The Authentic Networker

Everyone has two people inside them. Richard calls them your C game and your A game, and which one shows up decides how you lead, how you sell, and how you treat the people around you.

Your C game is the petulant child. It shows up in two ways: playing small, staying safe, and letting people walk over you, or having to win every contest, be the loudest in the room, and beat everyone to prove you're enough. Both come from the same place, and both leave a lot on the table. Your A game is something different. It's who you are when you're doing what you love, out of your values, wanting to contribute rather than compete. Richard says every one of us has already accomplished extraordinary things from our A game. Most of us just can't stay there.

In this solo episode, Richard walks through the core of Mach II With Your Hair on Fire. You'll hear how to recognize when you've slipped into your C game, why knowing your triggers is half the battle (his is being lied to, and he admits his reaction isn't pretty), and what your C game is actually costing you in your relationships and your business. He also explains how the same A game qualities show up whether you're raising kids or making the ask, breaks down red light, yellow light, and green light stories, and closes with simple homework: name your A game qualities, document your A game wins, and write ten affirmations. If you've ever caught yourself pumping the brakes on your own success, this one's for you.

Most people think a 70-year-old company is old news. Jennifer Glacken has been with Shaklee for going on 33 years, the only company she's ever been in, and she is still personally enrolling at least one business builder and five to ten new customers every single month. Her organization does $3 million a month in sales, and she has more than 400 customers ordering each month.

Jennifer started as a customer in 1992, when Shaklee's cleaning products helped her son's breathing. Nobody sponsored her for two years. When her husband lost his job in 2000, she decided to build a business just to fill the gaps, and she never looked back. A former professional dancer with the Washington Ballet, she brought that same discipline to building her business while homeschooling her kids.

In this conversation, Jennifer shares how she keeps finding new people to talk to through "fishing holes," why she has held the nutrition seat in her BNI group for 12 years, and how she leads with the opportunity instead of the product. You'll also hear why she has gone live on Facebook every night for 100 days with no script, the 120-day content system that builds consistency in her team, and why staying in "evaluation instead of judgment" is the first thing she teaches anyone who feels stuck. If you've been in the business a while and haven't enrolled anyone lately, this one's for you.

In network marketing, everybody is a volunteer, and every day they're looking for a reason to quit. That's why Richard Bliss Brooke calls it the toughest test of leadership there is. Now in his 50th full-time year in the profession, Richard walks through the core practices from his book Leadership On Fire: casting a vision people want to follow, enrolling instead of selling, and falling in love with "the mundane."

You'll hear why everything in your business comes down to the ask, how he learned to get excited when someone called it a pyramid scheme, and why the most interesting person in any conversation is the one who's most interested. Richard also shares the daily habit he's kept for decades, why belief is built one story at a time, and the numbers every leader should have memorized. If you're ready to level up who you're being, not just what you're doing, this one's for you.

https://richardblissbrooke.com/leadership-on-fire/

This episode is a replay of one of our most popular calls, and it holds up.

Girl, you got this! That's the message Bethany Shipley of Young Living wants other moms to know. She fell in love with Network Marketing three days after she had her first baby. Being a mom and a businesswoman sounded like a dream come true, and in five years she personally sponsored 118 people and built a team of 6,000.

Bethany had always wanted to wake up in the morning from passion, not from an alarm clock. That's exactly what she found by sharing the oils she loves so much. On this call you'll hear Bethany's story and her best advice for women who want to build a business while still being home with their families.

Richard pulls together six past conversations around one question: how many people did the top builders in this profession actually recruit, and how long did it take them.

The answers land in a narrower range than most people expect. Across more than a hundred interviews with people who built a real career, almost all of them personally enrolled somewhere between eighty and a hundred people inside a twenty-four month window, and out of that hundred came four to eight leaders nobody could have picked out in advance. The guests here confirm it from their own teams, walk through what their first month and first year actually looked like, and give the daily ratios they ran to get there.

The honest part is how slow the beginning is. Two people the first year. Three in the first ninety days. Hundreds of conversations for a handful of yeses. And the reason most people quit, as one guest puts it, is that they prospect just enough to get irritated. They talk to three people, get two nos and one who won't call back, and decide the model doesn't work.

Featuring Curt Beavers, Wendy Bakke, Sonia Magruder, Joni Rogers-Kanté, and John Holowaty.

What happens when a world-renowned clinical psychologist realizes she’s been living a life built on fear, performance, and people-pleasing?

In this previously top-downloaded episode of The Authentic Networker Podcast, Richard Bliss Brooke sits down with Dr. Shefali, best-selling author of A Radical Awakening, to explore the moment everything changed. At the age of 44, Dr. Shefali reached a breaking point and made a conscious choice to stop living according to society’s expectations and start living in alignment with her truth.

Now a global voice in conscious parenting and women’s empowerment, Dr. Shefali shares how women can break free from the cages of perfectionism, self-doubt, and emotional suppression. She offers a powerful roadmap for stepping into wholeness, reclaiming your worth, and awakening to the life you were meant to live, not the one you were conditioned to accept.

Whether you’re navigating your midlife, questioning your identity, or seeking more conscious leadership, this conversation is a call to wake up, rise up, and come home to yourself.

