billion lies by 2045. We better hurry up and help him do that. Brian, welcome to the show.
I need all that I can get, so yes, please. Let’s hurry up. We got to do that impact quickly. I’m happy to be here with you, John. Thank you.
We had the pleasure of hearing you speak at an event virtually. I was so compelled by your story. Let’s go back to your story of origin before you had this intense inciting incident as we describe it in the world of storytelling on our hero’s journey. Did you know you wanted to be different, make an impact or get into the world of helping people perform better? How did all that start?
I have always had a deep desire to serve and impact people, but I didn’t necessarily know the vehicle that was going to get me there. As with anybody, I have done a variety of different things, thinking that what I wanted and chasing was going to be the path to realize later in life that it was who I was that was going to be that vehicle.
It’s there that I’ve realized that I’ve got greater power to influence others by allowing my truth to give them permission to live theirs. I have always had a deep intellectual curiosity for people, human connection and human behavior. Though I did not start out saying, “I’m going to be a speaker, coach and entrepreneur to do these things,” I always had that drive and desire. I just didn’t know how I was going to get there.
Sometimes we hear a speaker, read a book, or someone introduces us to a concept of professional growth or have a wake-up call. For some people, it’s a health challenge. Your situation is a little different. Why don’t you take us right to that part in your story?
No Limits: Storytelling is a way to connect with people and get them to be in their bodies, experiencing it as their own story. That’s when you most effectively move people.
When I was seven, my mom, brother and I went to our local Walmart to get a 1-inch paintbrush. As we were heading back to the car, getting to go on with our day, I had to wait for my mom and brother to catch up to the car so she could unlock the doors. This was back in the day before there were key fobs. She had to put that physical key in the door and turn it so that we could get on and go with our day.
As I was standing there waiting, a truck pulled up in front of the store. The driver and middle passenger get out. The passenger to the right felt the truck moving backward. He did what any one of us would do and scooted over to his foot on the brake. I always imagined in my head that he scooted it over and gingerly, put his foot down calmly.
In reality, when you’re in a vehicle moving and there’s no driver in the seat, there’s probably panic setting in. He probably had his knee way up to slam it down on the brake pedal, but he missed. He hit the gas pedal. All that force went right into the gas. He threw himself up on the steering wheel and dashboard. Before you know it, he’s catapulting 40 miles an hour across the parking lot, right at us with no time to react.
Fortunately, my mom and brother were still a few feet behind me. By the time he got there, I was holding onto the handle. The truck went up and over the tree in the median, hit our car, knocked me down, ran over me diagonally, leaving a tire track scar on my stomach, tearing my spleen and continued to sever my left arm from my body. It was August 10th, 1992, 115-degree day, 6:10 PM. I’m, all of a sudden, laying in the parking lot. My mom and brother look up and see my arm lying 10 feet away.
Fortunately for me, my guardian angel also saw the whole thing happen. I always have to tell this story and she always has to be a part of it because I’m forever indebted to this woman for choosing to go into action versus go on with her day. When she walked out of the store, she saw the literal life and limb scenario in front of her. She rushed immediately over to stop the bleeding on the main wound and save my life.
She also instructed some innocent bystanders to run inside, grab a cooler and fill it with ice to get my attached limb on ice within minutes. If that did not happen, I either wouldn’t be here with you or I certainly wouldn’t have an arm be reattached because that arm was cooking like hamburger on a 115-degree day on the parking lot.
What I know in all this time, John, is that I’ve got a unique story. It’s not one you hear every day. What I realized through everything we’ve done, the more I’ve done it, is that every single one of us all has unique stories. What’s important is not to look at the extremity of anyone else’s stories but to start with your own and realize, “How do we become aware of the lessons we can extract from our stories? How do we become intentional with how do we apply them in our lives?” We all can do that and tap into the collective wisdom of other people’s lessons to shorten our curve to learning. I’ll share with you two quick lessons and we’re going to go from there.
The first one is I learned very early not to get stuck by what has happened to me but instead get moved by what I can do with it. What I’ve realized through many years of seeing this is that when you get moved, moved people moved people. That approach to impacting one billion lives is only going to happen with several moved people pulling in the same direction. That’s what I call collective impact.
[bctt tweet=”If we don’t feel, we don’t heal.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The second lesson is this concept that I didn’t quite understand until later in life. At 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 years old, I was in a fog. Although I was the one having surgeries done to me and all these years of therapy, I was being guided through the process. My parents, however, were not. They were intimately aware of the unceasing medical treatments, years of physical therapy.
The idea of seeing their seven-year-old son grow up without the use of his left arm was a source of great potential suffering for them. They willed themselves day in and day out to do what was necessary, what was tough and embrace the pains required to ultimately strengthen and heal me. What they did, whether intentional or not, was ingraining me in this philosophy and way of living, which is to embrace the pain to avoid suffering. When this is done correctly, it’s also where we gain freedom.
Let’s unpack some of these things. I first want to go back to why you’re a good storyteller for people who might want to think about improving their storytelling skills. My mission is to help as many people as possible to embrace storytelling and get better at it. When I have a master like you here, I like to take them behind the curtain a little bit.
Part of what you did so well was the descriptiveness of it. We know exactly where you are, how hot it is, how old you are, how a few seconds, one way or the other, would’ve changed everything. Your whole intent of going on that trip was for something as insignificant as a 1-inch paintbrush. I thought to myself, “It doesn’t get smaller than that.”
Suddenly, the three of you are on that trip that’s seemingly an innocent everyday experience. The other thing you said that was so clever is about losing an arm and extremity. Then you talked about, “Everyone’s got stories, but let’s not look at the extremities of those stories.” It’s a clever play on words. Was it intentional or is that something that I’m the only one to notice?
