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Finding A Better Way: How To Change The World And Your Life With What You Know And Want With Dr. Angela Mulrooney

BYW 39 | Better Way

 

Dr. Angela Mulrooney is a global speaker, best-selling author, and personal branding expert. But before all that, she used to be an incredibly shy girl with such perfectionist standards. Although she aced the game of professional and academic achievements, her personal life had a hole she can’t seem to fill. That is what made her say enough is enough, and that it was time to find a better way. Joining Dr. Gary Sanchez, Dr. Mulrooney shares her personal journey and how her WHY of better way made her the strong, successful, fulfilled, and happy woman she is today. She also touches on how media platforms can be used to drive sales in clarifying your message and driving sales. Continuing her work with thought leaders and brand archetypes, Dr. Mulrooney shares how one can change the world with what they know.

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Finding A Better Way: How To Change The World And Your Life With What You Know And Want With Dr. Angela Mulrooney

We are going to be talking about the Why of Better Way to find a better way and share it. If this is your why, you are someone who is the ultimate innovator. You are constantly seeking better ways to do everything. You find yourself wanting to improve virtually anything by finding a way to make it better. You also desire to share your improvement with the world.

You constantly ask yourself questions like, “What if we tried this differently? What if we did this another way? How can we make this better?” You contribute to the world with better processes and systems while operating under the motto, “I’m often pleased but never satisfied.” You are excellent at associating, which means you are adept at taking ideas or systems from one industry or discipline and applying them to another always with the ultimate goal of improving something.

I have got a great guest for you. Her name is Dr. Angela Mulrooney, and I met her several years ago. She was a dentist and is now a global speaker, bestselling author, and personal branding expert. She works with thought leaders around the world to clarify their message through their brand archetype while using various media platforms like LinkedIn, podcasts, and the stage to drive sales, so these experts can change the world with what they know. Angela, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. It’s nice to be back.

In total transparency, Angela and I have already done this interview and I forgot to hit record. Those of you that have your own show are probably smiling and laughing and thinking, “I have done that too.” This is round two. Angela, let’s go back to your life because what I mentioned was you were a dentist. Let’s go back even before that. What were you like in high school, and where did you go to high school?

I went to high school in Regina, Saskatchewan. For me, high school was torture because I was shy and an achiever. I’d win these awards and then that would draw a whole bunch of attention to me and people would steal my exam paper when we got our marks back to see if I was still top in the class. I hated it. I wanted to achieve what I want to achieve for me and then go do my own thing. I wasn’t trying to draw attention to myself. I want to be a wildflower and blend in with the scenery.

Let’s talk about that for a minute. For those of you that are reading, if you saw Angela on camera, you would not think that she’s shy based on how she’s dressed and what she does. She’s not shy now. Back then, why do you think you were so shy?

It was partly the way that I was raised in my family. I could never do anything right. I was always really self-conscious about what I was doing and achieving in school made me feel confident but anything outside of that, there was a separation between the academic and the personal Angela. Personal Angela was really shy, and academics was a killer. “You were going to get my way, I was going to take you down.”

There was this dichotomy in me and that lack of confidence made me very perfectionist. It made me always strive to get to the top of everything and I didn’t know how to do that. In my personal life, that’s always been a lack. I have always been good at figuring out the game of achievement, but personally, there are not those goalposts that you have compared to academic and professional ones, for sure.

BYW 39 | Better Way
Better Way: Sometimes, you can be good at figuring out the game of professional or academic achievement, but those are not really the goalposts you have personally.

 

In high school, did you look older or younger than the other kids?

I looked younger.

Did that have anything to do with it by chance or not?

I don’t think so. Part of it was my hair. I have pretty easy curly hair and at that point, I didn’t know but to brush it. I was always a fuzzball. I was well-dressed because I worked on the weekends at the RCMP museum, so I had to be dressed nicely and took my work clothes and wore them to school. I stood out a little bit that way. People knew that I was shy, so I had a target on my back because there were people who wanted to tease me to bring me out of myself, and then there were the ones who wanted to tease me to put me in my place.

The funny thing is when I would run into bullies or anything, if I saw a kid being bullied, I would step in and the stuff that would come out of my mouth was surprising to people because I didn’t talk. If there was a situation that needed to be diffused, I would step in and defuse the bomb even if it meant that I had put myself in harm’s way, and sometimes it turned out badly for me. There was a laugh because you turned into this yelly, little smurf that came out of nowhere that no one was expecting so that I could overcome it to protect someone else, but I had problems overcoming it for me.