Dr. Shefali Links:

Richard’s Mentorship Program:

Richard Bliss Brooke Links:

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Joni Rogers-Kante joins Richard to talk about how SeneGence actually got built, starting well before the company existed. She grew up on a farm in Oklahoma, was sent to California at fifteen, and spent her teenage years working at Sav-On Drugs before finding her way into Mary Kay in her early twenties. She quit her day job as soon as her commissions matched her paycheck.

From there, Joni and Richard walk through the early years in detail: 1,200 women recruited personally and $1.7 million in sales in her first year, selling out of a baggie of product with a homemade price sheet and a fax machine for orders. She talks about what it took to get SeneGence to a point most people would call a real company, thirteen years, including a stretch where a packaging shortcut caused $10 million worth of product to be destroyed after lip color started leaking in customers' purses.

Her approach through most of it comes down to a few things: tell people the truth, take the harder option when it's the right one, and if something isn't working, change how you're learning instead of waiting for circumstances to change on their own.

Guest Bio

Dave Grimaldi, CEO of the Direct Selling Association (DSA), returns for his second conversation with Richard this year, and the timing is not an accident. September is when direct selling goes to Washington, and Dave says the stakes this cycle are as high as he has seen them.

Richard and Dave get into what most of us never see: a Congress balanced by fewer than five seats, a Federal Trade Commission that could be rebuilt and supercharged overnight, and the one fight that matters more than any other for everyone in the field, your status as an independent contractor. They talk about why a younger Congress does not know our story, why the "P words" (predatory, pyramid) keep getting aimed at us, and what actually moves a lawmaker.

There is also a challenge in here for you. Dave and Richard both believe the best defense is a better profession: more honest recruiting, kinder selling, and real results people can point to. This one is part civics lesson, part call to action, and worth your time before Day on the Hill on September 23.

https://www.dsa.org/submit-my-story

Dave Grimaldi is the CEO of the U.S. Direct Selling Association, the national trade association representing direct selling and network marketing companies. He stepped into the role in January 2025, bringing more than two decades of Washington experience in advocacy and public policy. Before the DSA he was EVP of Government Relations at the Blockchain Association, held senior policy roles at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and opened the D.C. office for Pandora. Earlier in his career he served on Capitol Hill as Senior Counsel to House Majority Whip James Clyburn and as Chief of Staff to FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. He worked as an independent distributor for ACN during college, which he credits for his distributor-focused perspective. He holds a B.A. in English from Loyola Marymount University and a J.D. from Catholic University's Columbus School of Law.

What happens when a young couple’s simple prayer, “Can we just make $1,000 a month from home so Mom doesn’t have to put the kids in daycare?”, turns into a 39‑year global business in 26 countries? In this episode of The Authentic Networker Podcast, with over 1.4 million life-time downloads, Richard Bliss Brooke, bestselling author and coach, sits down with Curt Beavers, one of Juice Plus’ top ten distributors worldwide and author of Make A Life, Not Just a Living.​

Together, they unpack Curt’s journey from “silver spoon” to bankruptcy, from delivering aloe vera out of a warehouse as a teenager to leading a team of 40,000 distributors and hundreds of millions in sales, built on solid principles and authentic relationships. You’ll hear the full story of the Sunday “kairos moment” when Curt’s wife Lori realized she refused to hand their future kids to daycare, and how that decision sparked 300 conversations in one month, 38 customers, and five business partners that changed everything.​​

In this powerful conversation, Richard and Curt dive into:

How Curt and Lori went from two small paychecks to over $100,000 in their first year by front‑loading honest, fun conversations, not pressure or hype

Why belief, numbers, and a simple weekly calendar review can pull anyone out of “I’m stuck” and into consistent, productive action

What Curt learned navigating massive transitions, from water filters to nutrition, from fax machines and pagers to apps and gut‑health innovation, and why he believes now is still a launching pad moment for new Juice Plus+ partners

How to build a business that survives economic cycles, private equity ownership changes, and technology shifts without sacrificing your integrity or your team

The deeper mission behind Make A Life, Not Just a Living and I Call Shotgun, using residual income to create time freedom, serve on boards, mentor the next generation, and actually be present for your family and community

Whether you’re just looking for an extra $1,000 a month, feeling stuck and wondering if this business can really work for you, or leading a large team through change, this episode will challenge how you think about freedom and what it truly means to “Make A Life” through network marketing.​​

Curt Beavers Links:

Richard’s Mentorship Program:

Richard Bliss Brooke Links:

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Thanksgiving Day, 1993.

In this episode of The Authentic Networker (with over 1.4 million downloads), Richard Bliss Brooke sits down with Mary Young to share the real, unfiltered story behind the founding of Young Living.

Mary could have walked away.

Instead, she chose a harder path:

What followed wasn’t instant success; it was doubt, sacrifice, and leadership forged in the quiet moments when no one was watching.

In this conversation, Mary shares:

Why she never wanted the CEO role, and why she accepted it anyway

The early leadership lessons learned while literally building the company by hand

How Young Living was founded on Quality, Integrity, and Collaboration

What it truly costs to build a network marketing company the right way

Why long-term vision always beats short-term pressure

Mary started in network marketing in 1985, built a multimillion-dollar organization in just two years…

If you’re building a business.

This is a conversation worth your time.

For more network marketing resources check out:

Network marketing leadership, Young Living, Mary Young, ethical network marketing, building without investors, long-term business vision, authentic leadership, The Authentic Networker