There are not many things I do at this point in life that aren’t somewhat intentional. That was intentional. I’ll tell you that part of that is I’ve had to learn to normalize my story because it is so extreme. Extremities and the play on words connect with people because that’s the truth.
It’s clever.
Thank you. I’m impressed at the little elements that you picked up on that I have learned to embed in storytelling, which are ways to root and connect with people and get them to be in their bodies, experiencing it as their story. When we do that, that’s when we move people the most effectively.
No Limits: The things that keep us stuck are either stuff that’s in the past or fear of a fabricated future that hasn’t happened yet.
There’s a craft to this, honing of words, editing out and consciously choosing things. When it lands to the audience, that’s true artistry. “Was that intentional? It seems so spontaneous, yet that’s the cleverest thing.” I never thought of the clever use of that word on that. That’s a childhood incident that is going to either inspire you or take you down. It’s one or the other. It’s not going to be like, “I forgot about it a few years later.”
In this first lesson you talked about, we need to keep moving and not stay stuck in the past is so challenging for so many people or they get paralyzed by a fear of the future that gets them stuck. They don’t know what to do in their business, career or personal life. Either something happened in the past that is so terrifying, horrifying and traumatic, I can’t get past it like, divorce, death of a loved one or I’m playing out a horror movie in my head of what this future’s going to be either in my career or the world.
Therefore, I’m not even sure I want to bring a child into the world. All of these are things that cause people to not take action. I’ve seen it where people were like,” I was so devastated by the death of my pet. I will never have another pet.” I thought to myself, “That is a big choice to not be willing to feel that pain again because it was too traumatic the first time.”
I remember when my dog died, I was devastated and extremely sad. A friend of mine said to me, “Knowing this amount of pain, would you still choose to have a dog?” For me, the answer was yes. There were years of joy and all that. I was shocked that that’s not the choice everybody makes. You seem to be a real expert in this concept of, “Move again, get another dog, get up from the life knocking you down and embrace the pain to avoid struggling.”
That phrase alone, people go, “What? It’s like putting my hand on a hot stove and taking my hand off the stove to prevent the pain. What are you saying, ‘Embrace the pain?’ How does that help me avoid suffering?” Our brain makes you stop and think because your brain’s going, “They seem like opposites. I want to avoid both pain and suffering. How can I embrace one and avoid the other?” Can you give us an example of that maybe not tied to the accident that you help people look at that?
I can. You did a very solid job of articulating the things that keep us stuck. It’s either stuff in the past or a fear of a fabricated future that hasn’t happened yet. At the root of both of those are the things that keep us stuck. Those are situations or timelines that allow us to experience the world in a different way, either in the past or in the future, both are existing in a way that’s not right here. One of the things that I want to talk about is that so many people think that they are stuck and seek strategies and tactics to solve the problem.
If I get a new program, a new leader, switch companies, make more money, buy that car, that house, remove this spouse or whatever the case may be, then all of a sudden, I’m going to be free of either the confines of the past or the fear of the fabricated future. What we’ve learned in working with some of the world’s highest performers is that it’s not the stretching tactics to keep us stuck. It’s a combination of emotional triggers, behavioral patterns and environmental conditioning that keeps us perpetually repeating the same patterns in our lives.
That feeling of being stuck is because we haven’t unrooted and dealt with the emotional trigger that’s tied to it. You talked about the dog example. Being around other dogs and the idea of having another dog is triggering a person into a place of pain and not allowing them to see everything else that’s right in front of them, all the joy, freedom and fulfillment that comes through that experience. It’s the singular trigger.
[bctt tweet=”Moved people move people.” username=”John_Livesay”]
If we pull out that root that’s connected to that trigger, that’s when people can move. I had to hit on that point because you articulated it so well. It’s important to understand that it’s not about putting yourself into pain intentionally. I will break down and answer that question. It’s about understanding the dynamics that keep us stuck are not what we think they are.
It’s the emotional triggers that cause a certain behavior, then there’s a third element to that?
Environmental conditioning is also a dynamic of that. It’s these things that get so deeply ingrained in us. An example of the triggers is when your spouse gets on you about loading the dishwasher incorrectly. It has nothing to do with your spouse or the dishwasher. It has everything to do with how your grandma looked at you when you were four. That’s a point I had to hit on because of this idea of move, we have to understand the only way we can move is to uproot those triggers so we can see ourselves and the current situation more clearly.
Does it help people get over their addictions, whether it’s an addiction to food, smoking, money or getting likes on social media? Some of that seems to all be trigger, especially in young people, an addiction to getting people’s approval of how many likes and shares.
Validation, worth and all those things are tied to this thing. Those are all triggers that create these types of patterns that we tend to numb ourselves through so that we can experience the world or seek to connect more deeply either with ourselves or the outside world in some form or fashion. It’s not the things that fill us. You’re spot on, but this is an important place to say, “What is the difference between pain and suffering?” Often we’re seeking validation to fill a void. We have to understand in pain and suffering the definition of both.
First, we have to understand the narratives of the world, which is to reduce, eliminate or avoid pain at all costs. We see seek comfort, safety and protection. The world is wrong. It makes sense why we have this tendency because it’s a natural evolutionary response to survival. You cut your leg 100 years ago, you could die. That’s not the reality that most people in the world live in.
If we understand that pain is defined as short-term, intermittent, a direct cause from something and alleviated once that direct cause is removed, what do we do as human beings? We tend to screw it up by throwing other adjectives in front of it like we screw up so many other things. We say, “Acute pain and chronic pain.” Acute maintains the definition inherently, but chronic changes it because it implies that it’s no longer short-term and doesn’t heal after that direct cause is removed.