You graduate from high school and off to college. Where did you go to college?

University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

You are up in Canada, right?

I am, yes. For a couple more months and then I’m headed back to Nicaragua.

What was college like for you? What was that experience like?

As brutal. Still shy and a killer when it came to competitive stuff, but generally, pretty shy. I started ballroom dancing in my first year of university because that’s what the biggest social club on campus was. There were 1,500 members, which was the biggest ballroom dancing club in North America. I joined that and after the first year they asked me to become a teacher, and I’m like, “I’m trying to get into dental school, don’t distract me.” After the second year, I was like, “Please distract me. The dental school’s going to be brutal.” I started teaching for the club star performing, and then I turned pro as a dancer at 24 when I graduated from dental school.

Graduating from college then off to dental school. Where’d you go to dental school?

It’s the same place. I did two years of undergrad. We were still allowed to do that back then, so I got in after two years and finished my Dental degree at 24.

What was dental school like for you?

Still torture.

You were still the shy kid that studied hard, got good grades, and was serious about what you were doing?

Yes. There were some people in dental school that they got in and were like, “I have made it.” I was trying to get scholarships, so I studied really hard. I had good boundaries with people like, “Don’t call me after 8:00, I might be asleep.” I wanted to consume as much information as possible so that when I got out of dental school I could be an amazing dentist. I didn’t want to learn so much on the job. I’m like, “I’m here to learn. I’m here to get as many scholarships as I possibly can and then be able to be amazing when I’m out.”

You graduate from dental school and become a professional ballroom dancer. Tell us about your practice or what it was like getting into dentistry for you.

I decided to tell the people I was applying for jobs with that. I loved pediatric dentistry because with kids I didn’t have to have these uncomfortable adult conversations. I could tell them stories about the different colored sugar bugs that I have removed from their teeth. I could explain to the parents very briefly what had happened. The adults would go away, and I’d be back to my next kid. I did that for the first four and a half years of practice. I stuck to children.

Does anybody like pediatric dentistry or did you like it? Let me put it that way because as a dentist myself, I know that is not what I like to do.

Yeah. I did like it and in any position I applied for, I did treat adults as well, but when you are the one who wants to work with the kids, you get the job in every practice because no one wants to work with kids.

You were a pediatric dentist for four and a half years, and then what happened?

I then decided it was time to level up, and I wasn’t sure what that was going to look like. I plateaued. I’m like, “I either need to go and specialize in pediatric dentistry or something else has to change.” When you make your mind up that something needs to change, oftentimes, the perfect thing presents itself. I ran into one of my old bosses because I had done pediatric dentistry for his practice and he was like, “Do you want to pick up an associateship?” I’m like, “Sure, why not?”

He was working full-time replacing this 78-year-old dentist and I was 28. I was supposed to take two days off of his hands. By the end of the weekend, after I talked to him, he was like, “I don’t like doing dentistry. You know this, why don’t you take the whole associateship?” I went from expecting to work a couple of days to working full-time there and replacing him and this ailing dentist in the practice.

How old was he?

The dentist who owned the practice was 78. There was a five-decade difference between us.

What happened after that? You are now the person doing the dentistry for a practice that was meant for two dentists?

One dentist.

It was meant for one, and then what happened from there?

The dentist was in the hospital dying of cancer, and they’d had a few different locums coming in. There’d been a few other people who wanted to buy the practice and that was his life. That’s why he was still practicing at 78. He didn’t want to sell it. I walked in there and the carpet was black from years of cigarette smoking and dirt because it had never been cleaned.

When we finally did seven rounds of removing, doing the water removal, then it was beige. This was a broken-down aged practice. Every day that I walked in there, I could see potential everywhere. The view from the practice was amazing. It was the best view in Calgary. I decided that, “Maybe this was my level-up chance.” I went to the hospital and talked to the dentist.

I had heard from his old team that he had sworn he would never sell to a woman. I go in there and I’m like, “I have heard what you have said, and I happen to be a woman, so do you want to sell it to me?” He was a potty mouth and this bigger-than-life kind of personality. I was still a shy person at that time. He said, “I have heard amazing things from the patients. They like you.” His patients were going to see him in the hospital, so they heard.

