Public speaking is an excellent way to grow your business as an entrepreneur. You just need the right strategies and ways to get started. We discuss some of them in this episode with my guest Lisa Reid.

As the Founder of Get Speaking Gigs Now, Leisa trains entrepreneurs who want to use public speaking as a soul-fulfilling business growth strategy. Clients who work closely with her “Get Their Talk Ready to Rock” and build their speaking skills and confidence through the Speaker’s Training Academy.

Leisa has booked and delivered over 600 speaking engagements, and she teaches her clients all of the strategies she uses to get booked, stay booked and monetize their talks.

In this episode, she will share the #1 secret she uses to get speaking gigs along with other golden nuggets of advice!

For Lisa, public speaking is near and dear to her heart because she has always wanted to be a teacher. Even as a kid she remembers teaching her friends gymnastics amongst other things. It wasn’t so much that she needed to be the center of attention or to have the spotlight on her. It was just that when she knew that she could help other people understand something quicker, easier, better; she had to do it. It was very fulfilling.

Now she’s basically a teacher disguised as a speaker. She knows that because she works with entrepreneurs all the time, there’s quite a few of us who have that same type of drive for teaching. When we get the opportunity to teach, we get a natural high, a shot of dopamine. Something amazing happens when you give the gift of teaching to an audience whether it’s virtual in person. You know that what you’re offering is going to help them solve problems or help make something easier for them. That’s a very fulfilling way to market your business!

Leisa believes that people don’t get into business to do the sales and marketing themselves. They are suddenly surprised how big of a part of their responsibility is sales and marketing. She loves teaching speaking because it’s one of the easiest and most fulfilling ways to do effective sales and marketing for them to market their businesses. Many entrepreneurs welcome that opportunity.

Public speaking is especially important if you have something that many people haven’t heard of; such as your own philosophy or framework about how to do something. Then there are people who have problems that you can help with, but they don’t know it yet. They may need more information than they can get by reading a synopsis of what you do on your website. Speaking always allows you to educate people and it allows you to educate more than one person at a time. With many live and virtual presentations, you can even record them and have evergreen marketing and branding content for future prospects.

That means there are a lot of ways that you can duplicate your efforts while attracting your ideal clients and potential referral partners. That’s a great reason to get speaking coach. When you find someone that you want it’s because you can relate to their story. You like their personality. You like their humor. You like how fast (or slow) they talk. They resonate with you because it seems like they’re genuine. That’s the kind of person that you should work with.

The Starting Point of Public Speaking as a Sales and Marketing Tool

 In Leisa’s world the starting point of working with her is when you’re ready to get your talk “ready to rock”. That means you need to decide what your talk is going to be about, what your title is going to be, what your learning points are, your description of the talk, and what your call to action will be. That’s what she means when she says, “Get your talk ready to rock.”

When you say that you’re a speaker and update your LinkedIn profile to include “speaker” you’re claiming that title. That means when you’re at a networking event and someone asks what you do and you tell them you’re a speaker they’re immediately going to ask, “What do you speak about?” You don’t want to be hesitant or say something like, “I speak about quite a few things.” You want to be focused with a niche to explain. You need at least one talk to share.

Having that talk in your pocket will give you confidence and assuredness in the speaking world. It’s like planting a proverbial flag in the ground. If your talk is ready to rock, you’re going to be madly in love with your talk. You won’t be able to wait to share with everyone. That’s the kind of energy you want to start conversations with.

You can find lots of different places but it’s kind of like getting exercise, you can work out at home, especially if you’re just getting started. That’s what Leisa still does when writing a new talk. It gives her fortitude to do that. She’s been practicing that way since she was in college. She had a walk-in closet that she shared with her roommate. She would go into the walk-in closet and practice her new talks.

Practicing out loud on your own is very easy. It’s very affordable. You don’t have to get in a car. You don’t have to involve anybody else. If you have a dog or a cat, they can listen.

Then doing it in public is where people get scared; maybe they do it in front of a live audience and then it doesn’t go as well as hoped. That’s where dedication to practice comes into play. There is immense value in saying the words out loud, like dress rehearsal, to nobody. Three times at least. Then, with time, maybe after the third time, it’ll start to get smoother. You’ll start to transition easier. You’ll add things. You’ll change some things around. That dedication to practice ultimately makes all the difference for your public speaking success.

…and other golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”

As the Founder of Get Speaking Gigs Now and the CEO of the International Speaker Network, Leisa Reid trains entrepreneurs how to use public speaking as a soul-fulfilling business growth strategy and facilitates the birth of new talks all around the world in her “Get Your Talk Ready to Rock” sessions.

Throughout her years of working with speakers, the most frequent confessions she hears are: “I’ve always wanted to be a speaker,” but “I’m still working on my talk,” and “I’m not sure where to get booked.” It is her mission to collaborate with her clients so they can quickly and easily create their talks and deliver them to audiences that are a right fit.

Leisa has booked and delivered over 600 speaking engagements, is a 7-time author, podcast host and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate. Although she has both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s Degree in Speech Communication, she assures her clients those degrees are NOT required in order to be a speaker. She is a mom, a wife, a dog-lover and loves live rock concerts.

Want speaking gigs? Get Immediate FREE Access to the “5 Top Tips to Get More Speaking Gigs NOW”

The epitome of leadership is the ability to share your leadership story and leave a legacy. I discuss how to do that with my guest, Shelley Goldstein.

Shelley Goldstein is a leadership development coach specializing in communications affectionately known by clients as “The Coach Whisperer”. The moniker stems from her intuitive ability to pinpoint untapped potential in leaders and cultivate it into speaking mastery with remarkable ease and speed.

As the architect of Remarkable Speaking, Shelley has created a proprietary framework that has evolved into a global leadership development platform. Rooted in 30-plus years of experience in leadership, entrepreneurship, marketing, and design, her expertise allows her to creatively integrate time-saving drills, persuasive storytelling, and behavioral psychology, driving significant real-world impact.