Let’s stop calling that chronic pain because it changes the definition of pain and call it what it is, suffering. We don’t want to admit suffering exists, particularly when it’s a direct result of our choices. Often we are blind to the fact that it’s even there because it creeps up on us so much so that we don’t even notice the effects of it sometimes until the point, it’s irreversible, whereas pain gets lots of attention because we feel it, so we want to react to it and eliminate it at all costs.
A Course in Miracles
Let’s use an example. Let’s say someone’s parent dies and they get addicted to either drinking or eating too much to eliminate that pain. They can’t imagine a life where they are not in that much pain. They can’t zoom out and say, “Years from now, I’m going to still miss my parent, but I won’t be this sad. This is going to be this much pain or forever. I’m numbing myself whenever I’m at.”
There are consequences to that behavior. You get diabetes. It’s not like some genetic diabetes. This is years of eating too much sugar and then you’re in this endless circle. Your premise for all of us is if you embrace this pain of, “I’m so sad. I feel so lonely and rejected,” whatever the feeling is that you don’t want to sit with, that causes you to numb it. If you can embrace it, you will avoid the long-term suffering as the consequences of acting out in a way.
If we don’t feel, we don’t heal. To give you a couple of other examples, we can embrace the pain of hitting the gym for 30 minutes a day to avoid the suffering of aches and pains of a sedentary lifestyle. We can embrace the pain of difficult conversations with a spouse or loved one to avoid the suffering of being stuck in a loveless marriage that’s going to end in divorce or wanting a divorce and not being able to escape that dynamic.
We can embrace the pain of the fit our kids are sure to throw by having them put down their mobile devices at the dinner table to avoid the suffering of years of lost connection and conversation that will never get back. As business owners, we can embrace the pain of firing our top salesperson who’s contributing the most to top-line growth to avoid the suffering of losing all our other top talent because they were the greatest cancer in our culture.
The list goes on in every category of life. It’s important that we have to acknowledge the suffering we wish to avoid. We can identify the pains we tend to avoid and learn to embrace them to establish them as a habit in all areas of our lives. You had heard this, “Get comfortable being in the discomfort.” What I’m suggesting is discomfort is the 5K to pains marathon.
It goes deeper than that. If we need to truly avoid suffering and have joy and freedom and film it holistically in our lives, we must understand that the small decisions that compound over time leads to suffering. Seeking validation externally online is filling a void and worth that likely was the inability to give or receive love effectively as a kid to know how to connect at that deepest level. When we tend to numb ourselves, it makes sense as well.
One of the first things we want to do is feel safe. The human experience is rooted in four areas. We all seek the desire to feel safe, protected, seen, understood and connected. Seen, understood and connected don’t happen unless the first two do. When we don’t feel safe, we put protect ourselves. Our armor goes up. We guarantee at that moment that that impenetrable force, nobody’s going to see and understand us through that.
On one side, we can’t project who we are clearly, nor can they see through it, which means we won’t connect. We’ve got to embrace the pain of lowering our armor and convincing ourselves that we’re safe, wrapping an element of protection around either who we’re with or the environment we’re in so that everyone can feel safe, protected, seen, understood connected. That’s what effective leaders do.
[bctt tweet=”To have the power to influence others, you have to allow your truth and give them permission to live theirs.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It reminds me of a quote from A Course in Miracles which says, “In my defenselessness lies my safety.” Most people go, “What? I’m going to lower my defenses and put my weapon down?” You’re like, “If you’re thinking you need to be in fight or flight mode all the time, you’ll burn out.”
True strength hides behind vulnerability.
With this concept of the outcomes of feeling a little bit of pain, years ago, the trainer I was working with said, “I want you to do some deadlifts.” I said, “Who cares what the back of my legs looks like?” He calmly said, “Have you ever seen some elderly men in their 80s who may be in the shower? They don’t have any muscles in the back of their legs, so their butt has dropped.” I go, “Yes.” He goes, “If they had done deadlifts, that wouldn’t have happened.” I’m like, “How many do you want me to do?”
It’s true. When you understand what you want to avoid, it’s much easier to embrace the pains in real-time.
I’m like, “I don’t see the back of my legs. Who cares?”
You’re like, “There’s no way an 80 is having no butt that hangs.”
I didn’t even know that was preventable. I’m in. I thought that’s gravity. That’s sad. I wanted to lighten it up a little and then we’ll go back into the intensity of this. We need to ease it people and out a bit. When I was working in media sales, some personalities were running certain publications that were tyrants. They were top producers, so they got away with horrible behavior. They were making so much money and getting away with anything. There were drugs involved. There’s all that drug behavior that causes people to scream, yell and be horrible.
I’m so happy to see people saying, “The culture’s more important than one person’s bottom-line performance.” If you are afraid of losing a top performer or a top client and you put up with the abusive behavior or you’re in an abusive relationship, that’s not coming from a place of abundance. When your message is, “No, let’s shift. The ends do not justify the means.” Therefore, if we create a wonderful culture, we’ll attract the right clients and people who can perform.
No Limits: People don’t want to admit that suffering exists, especially when it’s a direct result of their choices.
There are 2 dynamics to what you said that hit on 2 very strong elements. You focused on the pain piece. We need to embrace the pain because the culture is going to supersede any individual. Recognize that what you said is, “If you are afraid to get rid of a top performer or an abusive spouse, the individual and the leader that can remove that person, the one to embrace the pain also has to recognize that their hesitancy is rooted in an emotional trigger. If they’re afraid to lose it, that scarcity is tied to something deeper.”
There are two things to pay attention to. If you’re in a position where you are not able to freely move when things are out of alignment in your world, pay attention to, “What do I need to address internally?” A guy by the name of Alex Charfen has one of the greatest quotes that I’ve heard. I’ve always said for a long time that everything begins and ends with you.