They had taken the word to him that things were working out well with me, so he decided to sell it to me. He ended up passing away halfway through the deal and then his son tried to sell it out from underneath me. There was all this weird chaos that happened with this practice, but in the end, it turned out to be one of the best things I had ever done as a dentist.

You buy this old practice probably old everything, old equipment, and I’m assuming you did not keep it old?

No, it took me three months. I lasted three months with the old equipment, and then I shut the practice down. In three weeks, I found a contractor, and he renovated the whole practice in three weeks, which to do a practice that fast is unheard of. Everyone’s like, “You are going to be down for two months.” I’m like, “No. He promised me three weeks.” He kept his word, and I went in and helped. We got it done.

We turned it from this broken-down practice to this beautiful high-end, high-tech practice. From there, it started attracting different kinds of patients. I leveled up my skillset as well because a lot of the patients were broken down because he couldn’t see properly. His assistant did her best to be like, “Maybe you should go a little bit more to the distal.” Some days he would listen, some days he wouldn’t.

When I would show patients their X-rays, they could see the big black thing underneath their bright white filling. They knew that I wasn’t lying about it, and they often commented. I have never seen someone so excited about teeth. They knew that I was invested in their care. They knew I was doing a good job and wanted to make sure that they were taken care of. That helped with getting them onboard with higher level care.

At this time, what were you like as far as that shy little girl?

Still shy, but I also realized that I had big boots to fill with his personality. I made a deal with myself that I was going to learn how to communicate, and I would sit in my operator’s chair across from my patient and my leg would be shaking. I’d be holding myself onto the chair, making myself stay and talk to the patient because they were used to so much personality in the practice that I knew my technical skills would take me so far, but I needed that charisma as well-built. I forced myself to learn it.

What was that like for you? That had to be terrifying, and then how long did it take you? You then went through a transformation.

It was torture. I hated it every day until I stopped hating it. It’s learning anything new. You are a fish out of the water until it starts to become second nature. That is what allowed me to start doing the higher-level treatment that I did. I went and finished the Kois program in thirteen months. I did my IV station. I did my implants. I did sleep apnea, and suddenly, I had people accepting $40,000 to $60,000 treatment plans on the first meeting with me.

When you’re learning something new, it feels like you're a fish out of water until it starts to become second nature. Click To Tweet

I started sending out referral pads because nobody likes to deal with people who are scared of the dentist. This practice was full of people who were scared of the dentist, which is the same as working with little kids except they are bigger and say way meaner things to you. I started getting referrals from all over the city from dentists who were 20 or 30 years older than me and who didn’t realize I was that young because they weren’t creeping on the internet as we do now. I started building a referral-based practice.

Again, if you are not able to see Angela, you would expect from what we are talking about that she’d be wearing scrubs or being very conservative, and you are not. When did that happen?

That started to happen closer to the end of when my career finished. I started to not care. I saw cool haircuts, and I have got this crazy curly hair. It’s beautiful corkscrews, but when it’s all there it’s like a lion’s mane. I decided to go and get it shaved on both sides. I had this curly Mohawk and didn’t look like I was supposed to look. Patients used to come up and rub the side of my head and be like, “Cool hair, doc.”

It’s because the patients started to be playful with me, it allowed me to be more playful with myself and stop letting that perfectionism happen. I stop worrying about what people were thinking about me because they didn’t care. They were thinking about themselves but I was so caught up in trying to be great and be a professional. Once I let my hair down, it started to change everything.

You went from being a very shy or maybe reserved dentist. Give us a description of what you transformed into.

I started to transform into someone who didn’t care and did not take things seriously. The biggest transition point for that was after I got injured and lost my ability to practice overnight. That was life-altering because six months after that happened, I was on bankruptcy’s doorstep and I didn’t know what life was going to look like. I had my keys handed over to the bank and realized, “I have done everything right.” I did tons of pro bono in my practice, $100,000 to $150,000 per year. I treated my clients well. I treated my team well and yet, I still got slapped out of the sky by the universe. I was like, “Life is a joke.” You can be serious about this and do everything right, and it can still blow up in your face.

Life is kind of a joke. You can be serious about this and do everything right, and it can still blow up in your face. Click To Tweet

What happened to you? I know you lost your ability to practice. Tell us about that.