Your leadership story begins with the origins of why and how we do things. It can go back to your youth when you’re joining a music program or getting involved in sports. It’s a study of behaviors involved with those activities. It’s those stories that build one on top of the other that become your legacy, who you are today, and why you lead the way you do when situations call or leadership.

Shelley says her story goes back to when she was eight or nine years old and her and a group her friends put together a neighborhood newspaper. The three of them were about the same age. They included hosted a beauty pageant and had articles and recipes that they got from their neighbors. Being able to organize that at such a young age and publish it month after month had a profound impact on leadership in Shelley’s adult life.

Looking back, she learned a lot about leadership skills and taking the initiative at a very young age. Some of the things she carries forward with her today is the idea of sharing that responsibility and delegating to other people. Whether she was aware of it or not, it just naturally happened. And Shelley believes that’s what helps her be a better leader today; that sharing of ideas and giving people autonomy to create some of the most innovative, creative ideas of their childhoods.

Shelley remembers her earlier career as a costume designer. She had the responsibility of creating a look, making sure the costumes could be perceived from the audience. That meant meaning when that curtain goes up, she can’t be up there with the assistants hemming and sewing. It was showtime. Shelley believes that whole idea of “it’s showtime” was an early leadership development experience in her adult life. She realized that she can’t do everything.

She had to prioritize and realized you can’t sweat the small stuff. To lead through that and make sure her team understood that the work that they were doing as individuals contributed to their combined success; and that bigger vision of what things need to happen.

It’s so hard to say where it actually begins.

If you have an idea, let’s start with the incubating. You have a great idea. How you strategize that, how you move forward with that, that’s an innate leadership skill. I’m going to have a marketing strategy. I’m going to have a sales strategy. I’m going to develop my brand this way. Those are all leadership skills because you’re making important decisions. Those stories of how you eventually do that, that becomes the legacy. That becomes your competitive advantage and unique story to only you.

The stories are so important because that’s where the money flows. Money is how people respond to the stories. That’s what people buy into. That’s the journey.

A great leadership story is the journey, the mistakes, the decisions you made when you were building your business. You know what? I’m going to go with my marketing strategy and hire this team and go forward with them. And let’s say it’s a bomb. Nothing happened. Six months, you spent thousands of dollars. That’s a learning moment. So, what did you do to compensate for that, to switch gears and become the success you are today?

It’s the little things that we think are so unimportant. For example, Shelley coached a young guy who was a very successful entrepreneur. He made well over a hundred million dollars in his twenties. He was a college dropout, and he created a watch company.

He built his company and sold the organization for hundreds of millions of dollars. After the company’s sale, he came to Shelley and said, “I have nothing to talk about. The company sold and that was my identity. I don’t know what to talk about and how to show up now. Who am I? I’m nothing without that organization.”

What they unpacked together was the fact that that journey, whether it’s in the past or it’s current, is part of that story, is part of that legacy. Identifying with that as an entrepreneur and focusing in on the little moments, the pivotal moments, the early days where you had no followers, let’s say, to the time where you had millions of followers, to the time where you couldn’t fulfill your first order for your product, to the time where you sold hundreds of millions of units. All those details are every bit of who you are today and where you’re going tomorrow.

And changing that story and being able to express that story changed everything for this young entrepreneur. He’s now running a lot of other businesses based on that experience because that’s what people want to know and that’s what they’re buying into.

…and other golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”

Shelley Goldstein is a leadership development coach specializing in communications affectionately known by clients as “The Coach Whisperer”. The moniker stems from her intuitive ability to pinpoint untapped potential in leaders and cultivate it into speaking mastery with remarkable ease and speed.

As the architect of Remarkable Speaking, Shelley has created a proprietary framework that has evolved into a global leadership development platform. Rooted in 30-plus years of experience in leadership, entrepreneurship, marketing, and design, her expertise allows her to creatively integrate time-saving drills, persuasive storytelling, and behavioral psychology, driving significant real-world impact.

Through a fusion of her multicultural experience and multidisciplinary approach, Shelley has personally coached over 1,000 C- and V-suite executives, senior officers and managers, and has led more than 150 cohorts worldwide. Her extensive work spans a diverse array of industries, with a particular focus on the technology, financial, legal, and manufacturing sectors.

The Remarkable Speaking brand speaks for itself; empowering high-achieving leaders and visionaries with the directness, clarity, and composure essential to command authority and truly influence individuals and industries.

Connect with Shelley on LinkedIn!

Check out Shelley’s Book!

Click here for all things Shelley!

Creating and embracing your leadership promise can change your life and your business as an entrepreneur. You just need a strategy for creating it and then maintaining it over time. I discuss how to do that in this episode with my guest, Jason Hewlett.

Jason has delivered thousands of presentations around the world; performed in every major casino in Las Vegas; inspired the Troops in wartime Afghanistan; and authored “The Promise to The One”. He utilizes entertainment, musical impressions and comedy to teach leaders how to capture their unique Leadership Promise and Signature Moves.

Teaching about creating and embracing your leadership promise has taken Jason years to create the language around what your leadership promise is. He’s been teaching it subliminally, he believes, for decades. He now believes your leadership promise is to identify, clarify, and magnify the signature moves of the people you lead. Jason wrote a book called “Signature Moves” years ago. He’s also written a book called “The Promise to the One”, which is a promise to yourself.

That all comes together with that language to help people say, “Can I help identify the talents and the gifts of the people I lead? Can I help them clarify that that’s something they need to do every day in their work? And can I help them magnify it and all that we do together?” As entrepreneurs, especially for solo entrepreneurs like Jason for the past 25 years, hiring independent contractors, bringing people in and getting rid of them as people come and go brings with it a lot of responsibility.

It’s interesting to see how often entrepreneurs get stuck in the minutia of doing their everyday work.  You could probably spend 12 hours working on a broken printer, and not doing your signature moves, your greatness. That’s not time well spent. Instead, you could just hire somebody who could do it in about 10 minutes and fix it for you. Yes, you spend a little extra money, but you get into the things that you do best that way.