He says, “If you’re constantly putting out fires in your life and business, there’s a good chance you’re the arsonist.” Not only do you have to learn how to embrace the pain to avoid the suffering and protect the people in your environment and your culture but recognize that if you have any hesitancy to do that when something’s out of alignment in your culture, it’s probably something you need to deal with first.
This is so valuable for entrepreneurs who are reading, who maybe are in the first few years of their new business. They have a client who is not paying on time, never happy, never going to give them a referral, and making their lives miserable. There are no boundaries. If you need every dime for your cashflow needs, it’s hard to fire that client or even to say no at the beginning. My whole thing is, “Who you say no to is more important than who you say yes to.” Ironically, the more you keep your boundaries of, “I don’t do that for that price. This isn’t working out,” we’re always teaching people how to treat us in our personal and business lives, but if we have these emotional triggers still there, then we’re reacting and not coming from a place of choice.
That’s one of the things that we talk about around emotional triggers. Triggers cause you to react versus respond. When you react, you create damage. When there’s damage, you need to create repair to neutralize and diffuse the energy and connection with everybody involved. Whereas if you respond, you can realize that what you’re reacting to internally likely has nothing to do with the situation right in front of you. You can move through it without creating damage and eliminating the need to create repair, which takes more energy, time and attention.
People are always focused on speed. How many things are slowing you down? When you have resistance and energy drain because of a bad relationship, a bad client, somebody who’s not paying on time or you’ve created damage that you’ve got to create repair, how much energy does it take to move through that? If you’ve responded in the first place and seen it clearly, you would’ve eliminated 75% of the drain from that experience.
When people hire you to be a speaker, who’s your ideal audience? Is it sometimes salespeople need some insights on resilience? Is it more of a leadership people looking for ways to become a better leader or both?
I would say both because of the direction in which we take things. We will do very strong leadership and culture development-type themed talks. We will do one to be able to help people move through those blocks that are limiting them from living at the level they’re capable of living. People with variable incomes identify on that side very deeply. They start to recognize when there’s hope and desire that they can lean into if they address the stuff they need to. Their performance, their teams’ performance and the organizations are raised.
[bctt tweet=”Do not get stuck by what has happened to you, but instead, get moved by what you can do with it.” username=”John_Livesay”]
As a speaker, generally, individual organizations hire me to fit into 1 of those 2 buckets. I also speak at a lot of conferences, though. My ideal audience in that space is on the entrepreneurial side because where we engage with organizations typically beyond the stage is at the top level of leadership. These are large organizations we’re working with C-Suite and executives, mid to small-sized organizations and even large ones that are true entrepreneurs. We hit on two different areas. It only depends on the way that we enter the world.
Tying back to your goal on your mission to impact one billion lives by 2045, how are you tracking that? What can people do to assist that?
It’s being tracked in a couple of different ways. What I largely recognize is it’s going to be untrackable to a large degree. I have a genuine belief that if I chase impact, income always follows and everybody else gets to be moved so they can move other people. Collective impact is something that we talk about. If you hear one thing for me that you’re like, “That’s in my life,” whether you pass it on or not, you’re part of the billion.
What often happens when people hear something that moves them is they move it through the world. They’ll pass it on to somebody else or say, “I heard this great quote,” as I did with Alex Charfen. The ripple effective impact is significant but that’s also why for myself. I typically am working with the leaders of these organizations. If we permeate them, there’s also a trickle-down effect through the culture and everybody in that organization can have an impact if the leaders change.
That is a philosophy, at least in the speaking and coaching stuff. We’re in four different businesses, all rooted in the who, helping people discover who they are, who they’re doing this for, who they’re doing this with and who they’re going to impact. Each one of our entities has different ways that we’re tracking impact and how that is translating.
We’ve got a movement over on the side that’s going to be launched. There have been months of foundational stuff, but the movement is called I am One Billion. It’s going to be something that we’re going to have as collective energy to move things forward. I’m less concerned about tracking and more concerned about focusing on the day-to-day individual or mass aggregate impact we can have. Over the next years, if that happens and we stay regular and consistent in it, one billion’s going to be behind us before we know it. I don’t say that arrogantly. I just believe in the added benefit of the compound effect and collective impact of people.
We’ve seen things go viral. Once you start going global, it goes fast. Brian, if people want to find out more about how they can discover to let go of these emotional triggers and embrace some pain so they don’t have to suffer, where should they go?
If you’re on social media, it’s @BogertBrian on any channel. If you are perusing the web, go to BrianBogert.com. Those will both be great entry points. We realized to impact 1 billion lives that 99.99% are never going to pay us $1. We are very okay with that. We do have a free resource as well that we put a lot of time, energy and attention into. It’s a free course with over 30 minutes of video dialogue to help individuals evaluate these concepts themselves.
If you go to NoLimitsPrelude.com, that’s a place where you can get that. I always get full disclosure here. Do you exchange an email to get it? You do. Will you get some emails throughout the experience? You will. Will you get four emails after you’re done with it? You will because we want you to have other opportunities to do so but there are big unsubscribe buttons on there every single way. This is not a way to funnel you. This is a tool and a gift we want to give you to hopefully elevate and empower you.
Thank you for that gift and for being you. I am so grateful to be able to know you and help in some small way, get your message out through this show and share what you do on social media. I love it. It’s needed and you’re the right person to be doing it.
Thank you so much for building a platform to give me the ability to serve your audience and pour my soul into the world. You are a part of the collective impact. It’s not lost on me who you are in this world and I’m grateful as well.
Thanks so much.