I ended up with a condition called focal dystonia. If you look at my two hands, this hand, you can see there’s no muscle there. If you look at the flexibility of my two hands, this one can bend backward, and this one cannot. What happens to it, if you have the genetic predisposition? If you overuse your fine motor dexterity, which is what we do all day in dentistry, then it damages the brain and reverses the chemistry.

What should relax contracts and vice versa for your fine motor skills? I lost control of my hand. It actually fully went out in the middle of a major procedure where I had the patient flapped open. We were doing bone recontouring, and we were about to sew her back up. I reached over and picked up my suture and my hand wouldn’t pick up my suture.

I end up saying to my assistant, “The problem I have been having with my hand, not working at all now, so you are going to have to be my right hand. I’m going to use my left hand. You are going to listen very carefully to what I have to say, but we need to get her sewn back up, otherwise, she’s going to be in trouble.” It happened to work out. The case turned out beautiful and that was the last day I got to practice dentistry.

You went to the doctor, they told you that you have got this. Is it a disease or is it a condition, or what is it?

Guess it would be a disease. They didn’t know right off the bat what it was. I was being sent to specialists and in Canada, specialists don’t talk to each other. One person had a theory, another had a theory, and nothing fit together. By the time I was on bankruptcy’s doorstep, I was like, “I got to throw a Hail Mary and try and save myself here.” I ended up getting down to the Mayo Clinic and within a couple of days, they had me diagnosed because they put their heads together.

They told me, “You got to figure out what you are going to do with the rest of your life because you are not going to be a dentist.” I must have looked down at my left hand or something because they said, “Don’t you dare try to train your left hand to do dentistry because you will lose that hand as well.” That was the final nail in the coffin for my career and allowed me to start moving on to other things.

You were how old at that time?

I was 33.

You were 33 and told you can no longer practice and your practice now, tell us about your practice as you went through all this. What happened to it?

I didn’t know what to do. Those six months until I knew what was going on, everyone was like, “Don’t lose hope. You are going to be doing dentistry again. You are meant to be a dentist.” All that hope was awful because I didn’t know if that was what was going to happen. I felt like I was torn between moving on and going back to dentistry. It wasn’t up to me.

Once they told me going back to dentistry is off the table, that was a relief to start making plans in the right direction. Everyone was telling me, “You built this amazing brand in your city, hire associates.” The problem was I had a skillset that most dentists don’t have. Having Kois, sleep apnea, IV sedation, and implants were not something most people had. I ended up having to bring in four different associates to cover off my skillset with the patients that I had.

None of them wanted to work with folic patients, which is what I had niched myself into because I liked working with them. It was a battle. Eventually, I was like, “I’m going to have to make this back into what it originally was, which was a bread-and-butter practice.” I did that, and it was heartbreaking to see these dentists come in who were not as committed, and who were annoyed by the patient base because they were scared.

When 2015 hit, which was the oil crisis, my practice was in Calgary, and the economy, I could see it going. I had built the practice during the global financial crisis, so I decided it was time to let it go, stop listening to what everyone else was telling me I should be doing, and listen to what I wanted, which was to be out. I sold it for half of its value and started moving on with my life.

That had to be a rough day, but probably liberating.

It was a liberating day. Those two and a half years I had been fighting with myself too. Everyone was shooting all over me, and then in my heart, I was like, “I hate coming in here,” because it was ripping this giant scab off. I was like, “Maybe they are right. Maybe it will get better. Maybe I can be an owner.” I have wanted to be a dentist since I was two. That was a big dream that I was watching burn down to ash every day and it was awful.

You sell your practice, and now what are you going to do?

I decided to take a break from dentistry because anyone in the industry who knew me looked at me with pity because they knew what had happened. I had been a referral practice. I decided to go back to professional dance and built an unleashed dance company and took a year to let the cards fall and start figuring out like, “Why did all this happen?” It was interesting because it allowed me to see the pieces of what I could use from that experience, from going through a lawsuit with my team, from the owner dying halfway through to worst case scenario of losing my ability to practice and being able to take that time away from dentistry.

I built the company very quickly. In the first six months, I became the second-largest adult-based Latin company in our city. It was fun because I could be in that creative mode and let things flow through me. What I figured out was, with everything that I’d been through, I could reach back into the industry and pull people forward. I decided to build my business coaching company for dentists, which was originally called My Business Doctor Inc. Later became Unleashing Dentistry’s Potential and started to help people figure out what their niche was, what they wanted to do, and what was their passion in dentistry, so they would love going into work.