Jason truly believes your leadership promise is not only for yourself to identify, clarify, magnify your signature moves, but also to help others to identify and clarify and magnify theirs. He calls that the ICM process (Identify, Clarify, Magnify).

Jason recalls it probably appeared back in high school; he was the student body President of his high school. He says perhaps it came from seeing people on their student body council that didn’t follow through with the things they promised they would do. And then it all fell on him as the President.

Jason realized he was the last one in line because leaders eat last, as Simon Sinek says. He remembers that he would always have to be the one that picked up the slack. And so, the leadership promise came down to that. It came from examining: Who is keeping their commitments and who’s not? He told me “What’s fun to think about is that it goes all the way back to the school days all the way into adulthood and now into the leadership of not only leading my own company, but I lead several organizations and yeah, when it comes down to that it’s about who makes a promise and keeps it.”

Jason believes it comes down to your own personal accountability for the things you’ll do for yourself. That’s why he wrote the book, “The Promise to the One”, which is a promise to yourself. You could keep a promise to your audience, to your customers, to your employees, to the independent contractors. But if you are waking up and not keeping those promises that you made to yourself, then it’s going to trickle down eventually, and you’re going to drop the ball.

Whether it’s creating a morning routine, the Hal Elrod “Morning Miracle” stuff, or if we’re talking about even the Gay Hendricks and “The Big Leap”, how do we get to that place of doing our greatness in our zone of genius? Jason says a majority of humanity at this point is living in a certain zone, especially if they’re listening to or watching this podcast but, if they think about it, they could get to that zone of genius.

That comes down to keeping promises and involves setting a goal that you can make a promise for. It’s not to say goals aren’t important because, of course, they are. If you’re an entrepreneur, you know that you must have goals as your metrics.

But if you’ve ever set a goal and you missed it, you just set another one. Whereas if you make a promise and break it, that’s a one and done. So, what are the goals that are your particulars and your promises that are proclamations? The particulars lead to the proclamation.

Jason’s saying that a goal is a sacred promise, something that you’re going to do no matter what. And then you’re also going to say that if you set a goal and I miss it, you need to make sure that you set the right goals in the future.

But what are the promises that you keep no matter what? Jason would say that that’s where the leadership promise comes into play.

…and more golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”

Having delivered thousands of presentations over 2 decades, Jason Hewlett utilizes entertainment, musical impressions and comedy to teach leaders how to capture their unique Leadership Promise and Signature Moves.

He has performed in Las Vegas, is one of the youngest inductees in the Speaker Hall of Fame, and is the author of the “The Promise to the One”.

Husband, Father, Writer, Mentor, and Coach, Jason’s blog “The Promise” is enjoyed weekly by people worldwide, his online videos and courses inspire learning and   entertainment, while educating and uplifting corporate executives, artists, leaders and families.

Jason’s hobbies include hiking in the mountains, writing music, playing with his kids, and staring at his wife. His greatest accomplishments all live within the walls of his home.

He is a husband to the most beautiful woman in the world and Dad to four incredible young children who serve as his inspiration.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonhewlett/   LINKEDIN

https://twitter.com/jasonhewlett  TWITTER/X

https://www.facebook.com/jasonhewlettentertainer/    FACEBOOK

https://www.youtube.com/user/jasonrhewlett   YOUTUBE

https://www.instagram.com/jasonhewlett/  INSTAGRAM

https://jasonhewlett.com/ WEBSITE

We all have an “Emotional Source Code” that is set when we were children. It’s what drives us and is why we do everything we do.

What if that code isn’t working to your advantage? You can change it! In this episode I discuss how to do that with my guest, Dov Baron.

For over 30 years, Dov Baron has been empowering inquisitive leaders and influential figures worldwide to explore their own “Emotional Source Code” and their organizations “Emotional Source Code” to discover how to generate Fierce Loyalty.

He is the creator and host of The Dov Baron Show podcasts (previously known as Leadership and Loyalty), named the #1 podcast for Fortune 500 Executives by Apple podcasts. The Dov Baron Show has featured hundreds of hours of interviews with top leaders, entrepreneurs, theologians, military intelligence officers, and artists.

Your Emotional Source Code is a thesis that has come out of a blend of quantum physics, neuroscience and psychology, organizational psychology and subjective personal psychology. It’s profoundly insightful into what it is that drives us. Very often you’ll meet somebody, and they’ll say, “I really have this bad behavior, and I want to change it.” You might say, “I can help you with that.” Great. And then you help them, they change their behavior, and it doesn’t stick.

They wonder “Why didn’t it stick?” Maybe the problem is that they have a belief system or a value system that’s holding that behavior in place. That’s when they realize they have to do some real work on their behaviors and to my beliefs.

Then they do some belief restructuring. They get happy because the belief’s better now, and as a result, the behavior’s gone away. And then a year later, they’re back in the same boat. Why? Why does it not change? Because you have an emotional source code. That’s what Dov calls your Emotional DNA.

Your DNA is not dominant. It’s just the most… obvious place to start. What Dov means by that is you may have a predetermination for certain situations from something in your DNA. It doesn’t mean they’re going to happen. It just means it’s there in your Emotional DNA. It’s waiting to kick in. That’s the same with your emotional DNA being in your Emotional Source Code.

Your Emotional Source Code starts at the base level at the foundation of it, which is the origin of your Emotional Source Code itself. That’s the environment and the circumstance you grew up in. Now, you might be thinking “Oh, my God, we’re going to spend 20 years on a couch talking to a therapist.” No, it doesn’t have to be like that.

Consider your parents, especially if you have siblings. Not only have your parents changed and matured over the years, but as parents, they as parents respond differently to their firstborn than they do to their thirdborn. On top of that, there’s also an economic situation. There’s a pretty good chance your parents were in better financial shape by the time they had their third kid than they were when they had their first child. They’d matured in age, hopefully emotionally. Their relationship had also matured, again, hopefully to make it better. And there was an economic change also.