Important Links
- Brian Bogert
- A Course in Miracles
- @BogertBrian – Instagram
- NoLimitsPrelude.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Building Genuine Connections With Maria Franzoni
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
In any field, but especially in business, being able to build genuine connections are an important skill, and that cannot be overstated. Connecting with clients on so many different levels is the lifeblood of business, and missing out on this might just put you in the position of missing out on a client as well. Maria Franzoni is a UK-based founder of the MFL speaking bureau and works with some of the biggest and best speakers and thought leaders. She joins John Livesay to discuss how to build and maintain these valuable connections that you have with your potential or existing clients.
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Listen to the podcast here
Building Genuine Connections With Maria Franzoni
Our guest is Maria Franzoni, who has her own company called Maria Franzoni Limited, MFL. It was formed after years of working in both business and speaker bureaus with the support and encouragement of some other people that founded the London Speaker Bureau. Her company is a group of experienced people who want to make a difference to an organization and go beyond the speaker booking to create real change and continued momentum for clients. She’s not in the business to business, but she’s in the human to human, H2H. She has more than a Speakers Bureau, she is an agent of change and does all kinds of workshops. She has her own podcast called Speaking Business. Maria, welcome to my show.
You make me sound good. I barely recognize myself.
Who is that amazing woman? I would like to know her. Speaking of getting to know you, I love to share and give a shout out to people who introduced me to wonderful people like you and our mutual friend, James Taylor, who you represented. He’s a phenomenal speaker on innovation and was kind enough to make this introduction. No matter what business you’re in, those relationships that you form and you give before you ask is in my mind the way to get people to want to introduce you to other people. Let’s start there, Maria. What’s your philosophy on connections and the importance of it?
My entire life has been about connections. That’s interesting that you say that. Ending up in the Speaker Bureau was perfect because it’s not something that I knew about when I started working. It didn’t exist. It certainly wasn’t on my radar. I collect people, I always have. If I meet somebody who’s interesting wherever they come from, whatever background, I make sure I keep hold of them and I keep in contact. LinkedIn to me is wonderful because it helps me keep hold of people, but I don’t keep in touch as often as I would like because you get busy. I try not to forget them and I try to pick up where I left off. I love connections. It’s wonderful. It’s hard because there’s so much noise and so much going on, but life’s about connections.
When someone takes the time to remember your birthday or acknowledge an accomplishment or a promotion, or if it’s a company and their stock price is up, if you make those little connections and take the time to make significant specific feedback, I find it is where the emotional connections grow. Do you have a story around someone doing that for you? Are you doing that for someone?
What’s wonderful is people remember you over a long period. A few years ago, I was in touch with a speaker and things didn’t develop, nothing came of our interactions, but he remembered me. He came back a few years later with an opportunity for us to work together, which is coming off in 2020. It’s an enormous opportunity and I’m going to be positive and say when it comes off rather than if. It will be the biggest deal of my entire life. All from a relationship that goes back a few years and we barely have been in touch over the last few years, but something resonated. That connection was strong. I might have to come back and tell you what it is when the deal is done, but I’m a little bit superstitious about mentioning details.
We don’t count the chickens until they’re hatched, as they say, but the energy around that is what fascinates me. Those seeds get planted a few years ago. Many of us are impatient. The analogy I use is if you’re baking a cake, you don’t keep opening and closing the oven door to see if it’s risen or not. It won’t rise. We plant a seed and we don’t keep digging it up to see if it’s sprouted. Yet we expect relationships to be producing right away and we get impatient when things aren’t happening as fast as we can. Do you have a philosophy around that or any advice for people reading about how we can trust the process a little more and not be impatient?
It’s funny you say that because I like to interview my podcasts speakers. I remember speaking to somebody who said, “It’s taken me several years to become an overnight success.” It’s similar to the music industry and I think it’s the same for me. I’ve been in the Speaker Bureau world for many years, but it’s taken me this long to have the confidence to say, “I know the business. I understand the business. I want to tell you about what’s going on.” Sometimes, it takes a lot longer than you realize. I don’t know who the clever person was that said, “What you think you can achieve in a year, you overestimate it.” I don’t know who said that, somebody very clever, but I think it’s true. There are lots of examples about that, but in terms of the speaking business and booking speakers, it is becoming last-minute much more so than it used to be. That’s a mistake. That’s not great for us, for the client or for the speaker. Having the longer lead time and allowing time to settle, to think, to plan it is much better than doing a short-term lead time.
[bctt tweet=”Integrity is the key to success.” username=”John_Livesay”]
In my experience, good speakers are the ones that take the time to do a deep dive into preparation. If you’re given a month or less, you don’t have a lot of time to interview people that are going to be in the audience to find out what their particular challenges are that you can customize your talk to. Everybody’s scrambling then. That’s when problems can happen like, “We didn’t know you needed a lavalier mic. We have a handheld mic. Where are the slides?” All those little details because when you’re rushed, things can fall away. I want to ask you about your own story of origin. I dabbled in it a little bit at the introduction. Tell us about your encouragement from Tom and Brendan, who founded the London Speaker Bureau to start your own.
It’s interesting because I have run my own business in the past. I came into the Speaker Bureau world a bit later. I wasn’t a spring chicken. I’d had a couple of careers before that and I fell upon the Speaker Bureau world. Because I’d had my own business before, I had strong ideas about how things should be done. Tom and Brendan were fantastic in that they allowed me to put my views and make changes in the organization, but London Speaker has grown fast. As it gets bigger and bigger, you can’t keep tweaking and changing. I’m a reformed and former management consultant. As a manager/consultant, you’re always looking to improve, always looking to change.
