Capability Amplifier

Management Mess To Leadership Success!! My guest on this week’s show is Scott Jeffrey Miller. If you want to improve your management skills and capabilities, this is the episode you’ve been waiting for.  Entering his twenty-third year with Franklin Covey, Miller serves as the executive vice president of thought leadership. He is the host of the Franklin Covey-sponsored “On Leadership With Scott Miller,” a weekly leadership webcast, podcast, and newsletter that features interviews with renowned business titans, authors, and thought leaders and is distributed to more than five million business leaders worldwide. He is also the host of the weekly radio program “Great Life, Great Career With Scott Miller.” This radio program and podcast provide insight and strategies drawn from Franklin Covey’s leadership principles and from Miller’s career and personal life experience to assist listeners in becoming more effective as business leaders and to improve their personal performance. One guest interview in particular had such a profound effect on Miller that it inspired him to write his first TWO books, Management Mess To Leadership Success and Everyone Deserves A Great Manager, simultaneously. (Which he does NOT recommend doing, by the way!)  The guest who inspired Miller was Steven M.R. Covey, the oldest son of Dr. Steven Covey whose book The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People sold 30 million copies and who is one of the most influential men of the last 100 years. Miller asked him if he ever felt like he needed to write a book because of his dad and his response was “I didn't until I did.” Meaning he never had anything to say until one day he realized he DID, so he took a two-year sabbatical, wrote The Speed Of Trust and sold two million copies.   At this point, Miller had been at Franklin Covey for 22 years and never thought he had anything to say either ... until that interview. What he realized he had to say is that leadership is not easy, it’s not for everyone, and vulnerability is a leadership competency (which really goes against the traditional culture of the firm).   Miller wrote the first book, Management Mess To Leadership Success, which is the story of all his struggles as an officer in a leadership firm where he wasn’t even sure he should have been a leader. The book sold 20,000 copies in 100 days, and right now, he’s in the process of writing seven more books in the “Mess To Success Series.”  The book is raw and relatable with content like, “Here are 30 challenges you're going to face, not just as a formal leader, but in your personal life with your mother-in-law, your spouse, or your kids.“  The second book, Everyone Deserves A Great Manager, Miller co-authored with Franklin Covey's chief people officer and one of their leadership consultants. This one is a very practical and easy read, using Franklin Covey's 40 years in business and millions of profile assessments to share things like, “Six things that leaders need to do to build a great team.”  To hear this inspiring conversation about leadership, download or stream the full episode today. You’ll be happy you did! –Mike 

This episode is all about amplifying and multiplying your time to increase your consciousness and value. It’s something that is near and dear to both Dan and me. We're talking about getting the MOST time out of the life you have.  There is one thing in this world that is fixed and that is everybody has quantitatively the same amount of time. When people say they’ve found a way to “shorten time,” it’s simply not true. That would be like shortening gravity or water. We're all given the same material (time) to work with but the gradient equality is what people do with the quantity of time that they have.  I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and a few days ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with six core ideas about time shuffling around in my head. They were important enough to wake me up so I wrote them down:   * Time Slicing * Time Compression * Folding Time * Chaos Elimination * Courage Amplification * Embracing The New Rules Of The Universe   Let’s take the first one, “time slicing,” for example. The basic premise is increasing your consciousness through meditation—actually slowing down time and focusing on or creating peak experiences. I believe those who focus on and in the spiritual realm are living “outside” of time versus living in the physical realm. The more conscious you are, the slower time can appear to be.  When you pack more exciting experiences into the same amount of time, you, in fact, live more. Imagine time as stacks of pancakes versus laying the pancakes end to end. There's more density to the quality of life. The quality of your life depends on how you choose to perceive and give meaning to the things happening around you and for you.  The world is getting more and more complicated every day, and it's the actual experience of unpredictable complexity that robs us of time consciousness. We’re being asked to constantly respond to new things and don't have time to reflect and give it meaning. Instead, we react. Figuring out how to slow down and become more conscious through meditation will help combat this ever-increasing problem.  Your phone and social media can be a gateway to constant, unconscious interruptions (hell on earth) or an infinite volume of wisdom, knowledge, and information (heaven on earth). Every day, you get to choose. Chaos elimination is next. In other words, owning your time by not giving it away or devaluing yourself improves your decision making. This increases your own self worth and your value to the market, and increases your consciousness and awareness.   One major example of this is unconscious consumption. To me, the biggest robber of consciousness is social media and TV. There is SO much out there readily available for consumption that it is very easy to just flip, flip, flip through, and down the rabbit hole you go, appealing to the lowest-frequency, addictive part of the human brain.   I’m guilty of doing it. Nearly EVERYONE is. Until you make the conscious decision to eliminate those “time sucks,” you’ll stay stuck and continue to lose precious time.  Evidence of this is our lowest common denominator, clickbait world of media. Journalism ceased to exist the moment it began depending on clicks to survive. One hype-induced “us or them” existential threat after another. 9/11 led to a (fake) war. Remember the big “anthrax” scare in letters that was the end of the world? Turned out to be one guy. Then SARS. Pandemic! End of the world. Nope. Then one Trump drama after another. Now it’s the coronavirus. Keep the lemmings glued to their screens. It’s “us” versus “them.” All the world's a stage, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Wizard of Oz. It’s all just a grand illusion. Peace is behind the curtain if you choose to pull it back, look behind and contemplate ...