That means you and your siblings didn’t have the same parents. In fact, none of you did. You all had different parents. And so, as a result, you built your Emotional Source Code based on the environment you were in at a moment in time.

Dov was born into abject poverty with violence, crime, abuse, addiction all around him. That told him how to survive. He remembers thinking, “If I’m going to make it through this, I’ve got to work out certain things about how to be.” He would look at the world and think that’s dangerous, that’s safe. We all do it. It’s not because of his background. You did it even if you had a wonderful childhood. You still did it because your primary objective is to survive.

That early Emotional Source Code determined the next level of your Emotional Source Code, which is your meaning. You determined the meaning of everything. So, for instance, you’re standing in the edge of the crib and you’re watching your mom and dad have a fight about paying bills. There’s not enough money. You don’t stand there and go at two years old, “You know, I think my mom and dad need some therapy. They’ve got some serious issues around money.” You don’t do that.

You look at this scene and your programming becomes money equals stress. So, as an adult you believe if you have money, you’re going to have a lot of stress. If you don’t have money, you’re going to have a lot of stress. It becomes a catch 22. What you’ll find is somebody in that situation will either collect a ton of money, really gather in, and be fixated on making more and more money, or they never break through. They never financially break through because the mind operates in polarity.

That’s how it operates. We assign meaning to circumstances and situations. Now money was just one example, but it could be a million different ones. And you have assigned them in your childhood.

Then from that base foundational emotional DNA to your meaning, then you go, well, “Who can I be in this environment?” That determines a lot of things you can’t be. For instance, in the environment Dov was growing up in, there was no room for me to be highly intelligent. There was no room for Dov to be more spiritual. There was no room for Dov to be highly creative or intuitive.

All those things had to get pushed into the shadows. They became quote-unquote disenfranchised. They become part of who Dov is. He didn’t have access to those things because he built his identity to survive based on the meaning he assigned to certain situations in his life.

…and more golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”

Dov Baron is a Speaker, Facilitator, Podcast Host, and Bestselling Author. Dov is the preeminent expert on Creating Cultures of Belonging because “Fitting in is not the same as belonging.” For over 30 years, Dov Baron has been empowering inquisitive leaders and influential figures worldwide to explore their own Emotional Source Code™ and their organizations to discover how to generate Fierce Loyalty. 

The Emotional Source Code process drives deep loyalty and purpose through the power of emotions. Dov assists leaders in creating life-and-work meaning. His models and strategies of the Emotional Source Code and the Anatomy of Meaning are used by leaders in business and government worldwide. He is the founder and CEO of Dov Baron International.

Dov has been named a Top 30 Global Leadership Guru five times and an Inc. Magazine Top Leadership Speaker twice. 

He is the creator and host of The Dov Baron Show podcasts (previously known as Leadership and Loyalty), named the #1 podcast for Fortune 500 Executives by Apple podcasts. The Dov Baron Show has featured hundreds of hours of interviews with top leaders, entrepreneurs, theologians, military intelligence officers, and artists.

He has written for or been interviewed by many media outlets, including CEO World, CNN, Elle Italia, Entrepreneur, and FOX. 

He is the author of several books, including “One Red Thread: How to Find the Purpose Already Woven Into Your Life,” and “Fiercely Loyal: How High-Performing Companies Develop and Retain Top Talent.” Both were bestsellers on Amazon. 

As a speaker, Dov has presented to the United Nations, the Department of State, the World Management Forum, the Servant Leadership Institute, The World Management Forum in Iran, and the United States Air Force. Dov is also the co-founder of The Authentic Speaker Academy for Leadership — where he teaches leaders how to use ethical persuasion skills to impact and influence change-makers.

Click here to learn more about Dov!

Many self-help books and programs are overly complicated with dozens of steps or components. My guest, “Doc” Thom Mayer believes we can (and should) do simple things savagely well. We discuss how to do that in this episode.

Doc is the Medical Director for the NFL Players Association, as well as a prominent figure in the fields of emergency medicine, sports medicine and leading in times of crisis.

He has built a distinguished career focused on athlete and patient health, safety, emergency response, as well as the skills required to lead from the front lines, making significant contributions to clinical practice, medical education, and thought leadership.

Doc has always thought that we’ve made life more complicated than it really needs to be. It shouldn’t be as complicated as we’ve made it. And he believes all of us who are in the business of trying to help others, that’s his business, that’s your business, should simplify, simplify. Einstein said, “Simplify, simplify, but not too much.”

Doc’s great friend, Mark Verstegen is the founder of Team Exos. Team Exos is the best athletes’ performance company in the world. Had they been a country in the Paris Olympics, they would have finished sixth in the medal count. That’s how elite the athletes are and how diverse the sports world is that he’s involved with. And Mark is the one who said, “Do simple things done savagely well.” So, combining Einstein and Mark Verstegen, Doc has tried to do simple things done savagely well.

An simple example of “too simple” is looking at the equation E equals MC squared. Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. When Doc learned that he thought, well, that’s awfully simple. I Why didn’t somebody come up with that before? The reason is that wasn’t the equation. It turns out the real equation is not that simple. The real equation is E equals MC squared divided by one, divided by the square root of one minus V (velocity) divided by C squared. Well, that’s a little more complicated.

So, some genius in marketing somewhere decided let’s just do E equals MC squared. So yes, simplify, but not too much. To simplify too much is when people fail to make the connections that are simple but have failed to be made because there’s all kinds of corollaries of logical consequences that come out of that.

Doc says to start by taking something that is considered to be the status quo, thinking about it, reflecting on it, and starting to think, well, how do I put it to work? For example, Doc’s most recent book is titled “Leadership is Worthless, but Leading is Priceless, what I learned from 9-11, the NFL, and Ukraine”. Doc was in all those places. So, the simple idea is, leadership is worthless. How can that be? There’s 50,000 books on Amazon alone that have leadership in the title. The problem is that most leadership titles and advice include the 25 this, the 7 of this, the 14 things, and people can’t remember them. So, it’s not simplified enough.