My team is used to it. It’s never going to stop. You have to keep improving. I was also doing that internally with the London Speaker Bureau. It got to the stage like, “I want to do this. I think the business can do this.” It was, “I’d like to go out on my own.” Tom and Brendan said, “Don’t do that. Don’t compete with us.” It was flattering. They said, “Instead, start your own office and remain part of our network.” My team and my office run independently. We can do what we like. We wanted to start a podcast, so we did. We want to do training for speakers, so we do. We’re also part of the entire London Speaker group of companies. We’re involved board-level with meetings, communications and with all of the team. We all collaborate and assist each other. I’ve got the benefit of being local, but having that global reach, which I couldn’t have on my own. London Speaker has got 25 offices around the world. That’s useful in terms of having a global roster.
It sounds like you’ve got the best of both worlds. You’ve got the structure and the connections of an established brand while starting your own brand that allows you to be agile and turn on a dime. Without a lot of bureaucracy stopping you or slowing you down and a bunch of people having to hem and haw and approve budgets. You’re like, “This feels like the right thing to do.” You mentioned your podcast, it’s called Speaking Business. Tell us what the number one thing that you love most about it is?
Building Genuine Connections: Having the longer lead time and allowing time to settle, think, and plan is much better than doing a short-term lead time.
It’s so much fun. You must find that too as well. I always find out something different and new. The guests on my podcast are all speakers that we book through the Bureau. It’s my way of saying thank you. We have a good chat and I always discover something that I didn’t know. Some of the speakers I’ve been working with for many years. They’ll tell you something like, “Maria, I was sacked from my first job.” I thought, “Can I put that out on air? Is that okay?” or things like, “I’ve got a license to fire a cannon and I’ve got my own cannon at home.” I’m like, “Really?” The things you find out like, “I was homeless.”
In fact, on my latest podcast, both of us were crying because it was such an emotional revelation. I love the human bit, the human to human that you touched on. The original reason to do it was I wanted to show people, and the strapline at that time and I’ve changed it slightly now, is to get to know the person behind the mic, the person who is the speaker behind the mic, to know them better. It wasn’t about understanding in a short period of time, extrapolating some of their great knowledge because they are fantastic minds and brains. That’s why this business is exciting, but also to find out a little bit about them as well as people.
You touched on something that’s important for everyone reading, and that is this concept of being vulnerable. It’s important. That’s how we connect to people. I talk about all the time letting go of the need to be a perfectionist and being a little too slick that the audience can’t relate to you. If you’re talking about storytelling, confidence, you never had a bump in the road, you were never laid off and you don’t know what that feels like, then people can have a difficult time relating to you, “Easy for you to be confident, you’ve never had a challenge.” When I shared my story of being laid off after several years of Condé Nast in my TEDx Talk, of all the things that I talk about in the keynote and you love when people say, “I learned this or I’ve got this out of it.”
A lot of people resonate with this human thing that we all get knocked down. How fast did we get back up? Do we lose our identity when we lose our job? All those issues that allow them to look inside and realize, “We’re all human.” This concept of getting to know the person behind the mic is fascinating because a lot of people are interested to know what it’s like on the road as a speaker. Where else are you going? Where did you speak before here? Don’t you find that people are curious to know what a speaker’s life is? It’s not something that a lot of people do that you run into.
[bctt tweet=”You must embrace uncertainty.” username=”John_Livesay”]
People think it’s glamorous and it’s not always because you haven’t always got a choice of where the event’s going to be and how easy the travel’s going to be or not. Unless you are somebody who has a full-time role and is speaking four times a year and therefore is selective, a lot of speakers are speaking a lot more than that. It’s not always as glamorous. I’ve got speakers who will go out on a Sunday night and they’ll be traveling to several different countries and then coming back. It’s exhausting because when you’re on stage, you are giving 100% energy and it’s incredibly draining. Sometimes people don’t realize how fit you have to be in order to keep the pace up.
That’s important because you almost have to make a game out of it like, “How can I find something healthy to eat at this airport because there are lots of bad choices. If I get sick, I can’t do my next speaking gig. How do I take care of my voice?” All of those things that people don’t think about are part of the issue. I gave a talk and for people who are reading and wondering about the speaking industry in the world is you oftentimes have multiple audiences to please. It’s not just the person who hired you. For example, there was a private equity company that bought this video company that makes videos for the police to wear body cameras. They wanted to buy that company and improve their sales so they could turn around and sell it in 2 to 3 years.
The private equity company not only bought the video company, but they also hired a sales training company. The sales training company reached out to me to explore having me come to be the keynote speaker. At first, I was confused. I’m like, “Who’s my audience? Is it your company, the sales training? Am I speaking to sales trainers?” “You’re speaking to this video company that the private equity company hired.” I was like, “Let me wrap my head around this.” They’re like, “Okay.” The awareness of how the business operates from your management consulting background. Private equity companies buy companies that are doing well and they want to make them grow even faster so they can sell them. Part of that is let’s get a speaker in here and you think, “This ecosystem.”
I was working with the people who I was interacting with, the sales training team. They meet us in the ballroom at 7:00 AM. We do a mic check, all that good stuff. As I’m walking in, the vice president of sales of the video company recognizes my face and says, “I’m going to be introducing you.” I’m talking to him and meanwhile, the woman from the sales training company comes out to look for me. He grabbed me before I could walk in the ballroom. No worries. I walk in and then, “I’m so and so from the private equity company. I’m the one that followed you on LinkedIn and I’m the one that told the sales training company to hire you.” I’m like, “I’ve got a lot of people to keep happy.” Can you speak to that? How do you advise your speakers that are fortunate enough to be in your world?
As part of the briefing that we do because we get involved in the briefings with the speakers and we normally do it on the phone because often the speakers and clients are not in the same country, sometimes not even in the same time zone. One of the questions I always ask is, what does success look like? Make it as simple as possible so the speaker knows. That forms part of the briefing notes. It’s written on the briefing notes. It even goes on their travel summary as a reminder, “This is what success looks like. This is what the client has bought.” This is more often than not, what they’ve told me when they’d given me the brief to suggest the speaker and what I’ve told the speaker isn’t what they bought or what they want. The result is something different. Often, it’s much simpler than the original brief.