Back when we first met, you were a dentist trying to figure some things out who had a lot of credentials and, “How do I market my practice.” Over the years I would get tech or emails from you, not necessarily from you, but to your email list, which I was on. I would always wonder now, “What the heck is she doing now? Why is she doing that? How did she get into that?”

I never knew this story. Now it makes a lot more sense why you would go in the direction that you did and that you did it for yourself. You did it so incredibly fast, and now you are helping other people do the same thing with your unleashing, it’s the unleashing brand. You had Unleashing Dentistry’s Potential, and then how did that go for you?

I made a decision that was not going to be brick and mortar. That was going to be a completely online company and I did not want to spend any money on advertising. I took to LinkedIn and started talking about what I knew about dentistry and niching and passion. In a year I went from 200 to 12,000 industry followers on LinkedIn. People went, “How did you do that? Can you do that for me?” I started dabbling with a few of my friends’ profiles to see if I could replicate what I had done because I wasn’t sure if it was a unicorn or a blip.

That was a mistake with the algorithm. What happened was I was able to replicate the results. About a year after I started dabbling, I officially launched Unleashing Influence. That was January 17th, 2020. On March 17th, 2020, the world around me shut down, and I had two and a half full-time team members at that point. We had a meeting after the shutdown happened, and they said, “Everyone around us is getting laid off. If you need to lay us off, we totally understand.”

I said, “Buckle in. We are going to take this to the moon.” By 10 months into the pandemic, I had 14 full-time team members, and it had grown by gangbusters because no one was able to have meetings. They needed social media and building their personal brand to be able to fill their pipeline in a way that they weren’t used to. Getting them to be good on camera was a skill that most did not have. I was a busy girl.

Unleashing Influence, you did from Calgary, Canada?

Yes, I started it in Calgary, and then I decided to move to Nicaragua and took it with me. Again, I decided to make it so that I was completely online so that I was portable to be wherever I wanted in the world.

Of all the places in the world that you could have picked, why Nicaragua? I’m sure people reading are thinking, “Is Nicaragua a little dangerous?” Couldn’t you have picked someplace a little bit more safe or traditional, but no, you went to Nicaragua. Why did you do that?

Originally, my plan was to go and do international business development for Unleashing Influence. I was going to go to South Africa, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, and every time I picked something on the map, Canada had a rise in COVID cases and the border got shut. I was like, “That’s not working.” I was determined that I was going to get out. I put my house on the market.

I got it sold by December 2020 and was out the first month of 2021. I bought a flight down to Nicaragua to see what it was like. Five days after I arrived, Canada canceled all the tropical flights. They canceled spring vacation was the point, so I got stuck down there. I was like, “There are worst places in the world to be.” I was in a small town. It was all tropical. Everything is open air, so you are not sitting and breathing in other people’s air during a pandemic. I made the most of it. Learned to surf, learned how to ride a motorcycle, and did all these cool things that I hadn’t done before in my life.

For those of you that are reading, Angela’s why, as we talked about, is to find a better way and share it. How she does that, is by challenging the status quo, challenging what people think they can do or what she thinks she could do. Ultimately, what she brings are simple solutions to help other people move forward. We are seeing this play out in your life. You are always in search of a better way, but you are thinking differently, thinking big, challenging what people think they can do, and then you are bringing them simple ways to get there. Does that feel right to you?

Yes. When I look at what I do now because after I arrived in Nicaragua, I realized I was working 100 hours a week, which is what I’d been doing in Canada. That was what I was trying to escape and learn a different way. I realized I was wasting my time in paradise because I wasn’t able to enjoy it. I was sitting inside instead. I decided it was time to burn down what I’d built because it wasn’t serving me anymore.

I divested my companies and kept the little bit of unleashing influence that I did, which was teaching people how to pivot and leveraging their brand to support that. That became my full-time focus, at the end of October 2021. The interesting thing was everyone again was like, “You shouldn’t do that. You have built all these amazing things.

Get some managers in here or do something to keep these brands.” I was like, “No, it’s not working for me.” I know if I burn these down and get super focused on my niche of mastery, I can take this to the moon. It was interesting because three months after the final divestment I made the most I had made since leaving Dead Street. It didn’t take long for that mindset shift to start bringing the right clients to me and allowing me to do the work that I love to do.