So, to Doc, that contrarian idea is very simple. Leadership is worthless because it’s what you say. And anybody can say anything. They often do say a lot, tediously and at length, and usually about themselves. So leading is priceless because it’s what we do all day, every day. So, the simple thought is that leadership is worthless because it’s a noun, leading is priceless because it’s a verb, what we do. So Doc always tells his audiences, or anybody who will sit and listen, you must change the noun to a verb. Once you change the noun to the verb, life becomes so much more simple.

And therefore, new ideas are born, including the answers that are not above us in life, in an organization, in our family. They’re within and among us. The question that we should be asking ourselves is not am I, will I become a leader? You already are. You’ve got to say “Today I’m a leader.” Doc suggests abandoning the wistful, worthless word someday and embrace the word today, because that’s actionable. So, all simple, but contrarian.

Doc says he’s OK with lists, but only if they’re lists of three. Any more than three, and most people aren’t going to be able to remember them.

No offense to everybody who’s got lists. He always says he doesn’t have a to do list. He has a to don’t list.

The reason is he can take care of it immediately so he doesn’t have to worry about it or think about it or put it on a list and come back to it at some point. There are things he simply doesn’t focus on or do.

…and other golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”

“Doc” Thom Mayer, MD is the Medical Director for the NFL Players Association and Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine at George Washington University and a Senior Lecturing Fellow at Duke University., as well as Executive Vice President for Leading for LogixHealth, which “Makes Intelligence Matter.”

He is one of the most widely-sought speakers on healthcare customer service, trauma and emergency care, pediatric emergency care, medical leadership, and sports medicine. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, 100 book chapters, and has edited or written 25 textbooks on emergency medicine, including Leadership for Great Customer Service: Satisfied Patients, Satisfied Employees, Leadership for Smooth Patient Flow, Hardwiring Flow, and Strauss and Mayer’s Emergency Department Leadership: Principles and Applications.

Tom Peters, the internationally acclaimed leadership guru, has referred to his work as “gaspworthy.” Dr. Mayer was named the ACEP Outstanding Speaker of the Year in the second year the award was given and has twice been named ACEP’s “Over-the-Top” award winner.

Click here to learn more about Doc!

Click here to connect with Doc on LinkedIn!

If you want more quality sales conversations, you must ask more meaningful questions. I discuss how to do that in this episode with my guest, Leslie Venetz.

Leslie is a top 1% B2B sales expert, sought-after speaker, and founder of The Sales-Led GTM Agency. Leslie has been recognized as a global sales thought leader and her insights have been viewed over 100 million times.

Awarded LinkedIn Editorial Top Voice, 5x top 50 Sales Thought Leader, and 2024 Sales Innovator of the Year, Leslie’s also been featured in the Wall Street Journal and Success Magazine. Leslie is the co-author of Heels to Deals and author of the upcoming Profit-Generating Pipeline: A Proven Formula to Earn Trust & Drive Revenue.

A Story and a Roadmap for a Successful Sales Journey

Leslie didn’t realize that her ability to ask questions was so central to her sales success because it wasn’t the thing she was told is most essential to success in the sales world. The things that you’re told are essential to sales success are things like “never take no for an answer” and to “grind and crush objections” and other cliche sales advice. A couple of years into her sales career Leslie reflected on why she was having so much success, examining things like her sales style and overall sales philosophy. She realized that her approach to selling was drastically different than most of her peers.

The types of questions Leslie was asking weren’t just traditional qualifying questions or the superficial “What’s keeping you up at night?” style questions. She was going much deeper. She realized those deeper, more meaningful questions are her sales superpower. It’s something she’s embraced as a skill and has gotten even better at creating meaningful conversations with her prospects as a result.

In middle school, high school, and college Leslie was a bit of a self-proclaimed nerd, a geek, and she means that in the most positive light ever. She was a varsity policy debater. Her weekends were spent on stage winning awards for policy debate. Later, she participated in her school’s Model UN (MUN). She was even the president of her college MUN group for a handful of years. So, Leslie spent a tremendous amount of time practicing rhetoric. She didn’t know at the time that she was developing a sales skill, but she was, in fact, accidentally practicing the exact foundation that eventually made her wildly successful in sales.

That means when she was participating in a policy debate or a model United Nations round of debate, she couldn’t just ask “What’s keeping you up at night?” and then move on to something else. That would never work if she wanted to have a focused conversation and effective debate. In that context, she had to pull the evidence together or create the reports to support her arguments.

When it comes to sales conversations, it’s nice to know that somebody, for instance, is worried about budgets. If you can create the dynamic where you have the privilege of asking, say, two or three more questions, what you might uncover is that it’s not that they’re just worried about budgets. They’re worried that if they don’t hit their budget numbers, that might require them to lay off some of their staff.

And so, what’s really causing the pain and what they really want to solve for isn’t a little bit of ROI (which is what most salespeople commonly pitch). It is to avoid laying off one of their staff members, all of whom they worked with for years and have strong relationships with. Laying them off could damage those relationships.

Leslie found that the ability to ask meaningful follow-up questions that allow you to go deep and uncover not just a superficial sort of pain that they’re giving you gets to the real issue. Fast. You get to that thing that is going to cause them to want to put the time and effort and budget into solving their problem now instead of later. Those deeper questions make all the difference.

Leslie told me three things that immediately come to mind:

When we think about COI (Cost Of Inaction) language, what we need to keep in mind is that we as humans, have an extremely difficult time picturing future gains. We get stuck in today’s problems. Unfortunately, salespeople and entrepreneurs alike tend to default to ROI language. They promise things like “We are going to 2X your revenue.” They ask questions like “What would it mean to you if I could get you 30 more meetings a month?”

Both sales people and entrepreneurs tend to focus on more, more, more. More is a much more difficult way to sell people on taking action than COI language. COI language is going to help them avoid pain. So, it’s a balancing act. You also don’t want to come at people too hard and only use COI language.