To go back to that example I gave this talk to, the description of what success would look like would be the sales team would start turning their case studies into case stories, which is what I teach. They’re going to start using storytelling instead of facts. The private equity gentleman sent me a short email. He said, “Everyone’s talking about storytelling now, mission accomplished.” I thought, “That’s it, isn’t it?” That is what success looks like when the client says mission accomplished.
It’s such a simple question, but it’s hard often for the client to answer. Once you’ve got total clarity, this is what you need to deliver.
Sometimes, what I often do if someone is struggling to define what success looks like is I describe previous clients I’ve spoken to and say, “Here’s what it looked like for Redfin. Here’s what it looked like for Coldwell Banker. Here’s what it looked like for Coca-Cola. Here’s what Honeywell said.” It starts their mind going, “I got it.” Sometimes I think you as the bureau executive and sometimes the speakers, we have to help the clients define that. One of the tips I have found is in fact to give them some examples if they don’t know instantly. You’re assisting them in creating the best event especially if they’re not quite sure yet what that would be. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the other services you do. You have masterclasses and leadership development. Tell us how that started, who that’s for and how it helps?
[bctt tweet=”When you make strong connections, people remember you over a long period of time.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That started because we have some amazing experts who have great expertise and who feel that they go in, they deliver a speech and they think, “I could do an awful lot more. I could help that company achieve more,” because the speech will do on an amount. It’s not going to cause a change across the whole organization. Sometimes, because they’re buying an expensive speaker, that speaker is going to change the organization in a 45-minute speech. That’s not going to happen. You have to have some follow-up.
It started with speakers, but also with our own desire to have a long relationship with clients, to understand much more about the business. If you do that, you can then preempt what they might be looking to do next. When you meet a speaker or see somebody, an expert and you think, “That particular person would be perfect for this organization. They’ve gone through that. They can take it to the next stage,” you can be thinking ahead and a great resource for them. Instead of a client coming to you once or twice a year for their conference, I’m thinking, “Let’s look at our internal development. Let’s look at our board meetings. Let’s look at our executives. Let’s look at our away days.” That’s a much more satisfying and enjoyable relationship.
That’s why we went on to do that. It’s a different thing to offer education if you like, development and offer a keynote speech. I brought in a specialist. I brought in Mary Tillson onto my team, who was one of my clients many years ago. She was my client at American Express, in-charge of talent and executive development. Now she’s part of our team helping clients who want to put speakers and experts in to deliver, etc. She helps support that. She helps to scope it and helps to support the speakers in their preparation of the sessions.
One of the things people are looking for is a return on investment and how we can continue what we’ve learned here from this event, so the people don’t go back to their daily lives and forget all the learnings and the energy around it and keep it going. It’s amazing how you can be brought in to help us learn how to tell better stories, for example. When I was speaking to Blue Cross Blue Shield during the workshop, there are some people saying, “We also need help with storytelling as a management tool. We’ve got Millennials and then we’ve got some people who are ready for retirement and they’re not communicating properly. How can you help us with that?”
Building Genuine Connections: Being likable is important. If you can tell a good story about a speaker, the client will remember that speaker.
You uncover other things that people need and the fact that you continue that relationship with clients is fantastic. It’s something that I don’t see a lot of and I wanted to give it a special shout out to everyone. A lot of people who are reading might want to know what the 2 or 3 hot things that you see clients are seeking now. Is it about the future? Is it leadership? Is it help us make better sales? Are all of those things or other things that you see people looking to have speakers come to talk about?
I suppose the big one and it’s been around for a while. We’ve had a lot of it certainly in the UK. It’s dealing with uncertainty. How do we deal with uncertainty? How do we continue to be successful? How do we continue to grow? How do we lead? How do we keep going? We’ve had a lot of uncertainty. I think we still have some. That’s been a big one. That covers a lot of other areas. In order to deal with that, people say, “I need an expert. What’s going on in the future? I need an expert. Tell me about the AI situation. I want somebody to tell them about cyber risks. I want somebody to tell me about technology. Tell me about how I’m going to create higher performance when people don’t know.” It’s all underpinning that big thing. We’ve been through this whole Brexit situation and many people said, “The speaker bookings are going to go down because of uncertainty.” Over the few years that we’ve been going through Brexit, we have increased year on year because uncertainty means, “Help. Give me an expert.”
I talk about this in terms of embracing disruption mentally. It’s great to know that there’ll be driverless trucks eventually and what technology is coming, but there’s an emotional concept around it that I feel storytelling helps us through all the change. When people realize, “Is there going to be a need for my job, whether I’m in sales, customer service or whatever else is going on?” That I tell people now more than ever, the emotional storytelling connection, the AI still is not able to do that yet. AI is not great at empathy. It’s not great at making people feel listened to. When you realize that those are skills you have and can develop like any other skills. I’m happy to hear you say that because this concept of soft skills can make us strong through uncertainty.
If you’re realizing that you need to develop those, then people are like, “Oh.” I saw it myself with Gensler, which is the world’s largest architecture firm had me speak to their team about how to win more business through storytelling. They said, “It used to be enough to go in and show our designs. Now, we have to use virtual reality goggles so people can experience the design and that’s still not enough. We were told that a client said between you and two other firms and we’re going to hire the people we like the most because it’s a five-year project to renovate this airport.” They realized, “What? Get John in here. We’re architects. What do we know about likability? How do we do that in a presentation no less? How do we make ourselves likable?” I kept saying, “Tell your story so people can remember it.” That whole premise of everything is being disrupted. You’re being disrupted at a technical level. You have to have new tools, but you also need new tools as a person and communicator to embrace this disruption. You see this all the time between speakers. Clients say, “You’re going to give them maybe 2 or 3 options.” I bet you hear 9 times out of 10, we’re going to hire the speaker that’s the easiest to work with that we like.