You have made some challenging and fascinating decisions over the course of what we have heard. How do you go about making those decisions?

I trust my intuition and when I hear myself think, “What if? What would life be like? What if I did this? What if I did that?” That’s when I know something has to change when I consider what that possibility could be like versus staying in it. When I think about staying in it, and my guts are intense when it comes to my intuition, if I feel ill about it, I know something has to change. Even if it doesn’t logically make sense to anyone else, even if they see it and think that I’m burning down something that shouldn’t be burned down if my intuition tells me I should do it, if I follow that, I win every time.

For most people, that seems a little scary. For me, that seems a little scary. Especially these decisions you are already doing well, and you say, “I don’t think I like this. I blow it up, and I’m going to go do it again.” That’s a lot of confidence to be able to blow something up like that and start again.

I wasn’t starting again. What I did was I took the best of everything that I had in each of those companies and pulled those skills in, and then put it into a pretty package that people could understand in the marketplace. I wasn’t leaving any experience, any expertise on the table. I was pulling it differently, but allowing myself to get deep into my niche mastery.

What are you doing now?

All I do now is help people to pivot. I run 90-day pivot accelerators. Some of them have already started being entrepreneurs, but most of them are not entrepreneurs, but they are leaving corporate. In 90 days I put them into pretty packaging and gave them their claims for fame in their industry. I help them to build out their mastermind. I help them to learn how to do sales well, build the whole business behind it, operations, and automation in the marketing and teach them to hunt. In 90 days, they have a business in a box and are launched into the world.

I love the word you use there, pivot. What do you mean by pivot?

A lot of the clients that I work with have had massive success in the corporate world. Most of them have twenty-plus years of experience in their industry, and they have had enough. Maybe it was provoked by the pandemic, maybe it’s their time in life, and they are not done. They are not done making a difference in the world. They are not done with their industry. They want to do it differently.

They want to have geographic freedom, financial freedom, and time freedom and be able to reach back into their industry and pull people forward by sharing the experience and expertise that they have honed. That’s where the pivot comes in. They are pivoting out of corporate into entrepreneurship and doing it efficiently. With the program that I have, there are no steps wasted.

There’s no fluff, as you may have noticed, there’s no fluff around me. I get them there as fast as possible and with extreme intention so that they are making their tuition back very quickly after they finish the program. Once they finish the program, they are invited to join The Badass Entrepreneurs Club, which is continued education for them to keep leveling up what they are doing once they are launched.

Very similar to what we do in dentistry. It’s a similar path. Learn your skills and then join the study clubs and continue to learn, continue to grow. That’s awesome. For people that are reading, who would be an ideal client for you?

Someone who is experienced and has expertise. I can’t manufacture that for you. I can package it for you and help you to put something together, but I can’t manufacture it. Again, typically twenty-plus years of experience is what I work with. Someone who is ready to do things differently, who doesn’t want to subscribe to 9:00 to 5:00, and who also wants to have that geographic freedom. That’s a big part of it.

When people see that I have worked from different parts of the world and not skipped a beat that is desirable. It may not be that they want to live on the other side of the world, but they don’t want to be stuck going in to speak in person or going into a business and having to work in person. They want to be able to do it from wherever they are on the hours that they want to have and make way more money. A lot of times they’re coming in saying, “This is what I made in corporate, so I’d like to work half those hours and make more money.” We reverse engineer what needs to happen for them to build their program and help them to achieve that.

What do you think is the biggest thing that keeps people from making the pivot?

Fear and people shooting all over them. If you have had this career, and you are making good money, you have climbed the corporate ladder, and you are going to be leaving that, people think you are insane because why wouldn’t you keep taking those CIO or CEO positions and companies? They also have that intuition. They have that gut feeling that isn’t where they want to be anymore. They want something different, and they know they can do it.

BYW 39 | Better Way
Better Way: The biggest thing that stops people from making the pivot is fear and people shutting all over them. Because if you’ve already climbed the corporate ladder but suddenly decide to leave, people think you’re insane. But then they also have that intuition, that gut feeling that this isn’t where they want to be anymore.

 

They just need to have the right information to do it. If people don’t have that support, they will make a mess of it. A lot of my clients are 60 plus. They don’t have time to mess around. They don’t have time to make mistakes and figure things out. They need to pivot with grace, maintain their reputation, and replace their income as soon as possible so that they continue to feel successful and also aesthetically look successful to the world because they do not want to tarnish their reputation.