The way Leslie coaches her clients when they’re working on sales messaging is having a blend of “pain and gain” messaging. For example, thinking about how she can help them avoid the pain and clearly illustrate that. She tells them what her proposed outcome looks like and what the resulting gain is. She has found that to be extremely valuable to move past the superficial part of the conversation. They save time, they save money, and they reduce risk to get to what really matters.

…and more golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”

Leslie Venetz is a globally recognized B2B sales expert, corporate trainer, and founder of The Sales-Led GTM Agency. With nearly two decades of experience, she specializes in modern outbound sales strategies that drive revenue, build trust, and empower sales teams to excel. As a LinkedIn Editorial Top Voice and top 1% sales thought leader, Leslie’s insights have reached over 100 million views worldwide, transforming the performance of sales leaders and their teams.

Having personally made more than 250,000 cold calls and influenced over ten million through her training programs, Leslie has helped thousands refine their prospecting skills, overcome objections, and lead sales conversations that convert. She has delivered hundreds of keynotes and workshops for top-tier B2B brands and consulting firms across four continents and has been featured in prestigious publications like The Wall Street Journal and Success Magazine.

A recipient of 20+ industry honors, including 2024 Sales Innovator of the Year, Leslie is redefining what it means to be an ethical, effective, and high-performing sales professional.

Click here to connect with Leslie on LinkedIn!

Click here for Leslie’s YouTube station!

The digital networking scene is booming. So is a growing lack of respect for common people skills and decency. I discuss the case for bringing them back through face-to-face networking with my guest, Brian Wallace.

Brian is Founder of NowSourcing, an industry leading content marketing agency that makes the world’s ideas simple, visual, and influential. Brian has been named a Google Small Business Advisor for 2016-present, joined the SXSW Advisory Board in 2019-present and became an SMB Advisor for Lexmark in 2023. He is the Co-Founder for The Innovate Summit which launched in May 2024.

We’ve gotten used to interacting in a digital landscape, including video conferencing most of the time. As we get further towards the edge of a proverbial cliff, assuming AI is going to make everything better and we have the totality of everything on the phones in our pockets, what do we do to avoid falling? We can perfect our sales pitches on LinkedIn and elevator pitches on Zoom, and it’s still not nearly as impactful as face-to-face networking.

What people need to understand is, we need to stop running away from humanity and trying to do everything at scale in a virtual world. We need to get more personal again instead of just building new connections on LinkedIn like a video game. Think about it… when is the last time you checked in on somebody you’ve known for a couple of years but haven’t spoken to recently and set up an in-person meeting?  Brian says he can guarantee that everybody right now has a ton of missed messages they’re sifting through because they were focused on playing the LinkedIn game for so long.

In person interactions have taken a big hit. We’ve forgotten how to make eye contact, we’ve forgotten how to shake hands, we’ve forgotten how to be human. The world needs to get better at being human again. When it comes to networking in general, more so for in person networking, we need to stop selling everybody, stop coming up with canned sales pitches, and start connecting meaningfully again. At the end of the day meaningful relationships are paramount to your success (or failure) in the business world.

Brian believes the main thing to remember about face-to-face networking is to figure out how to be the most interesting person in the room or at least the most interesting version of yourself. That doesn’t mean you have to brag, grandstand, or be over-the-top energetically if you’re normally introverted. It just means that instead of asking meaningless questions about the weather, come up with better stuff and ask more meaningful questions that yield more meaningful answers and interactions.

We don’t need dumb party tricks instead of connecting as humans, and that is what is wrong with the networking world.

Let’s start by unpacking the word “networking”. Brian believes there’s a lot of misuse of the word, and that means developing the understanding of and behind that word. Because a lot of people depending on your personality type, how you show up in business, if you’re introverted or extroverted, in sales or a different career, “networking” means different things to different people.

So, let’s just examine the networking event game. When you’re at any kind of conference, meetup, or event where part of the agenda is networking there are many misconceptions. So, what do we automatically think? We better come armed to the teeth with a fancy suit and a bunch of business cards. We’re just doing the business version of speed dating.

We run around in this horrible, cutthroat way, and we’re just focused on sales and transactions instead of trying to make a good impression. But the truth is that people buy, people interact, people engage with the people that they know, like, and trust. It’s not rocket science. But it can seem that way if you have the wrong approach.

You have endless choices of who you want to do business with. Why would you work with somebody that you don’t know? Why would you work with somebody that you don’t like? Why would you work with somebody that you don’t trust? If your toilet is overflowing and its midnight maybe you’re not so picky about your plumber. That’s not how it is in the business world.

Aside from plumber scenarios, in a normal business situation, we actually have choices. So, instead of these dumb networking games where you try to meet people as fast as possible with terrible messages, there is a way to evolve that conversation. Many people think networking is bad because they think that it’s just salesy and superficial, but I think if they understood the true art and science of networking, they wouldn’t hate it so much.

Yes, sometimes you have the Type A personalities that just want to talk about themselves. That’s not networking. You don’t have to be like that. Networking is a skill that can be finely honed. It’s something in your brain that you can flex as a muscle when you choose to.

Brian loves the philosophy of Bob Burg and the “Go-Giver” movement. A go-getter is that annoying guy at networking events who’s being so over the top, so salesly, that no trust can be built. You run away from him. Those people think that business is just a numbers game and if they talk to enough people maybe somebody will buy from them. Brian believes there’s a better use of your time that can be more reflective and thoughtful for everybody around you. That way you don’t come off as a jerk by showing up and acting too aggressively.

A Go-Giver, instead of taking first, is giving.

“You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

~Zig Ziglar

People are interested in you when you care about them. When you’re a nice-natured human being you genuinely care about people and are genuinely interested in them. If you want somebody to do business with you should have at least a cordial, reciprocal personality.

You should be useful to them, and you should be resourceful when it comes to helping them. Brian gives talks all over the world where he talks about being the most interesting person in the room. He doesn’t mean be that egomaniac. He just means that when you’re really interesting you’re going to leave this indelible mark in somebody’s mind. They leave the interaction with you thinking “That guy was kind of cool. I want to learn more about him.” Then they’re selling themselves on you instead of you trying to sell them.