[bctt tweet=”As you get bigger and bigger, you can’t keep tweaking and changing what you do.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The likeability thing is huge. One of the programs I always refer to when I’m talking about speakers, I like to match it to music. I’m a big fan of Simon Cowell. Simon Cowell often says, “You have that likability factor. You are likable.” Being likable is important. Going back to what you were saying about stories, if I can tell a good story about a speaker, the client will remember that speaker. A lot of speakers don’t have great stories that I can tell. If they do, they’re memorable. I remember them. We’ve got 4,500 speakers on our roster. I am not going to remember everybody. I remember the good stories.
Here’s an example of what I think is a good story. When Anthem Insurance hired me, they said, “We’ve got nurses and MBAs. None of them want to be perceived as salespeople and yet we need them to start selling our data.” I said, “Ask them to be storytellers, not salespeople.” Light bulb, great. I said, “What’s going on after my talk?” We’re going to do an improv session where the audience is going to shout out objections and see how they handle it in the role-play situation.” I said, “What if I stayed after the keynote and helped them during that improv? I could whisper in their ear if they got stuck.”
“Nobody offered that. That’d be amazing.” During the process they said, “Can you be in my ear all the time when I’m in the field? You are the Pitch Whisperer.” That’s a little story now that people go, “I remember, you’re different.” It’s like, “They love that,” and that’s a story that you can tell. “Is that something you want to do? He’s done it before. He’s combining improv and sales training. What? How does that work?” Those little stories like that, they don’t have to be long. They have to be memorable. That’s what I love about storytelling. Is it memorable and magnetic?
The other thing to add to that is nobody has to remember your name. They have to remember the story. They’ll remember Pitch Whisperer and that is easier. They’ve got an image in their head. It’s easier to remember and that’s important for speakers to have that because there are many speakers out there. I’ve been in this business for many years. When I started, we were looking for experts to speak. We call it the speaker circuit. In other words, you can book this person to speak and pay them. That’s what it means. It’s not a real circuit. They’re not going round and round. On the circuit many years ago, there were few speakers in each of the categories, each of the topics and you were looking for them. Now, I think I get approached twenty times a day. That’s just my office and me.
Building Genuine Connections: Video these days is more important than ever from a client’s point of view because they’re too busy to go out and see the speaker live.
Imagine the difference between a warm introduction versus a cold call and the same thing with your relationships with your clients that know, trust and like you. They said, “If Maria says James Taylor or another speaker is good, we believe her. You’ve de-risked our own anxiety about whether that person’s going to show up and do a good job or not.” That’s what people don’t realize. You and I talked about the importance of a speaker having great footage of themselves in a crowd so that people go, “That’s what we have. He can nail that.” Also, the images a speaker uses because you and I have a love of photography and design. I tell people the kiss of death is to read from a slide. You see many people who are not professional speakers, whether it’s executives of the company talking to their team before you get up to speak and you’re like, “You’re boring them to death.” Let’s talk about the big picture of the importance of visuals, whether it’s a video or an image that you’re using on your deck.
Video these days is more important than ever from a client’s point of view because they’re too busy to go out and see the speaker live. Back in the old days, you would go and see a speaker live and think, “I’ll book them for my next event.” You can’t do that now. The next best thing is video. You have to have a video. It’s absolutely essential. Does it have to show an audience? I don’t necessarily believe it does. Clients are sophisticated. They’re quite switched on. They can see if somebody can communicate a message, how they convey themselves. With regard to using visuals, it depends on you. If you’re a good storyteller, you can paint the pictures. A good storyteller can create better visuals in your head than you will ever see. I love that because then that’s unique to you. If you’re going to have visuals and it helps the audience to stay with you, that’s wonderful. It’s all about helping the audience to stay with you. That’s what it’s all about. I also like the use of video during speeches if it’s appropriate.
Do you have any last thoughts or suggestions, books you love, quotes you like that you want to leave us with?
I’m going to give you two quotes from one particular speaker. They were the best bits of advice I have ever had and I still use them now. I hope I remember both of them and getting them both correctly. One of them was, “Do what you say you’re going to do because it’s quite rare.” That was one of the best bits of advice and the speaker is Philip Hesketh, so that you know who he is. He’s an expert in persuasion and influence. The other thing he said which is brilliant is, “The rules of selling are ABC, always be selling.” I didn’t say always be closing. He says, “Always be selling.” People have to remember that this is a business. Always be selling.
[bctt tweet=”The life of a speaker is not always glamourous.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That old philosophy, Always Be Closing, ABC, I put a twist on that at the end of my workshops and I say it’s ABK, which is Always Be Kind. People love that. I say, “Put it on a Post-it Note in your car if you have road rage in traffic. Put it by your phone.” The things we say to ourselves are much meaner than we would ever say to anybody else. How can we possibly be kind to other people we work with, let alone our clients, if we’re not starting with this ourselves? A lot of salespeople struggle with the image of, “People don’t like salespeople or lawyers.”
They’re seen as pushy. If you reframe that to ABK, it’s a nice little memorable takeaway that people like, “I’m using that,” or people will come up to me like, “ABK.” It’s a fun little thing. Those little memorable sound bites whether you’re giving a talk, being interviewed on television, it’s important to figure out who you are and what your brand stands for. Maria, you have nailed that in many ways. It’s been an honor getting to know you more, hearing your story, sharing your particular vision of being a human to human agent of change. It’s been an honor. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
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