The concept and goal behind this podcast series is for our listeners to hear our brilliant guests and get a cartridge-style upgrade to their skills and capabilities. My request is that each guest speaks from the heart with honesty, authenticity, and integrity, and this week’s guest did not disappoint.  His name is Arjuna Ardagh. He is a Radical Brilliance coach, writer, and public speaker, and he was the original founder of Awakening Coaching. He has trained more than 2,000 people to become Awakening Coaches over the last 25 years. Arjuna has been a speaker at conferences all over the world and has appeared on TV, radio, and in print media in 12 countries. He has spoken at Google and at the United Nations. In his groundbreaking new book, Radical Brilliance, Arjuna (author of the #1 national bestseller The Translucent Revolution and eight other books) offers us a compelling and practical model for the hidden components that together make up a brilliant life.  Arjuna put this book together based on more than 15 years of interviews with more than 420 scientists, artists, musicians, inventors, and social architects.  Arjuna’s current big quest is two-fold. One massive context is what is actually happening to humanity on the planet right now. “Essentially we are faced with various kinds of crises that are completely and utterly unprecedented, both in their global nature and severity.”   We, as humans, can do various things to become more capable in various ways, but if we're not actively addressing the predicament of the global crisis, then whatever we're doing, “it's like making a little more money on the card table while the Titanic is going down. It’s going down anyway and your winnings will not mean very much once you're in the water.” Unless our capabilities are aligned with the well being of generations not yet born, they're irrelevant.   Second is how slowing down, relaxing, and doing less actually ushers miracles into your life. A big myth we often buy into as doers and entrepreneurs is that everything is the fruit of our actions and our intentions. We overlook the fact that a lot of the greatest miracles that come into our lives come when we’re STILL and when we connect with the source bigger than our own minds.  Arjuna and I dive deep into the mythology and research behind what people think makes for a meaningful life and what ACTUALLY makes for a meaningful life. I’ll tell you right now ... it’s probably not what you’re thinking.  Arjuna shared some really interesting background with me that not a lot of people know, including where he was born, where he studied, how he got interested in exploring the outer dimensions of consciousness, and how he got his current name. Enjoy!