That way you start the proverbial dance to set the stage for something better for the both of you.

…and more golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”

Brian Wallace is the Founder and President of NowSourcing, an industry leading infographic design agency, based in Louisville, KY and Cincinnati, OH which works with companies that range from startups to Fortune 500s.

In 2014, Brian started #thinkbig, a grassroots movement to make the Louisville / Cincinnati corridor a more competitive player in the global marketplace.

Brian also runs #LinkedInLocal events nationwide, hosts the Next Action Podcast, and has been named a Google Small Business Advisor for 2016-present and started serving on the #SXSW advisory board in 2019.

Embracing Servant Leadership can bolster your business and change your personal life. I discuss how to do that in this episode with my guest, Andrew Kolikoff.

Andrew helps leaders create better journeys and greater profitability through the elevation of their people, teams, culture and customer experiences. He is considered to be one of the leading thought leaders in the world on the topic of Servant Leadership.

Andrew grew up in a remarkable home where his parents were madly in love and openly affectionate and his grandparents were the same way. His parents lived their lives completely in service; it was just who they were at heart. His home was like Grand Central Station every day, it was the place of joy, love, laughter and safety for the world.  That dramatically affected Andrew’s early outlook on life.

As a child and teenager, Andrew thought all of that was normal. It wasn’t until he was ejected from the bubble and went to college that he learned two things very quickly. One, the world was not what he thought it was. And two, his parents were heroes, he just didn’t know it at the time. So, this got him very early on in his life to really think about who he wanted to be in this world, both daily and for the remainder of this life.

Andrew believes the hardest thing to do in life is to know what your “One Thing” is. Andrew decided that his “One Thing” is that he had to pay it forward, he wanted to live his life in service too. But he was single, young, and he didn’t have a house or have a way to replicate what his parents and grandparents did. He had to come up with a way that he was going to keep himself accountable to that way of living his life.

So, Andrew developed this metric that he was going to live by every day. He decided he was going to do two things every single day of his life, which he’s done now for over thirty years. One, to have a coffee, breakfast, lunch, or now Zoom with somebody that he has not met. And two, he would find out what their personal and professional challenges were and help them. He changed the traditional radio station of WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) to WIFFT (What’s In It For Them). Andrew would show up to serve, not to get anything. He still averages making five introductions a day to help people with their challenges.

What Andrew has experienced is so much has come back to him as a result of giving without expectations. He becamse a 40 under 40 of the top 40 business leaders in New York City amongst other accolades. It wasn’t because of his status as the Chief Science Officer of an international company and a University Adjunct Professor. It was not because of what he did, it was a result of who he was. That laid the groundwork for the reinvention of himself post-corporate-career. So far in the second act of his life he has spent his time building great cultures inside of organizations and his own organization, “The Secret Sauce Society”.

Not only are those organizations more profitable and their people more productive; Andrew always facilitates more purpose and meaning for everyone involved.

If anyone wants to strive for alignment with their “One Thing” in life, it may not be easy at first, but it’s worth it in the long run. Andrew told me it’s always provided him with more joy and purpose in his life.

When it comes to Andrew’s giving without expectations advice people often tell him “I did what you say to do and it just doesn’t work.” He responds with this very simple question: “Do you do it every day and are you committed to it every day?” The answer is almost always “No.” Everybody wants breakthroughs in their life. Andrew reminds them how breakthroughs happen. Andrew uses the example of learning how to ride a bicycle. At first you had training wheels, you kept falling off and getting on, and then somebody helped you.

Eventually, there was that moment when you successfully balanced yourself. You were off and running, or in this case riding.

Remember: You got on that bike every day. If you had got on it once every other week or once every other month breakthrough would never have happened. Breakthrough happens from commitment. One thing, every day. Andrew was and is committed to his “One Thing” every single day and that’s how it comes back. Because consistency matters.

The same can be said about becoming a Servant Leader.

…and more golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”

Andrew Kolikoff is a multiple time C-Level executive/company founder, one time landing him on the Cover Page of USA today for a product he invented and received licensing from the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL in 2003.

After selling his company in 2006, Andrew has dedicated his life to giving leaders their lives and freedom back while simultaneously scaling sales, cultures, customer experiences and other supportive business-related operations via his authentic alignment method.

Andrew is an dynamic executive leadership coach, business consultant, and a top 1% keynote speaker that will change the way everyone in the room thinks about their careers, businesses and themselves.

Servant Leadership is at the heart of Andrew’s business transformation philosophy.

Click here to connect with Andrew on LinkedIn!

Click here to learn more about Andrew’s Business!

Click here to learn about Andrew’s Secret Sauce Society!

Want to learn more about leadership and peak performance? Click here to check out “How to Achieve Peak Performance by Creating a “Performance Bubble” with Craig Domann“

Marketing is much more powerful when it’s driven by a purpose and a mission. I discuss how to do that with my guest, Ryan Chute.

Ryan leads an award-winning creative agency within the legendary Wizard of Ads® group. As an Emmy-award winning Producer and an Executive Producer, Ryan has a deep-rooted passion for powerful storytelling and pivotal moments in entertainment. He builds creative, data-driven strategies that tap into the psychology of persuasion and the science of decision-making.

What is a “mission”? Mission starts as something internal to the company, and then becomes external to the public. When we think about that in the military sense, where “mission” derives from, that means the “commander’s intent”. Commander’s intent got popularized in the Napoleonic era where the Germans were fighting the Napoleon armies and they were losing miserably. The Germans realized one profoundly important thing: That they were going to have to sacrifice their autocratic way and come up with new flexibility of the army to take the hill however they might. Not every decision would come straight from the leader.

When they did that the tides of the campaign changed.

Ryan believes that everyone is a leader. They just need help bringing out the leader inside of them regardless of rank, authority or title. That ideology was the beginning of mission-based marketing and mission-based businesses.  The idea here is that you, as the commander, you have this notion of how you want to start and run a business. Ways that you feel are righting rights that are wrong and fixing things in the way that they were injust in the past. You need something bigger than you and that is greater than the sum of just you.

So you come up with the commander’s intent. The commander’s intent lives in three buckets:

Helping people win comes from being grateful and being trustworthy.

This notion of gratitude is a definition of terms; what does gratitude mean to you? Is it through the way that you pay your employees, is it the way that you present policy and return policies for your clients? How do you deliver your deliverables? All of this lives in the humility and abundance of gratitude.

Then there’s trustworthiness. What does being trustworthy mean? What does the action of trust and being a trustworthy person actually mean to you? That’s going to show up in what you decide to do when it’s convenient for you and when it’s inconvenient for you. This is the foundation of values and beliefs. Beliefs are like the constellations in the sky, they move around, they’re pretty, and they’re informative. But they’re convenient and they move. In any situation where it’s inconvenient for you, you’re willing to change, to take action for the greater good, and follow your mission.

When we all agree that the mission is to help people win in a trustworthy and grateful manner, the next step from that mission is to decide the rules of engagement. What is the objective that trying to achieve, what hill are you trying to conquer? In the HR department you’re trying to get the right employees, in sales you’re trying to close every sale that you ethically can, and so on. Ultimately all of those things are missions within your business, within your campaigns.

Why does this all matter to the mission driven business? Until you understand what mission is, you can’t have a mission driven business. If we can all agree for a moment that helping people win in a trustworthy and grateful manner is the mission, what does that mean to you in your business? What does helping people win mean?

In trustworthiness it’s the beliefs and values, the values are the things that you take consequence for. You accept the consequence, you suffer, you struggle and that’s when your true value shows up. People only value the things that they receive from you means you had to concede on something; both tangible and intangible in nature. Helping people win start with your employees. How can you help your employees become more successful and setting it up to make things easier for them to sell then they’ll be helped in being able to close more sales. Buyers will be able to buy more stuff. Then your company will win.

Your mission ends up being the thing that stands out that your competition is unwilling to do. It’s the consequence you are willing to receive that your competition is not willing to receive. All of these places where you can create less challenge for your clients to work with you makes it easier for the people to buy from you. So the mission becomes making it easy to do business with you.

Last but not least is doing it in a grateful way by throwing in extra rewards for doing business with you and making it an environment where you receive as part of the package.

…and other golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”

Ryan Chute is an award-winning creative strategist and the Wizard of Ads® who helps small businesses transform into BIG brands. With a passion for removing friction, Ryan specializes in crafting innovative sales and marketing strategies that drive profitable growth. Drawing from his extensive experience in retail and automotive, Ryan’s insights empower entrepreneurs to dominate their markets with bold, frictionless solutions.

https://www.ryanchute.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@wizardryanchute

Becoming a great podcast host is a blend of art and science. I discuss how to become a great one with my guest, Mark Iorio.

Mark is the host of Language of Leadership, a seasoned business culture expert, and a passionate advocate for helping organizations align purpose, people, and performance to build thriving, values-driven cultures.

Eight years ago Mark was in the studio shooting an episode of his TV show, “CEO Chat”, and his business partner was one of the co-hosts. As Mark was walking off the set a woman asked him to guest on her podcast and Mark agreed. When Mark arrived to record the show, the CEO of the studio, Keith, came into the lobby asked him who he was there to see. When Mark mentioned the woman that invited him Keith told him she was gone but he would interview Mark.

As the interview progressed, they were discussing marketing. Keith told Mark that he believed Mark would make a good podcast host. Mark blew it off as just another compliment to be nice, but Keith persisted. Mark agreed to be a host and decided to brainstorm topics and names for the potential show. He eventually came up with “Rainmakers’ Roundup” and ran the show for seven and a half years.

Just do it, just step into it.

First, you must be genuinely curious. You must focus on the person that you’re interviewing. Mark had 75 episodes of Rainmakers’ Roundup in the studio and he noticed there were dozens of hosts from other podcasts that read from a script. There was no flow to it, there was no real cadence. Just a list of questions. Mark was more improvised. He told me that if you can be curious about your guests’ lives, and be curious about the subject matter, your show will flow very nicely like a conversation over a cup of coffee.

In your head, create and go through a process. Maybe its discussing how your guest got started in their business or career. Maybe it’s learning about why they love what they do. Have a specific cadence and let them answer the question. Make the show about them. If you go in thinking your show is about you because you’re this great podcaster, then you probably shouldn’t do it.

If you’re there to shine a light on them and their career path, their service, what they’ve done for society and so on, then you’re taking the right approach. You’re in the right ballpark.

You must have a mission for your podcast. When you understand that mission, look for people that match that mission. As an example, Mark is starting over with his new podcast “The Language of Leadership”. Language of Leadership is all about people in leadership positions that not only use meaningful language, but their behavior is such that people want to follow them. They want to follow their behavioral patterns. Because of his purpose Mark knows he needs to find branding people, HR people that care about their staff, heart-centered leaders and so on.

What does this mean for you? Don’t try to squeeze someone into your podcast just because they’re a warm body. Know your mission and then figure out the types of people that fit your mission. That helps the conversation flow effortlessly and that makes it easier for you to ask the right questions because you know your mission so well.

…and more golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”

Mark Iorio is a dynamic keynote speaker, media host, and business culture strategist with more than 30 years of experience helping organizations align their people, purpose, and performance. As host of Language of Leadership and Rainmakers Roundup, Mark engages top executives and thought leaders in powerful conversations about authentic leadership, team alignment, and purposeful growth.

Mark is the creator of the Brand and Culture Alignment Toolkit (BCAT)—a science-based framework that visualizes a business as a single high-performing individual, helping teams clarify their collective purpose and drive consistent, values-based behavior. His talks blend real-world business insight with emotional intelligence, storytelling, and actionable strategies that resonate with leaders across industries.

Click here to connect with Mark on LinkedIn!

Click here to learn more about Mark’s company!