Create Better Messaging And People Will Beg You To Take Their Money  When you are positioned, packaged, and branded with great messaging, you can charge premium prices and be seen as an industry leader. I want to be seen as the highest priced solution in my business category. Don’t you?  My co-host Dan Sullivan and I have produced many, many different kinds of knowledge products and intellectual tools to help entrepreneurs over the last several decades, and we’re constantly being asked, “What is your process and thinking behind it?”  A friend of mine recently said something to me that profoundly affected me. His name is Stewart Emery, he's 78 years old, and he's gone through many, many reinventions. He said, “I have been fortunate enough to follow my curiosities for my entire professional life and monetize a fair number of them.” Stewart happens to have been one of the creators and founders of EST, which eventually became the Landmark Forum.  I approach everything through the lens of curiosity and market interest. Historically, my brands and businesses have largely revolved around my own capabilities and interests. I have to be fired up, inspired, and motivated to actually do something.  I also pay very close attention to upcoming trends. Then I think about how I can amplify, multiply, and automate them. Something else that’s REALLY important to me is finding interesting people that I actually want to do business with.   From there, it’s a matter of market testing. For example, this year, my wife, Vivian, and I decided to do something we call “SuperBeing Dinners.” We invite really fascinating, interesting people to our home, bring in a caterer, create a great night, and start a conversation that you don’t get to have anywhere else. People LOVE them. It’s a way to see people’s responses and their perception of value.  It really comes down to how you create messaging, an experience, and a feeling for people so they wind up raising their hands and saying, “Yeah, I'd like a little bit of that, please!”   One of Dan’s passions in life is to just ask questions of people and have them tell him about their experiences (most of the time they've never actually described these experiences in their life so, in many ways, they're creating the experience on the spot).   Questions can be super powerful and that’s Dan’s approach to branding. It’s never about him. It's about what's going on in the mind of someone else. It's about asking better questions of better people.  Every week, Dan and I give away cool prizes to voters and commenters and that might as well be you!  Enjoy!  

Our guest this week KILLS FAT for a living. Her name is Natalie Jill and she is a fat loss expert turned high-performance coach. She helps women age in reverse and LEVEL UP in all areas of their lives.  Natalie is a 48-year-old woman and knows all too well the struggles that can come along with aging. About 10 years ago, she lost her house, her retirement, and her marriage, and gained a lot of weight. She hit ROCK BOTTOM.   She had all kinds of nagging “False Assumed Truths” that she believed about herself. She felt too old, too broke, too overweight, and too depressed to do anything, but she knew something had to shift. She changed her state by changing her mindset, turned it all around, got her life back, and became an inspiration to others.  Natalie was on 13 magazine covers after the age of 40 (despite society saying she was too old) and became a master at creating all possibilities from NOTHING.   Although fitness and fat loss programs are what she’s known for, her passion and priority are in the personal development space. She believes “it’s what’s in our heads, our beliefs and our actions that create our realities” because she’s seen it over and over again with her fat loss clients. She changes their state, and next to follow is their weight! It’s not JUST about following a specific diet or doing a workout: “It’s about stepping into TRULY LIVING.”  Natalie Jill is 48 years old and looks 20 years younger. She’s CONSTANTLY asked the question, “How do you do it and how can I do it too?”   She has discovered the solution is two simple words. Two simple words that will change your life forever, reprogram your brain, and get you the body and life you've always wanted:   DECIDE and SURRENDER.  Everything starts with a decision and surrendering to living in your current reality. Exactly where you are right NOW. Not in the past. Not where you should be. Not where you want to be. Start where you are, surrender, and step into your life.   Enjoy!  Mike

This week, we're talking about creating brand new, valuable intellectual capital. What does that mean? It’s about creating tools, products, and services to elevate your brand and business.  This is something that Dan and I absolutely love to do, and today we're going to reveal some of the strategies we've been using to rapidly create our own content and products. PLUS, we’ll go behind the scenes and hear about what Dan's been doing with Strategic Coach and how he just changed his model of rapid content creation that drives his quarterly events.   I think you're going to find this one particularly interesting because it also ties into “who you want to be a hero to.”  Dan has always had a love for packaging and branding, even when he was young. So much so that one day when his parents were away, he thought it would be a great idea to use model airplane paint (remember model airplane glue? Talk about a high!!) to label all of the doors and drawers in the house. Needless to say … his parents were NOT thrilled, but so began his love of packaging and branding!  I define a “brand” as an emotional connection or feeling that someone has to a product, a company, an individual, or a service. The more feelings someone experiences that are positive, the more likely they are to want to buy a product. A continual emotional attachment embeds a trigger to buy.  Let’s use Coca-Cola as an example. It's one of the greatest brands of all time. Just hearing the pop of the can or bottle and the fizzing of the bubbles creates an emotion or feeling for most. (Be honest … you just pictured that red can and your mouth started watering, right?) Maybe you’re brought back to a childhood memory, but it becomes an experience that involves ALL of your senses.  When I work with my one-on-one clients, the goal is to establish an emotional connection. What is the primary emotion and feeling you want them to walk away with? I've discovered over time that the three things people want more than anything are clarity, confidence, and courage.  If you’d like to dive deeper into our own processes for creating a brand, content, products, and services FAST, then give this episode a spin right now! 

This week, I had the incredible opportunity to chat with Eric Edmeades, a fascinating individual, a TRUE visionary, and an all-around #SuperBeing. Keep reading because you’re in for a real treat!  Eric spent the earlier part of his life struggling with constant sinus and throat infections, excess weight, acne, and chronic fatigue. His doctors believed that surgically removing his tonsils was the solution, but on a whim, Eric decided to experiment with changing his diet. Within 30 days, all his symptoms went away. The surgery was canceled.  Eric became fascinated by food’s role in achieving true health. He wanted to understand why simple dietary changes healed his body. His research took him to live with bushmen in Africa, where he studied their eating patterns and HUNTED with them. We’re talking 27 miles a day in 100-degree heat with stone-age type hunter-gatherer bushmen using bows and arrows, sometimes with little or no results.   Eric has devoted years of his life to analyzing and testing his theories, and his company, WildFit, is the result of that experience.  Helping people have breakthroughs in their health and fitness simply by changing their relationship with food is not Eric’s only passion. He has spoken on hundreds of stages to thousands of people around the world teaching nutrition AND business and marketing (including Tony Robbins’s business mastery seminars).  “A lot of people don't recognize that there is truly an unconscious power level of influence that is given to people who are willing to stand in front of an audience. I am aware that every single person in the audience has stories that are either as valuable or more than mine are, and the only difference between them and me is a skill set. Once I recognized that, it put me in a position where I could never, ever talk down to an audience because every single person in that audience has life experiences as valuable as mine.” - Eric  I couldn’t agree with Eric more. As I’ve said many times, one of the best ways to market yourself and build a successful business is to get on a stage in front of as many people as possible and tell YOUR unique story. It’s a powerful thing and helps you relate to your ideal client.  To learn more about Eric’s incredible life from being born in South Africa to growing up in Canada and attending the craziest boarding school you’ve ever heard of, to currently living in the Dominican Republic and dreaming of building an “intentional” community, listen to the latest episode right now! 

Get Inspired, Get Creative, Solve Problems, And Get Paid For It.  This week’s conversation with Dan Sullivan came from an experience he had at an Abundance 360 annual event with Peter Diamandis.   Abundance 360 is a highly curated global community of 360 entrepreneurs, executives, and investors committed to understanding and leveraging exponential technologies to transform their businesses.  Because the event is jam-packed with expert after expert talking about things like virtual reality, artificial intelligence, machine learning, driverless cars, and spaceships to Mars, it’s VERY easy to get overloaded with information (especially for someone with ADHD, like Dan).  So Dan came up with a technique. Whenever a new prediction was made about a “breakthrough” technology, he would go to Google and punch in, for example, “What are the ten biggest obstacles for entire cities going to driverless cars?” Major obstacles for a city like New York include a massive transformation to the cars, retrofitting ALL of the streets, and a $25 BILLION dollar price tag. That’s a pretty hefty obstacle to overcome.  When anyone predicts a great new capability or “breakthrough,” look for the pushback, but also look for the strategic by-products.   Dan and I make a living by working with entrepreneurs, getting them together in groups, listening to their challenges, and coming up with creative solutions that essentially bypass or hack through the system.  I've made my living developing technology that superseded a problem or aggregated someone else's technology to solve a problem and allowing me to build infrastructure without paying for it.   One of Dan and my goals is to talk about how we get inspired, get creative, and solve problems while getting paid at the same time, allowing us to either build businesses, create businesses, or elevate and amplify other people's businesses so they make more money with less effort, and without all the problems and obstacles. Enjoy the show!

Do you have someone in your life you’re in awe of? Someone who’s been such an incredible mentor, teacher, inspiration, and friend that you feel blessed to know them at all? Joseph McClendon III is one of those people for me. Joseph is one of the most sought-after Performance Specialists in the world. His unique techniques rapidly trigger personal change that effectively moves you to take more consistent action and go further faster with your personal and business achievements.  This week, my long-time friend Joseph and I talk about his personal experience with prejudice, being homeless, raising a kid in today’s crazy world, evolving as a human being, and what kind of legacy he wants to leave behind.  I started the conversation by asking Joseph, “What is the scariest thing you’re doing right now?” and his answer might surprise you. It wasn’t business, money, politics, the environment or health ... it was being a parent.  Joseph has a 12-year-old son who’s getting to the age where he’s going to start doing things on his own. Joseph knows he’s done a great job preparing him but with everything that’s going on in today’s climate, it’s not an issue of trusting his son ... it’s the WORLD out there he doesn’t trust. (I’m in the same boat as Joseph. My son, Zak, is 17 and I have the same concerns.)  Joseph came from a background of having some pretty horrible things happen to him right around the age his son is now. He recalls seeing a news clip on TV during the civil rights riots of a black man who had driven into a part of town where they were having a white supremacist rally. The man was pulled out of his car and beaten badly because of the color of his skin. That was the first time Joseph realized that, as an African-American, the same thing could happen to him and that it was a dangerous world out there.  When he was 17, he was attacked by three grown men who tried to take his life because of the color of his skin. He became homeless because that experience destroyed his self-esteem and confidence. That was the genesis of his journey into personal development and growth.  Joseph feels that he’s “an evolving soul right now.” He knows he has a lot more learning to do, but he’s really focused on what he’s going to leave behind when he’s done—his legacy. He feels an urgency to focus 100 percent of his attention on giving people the tools, strategies, experiences, and results of hedging that bet and beating the ridiculous odds of not being able to succeed in your health, your wellness, and your lifestyle.

This week on the show, Dan and I discuss “Not Being Bothered,” It's a big idea that Dan loves to talk about. We dive deep into Burnout, The Entrepreneur’s Dilemma and how to retrieve your passion once it has been CONSUMED by business details and the grind.  Tell me if this sounds familiar: You were led to believe that if you’re a marketer, you can teach people how easy it would be to build a BIG business by using social media and “systems,” but soon found your complicated machine required 25 people to run—most of whom you don’t even like or like to manage.  You’ve grown tired of “team.” Tired of hiring, firing, legal stuff, customers, and the list goes on... and now you’re in a situation where it's a constant grind of being shallow and wide from a lack of focus instead of being deep and narrow, which is really the experiential side, the human side, of having a great business. You’ve reached the level where your business bothers you SO much that it’s time to escape. To reinvent. You’ve reached BURNOUT.  Remember the ambitions and goals you had back in your 20s and 30s? By the time you reached 40, you probably far surpassed those ambitions. Have you taken the time to reassess and take your ambitions to a new level yet in your 40s? Now imagine if that happens again in your 50s and 60s. Maybe it already has. You burn out because your life becomes about your past only, instead of including your future.  Dan is 75 and thinks that sometimes “entrepreneurs run out of future,” and I agree with him. Take retirement, for instance: Dan’s perspective on retirement is that the moment you stop being useful or providing value, the universe wants its parts back.  When thinking about retirement a lot of entrepreneurs revert back to a non-entrepreneurial way of thinking. Why? You chose to be an entrepreneur by thinking and doing things differently, so why would you buy into a traditional, non-entrepreneurial idea of retirement? Use the talents that got you here to plan a retirement that fits YOUR wants and goals! Get creative and innovative. DO YOU.  As an entrepreneur, I find creating is easier than managing and growing a business. When I was younger (and should have been focusing on building a real business), my identity was wrapped up in my company, which didn't need me from the start. As a result, I started becoming a “specialist.”  Not long ago I heard the phrase “Specialization is for insects.” Generalists WIN in the new economy. Resilience. Innovation. Reinvention. Co-creation. These are the values that win.  You can't spend your whole life being special and then complain about what comes with being special. It's part of the deal! As an entrepreneur, you never wanted to make your living in a conventional way. There are ENORMOUS rewards to doing so but there are also disadvantages. You have to know that going in and accept it or suffer the consequences.  So at what point in your life would you like to know that something isn't working? Would you like to find out five years from now? 10 years from now? 20 years from now? Dan and I have both done long and short suffering and we’ve decided that short suffering is a lot better.  Enjoy!