It’s fascinating. When I take a step back and listen to your story, it feels like there was somebody above you toying with you to a certain extent. You know, “We will give her a little bit of that, but now, I’m going to take that away.” It’s all been worked out for you very well in all the stuff you went through. You didn’t go through some easy stuff. Those are not simple little problems. Those are major life-changing, life-destroying problems that you had to go through but they equipped you, and now you are ready. You are ready for anything.

The worst-case scenario is I have to start again. Part of where my boldness comes from is I have been through worst-case scenarios. I lived out of my car, and lost my career, all these things happened to me, and I’m still okay. I still have my brains and am still able to rebuild. I know I can be successful at whatever I put my mind to because I’m tenacious. No one has my back, so I have to have my back and have to succeed.

That’s a lot of pressure as well. When you went through and discovered that your why was a better way, your how was a challenge, and your what was simplified, how did that feel to you?

It felt very on-brand with how I operate and how I feel about my work. What I’m always trying to do for people is, I have been through programs where afterward I’m like, “Why on Earth did they make me do that? That made no sense. It made no difference.” I have been through lots of high-ticket programs. I have probably spent $150,000 on them since leaving dentistry. I wanted to make sure that everyone got the best bang for the buck they have ever spent in a program with my program because I want it to be simple. I want it to be efficient, and I want you to get two years’ worth of work done in those 90 days so that you are catapulted into your new future.

I remember when I was leaving dentistry. A friend of mine that was kind of mentoring me said something to me because he had left his career a few years earlier. He said, “Six months from when you leave dentistry, you will probably even forget you were a dentist.” I thought, “What? There’s no possible way.” Sure enough, six months after I left dentistry, I didn’t think about it at all. I almost forgot that I was doing dentistry. Did you experience that same thing?

No, I still have dreams that I wake up and my hand works and I get to go back and do surgery.

I did it quite a bit longer. I did it for 32 years. How many years did you get?

It’s eight and a half, so I didn’t feel like I was done with it at all. I thought I was going to drill to the day I died, but that wasn’t what life had in store.

Last question for you, Angela. What’s the best piece of advice you have ever gotten or the best piece of advice you have ever given?

Can I give you the worst advice I got instead?

Definitely.

When I first started building Unleashing Dentistry Potential, I started creating content, and the person who built my website was like, “You got to tone it down a little bit. You got to blend in before you stand out,” because I was building this company competing against guys who were in their 70s, very conservative old dentists who were guiding the world and had guided me in my practice. I was this young punky-looking chick who was sassy and said what she thought.

You have to blend in before you stand out. Click To Tweet

He felt like that was not going to work, especially with dentists. They are conservative. I decided to listen to him and I had a shaved side of my head, so I pulled my hair over the shaved side and spoke more conservatively. I did that for about three months and with every video I created, I got more and more uncomfortable because I was worried about my hair. Curly hair has a mind of its own.

I was not comfortable with what I was saying and how I was saying it. I’m like, “This is not me.” One day I said, “Screw it. I’m going to be me.” Put my hair over to the side, showing the shave, and talked the way that I talked was as sassy as I wanted to be. That was when I started getting messages from people in my inbox on LinkedIn saying, “I like what you have to say.” I started getting contacted by the heads of dental companies across Canada saying, “I’d like you to weigh in on this. I’d like you to come and speak to our team.” When I started to be me, which is not easy, I started to more and more let myself out. That was when things started to change for me.

What’s the best piece of advice you would give somebody or that maybe you currently give to your clients?

It’s to be yourself. It is a learned skill. Most people have this dissonance between their personal life and their professional life. We are taught in dental school like, “You got to be professional in front of your patients,” and every professional college does stuff like that. When people are starting to put themselves out there, especially if they are older, that’s even more ingrained than in my generation. It’s hard to put those two things together and be okay with putting that out there.

A lot of the reason for that is, it’s vulnerable to be yourself on camera. If people don’t like the facade that you have put up, not a big deal. If they don’t like the actual, it hurts. The thing is, if you are being the real you, what’s going to happen is you polarize your audience. You are going to have people who love you and hate you. The minute you get hate mail, you are probably doing something right because you are probably being true to yourself because someone doesn’t like it. Someone does like it.

If you try and walk that line of likability, people don’t quite trust you. They can feel that something is off and people are more and more sensitive to BS coming at them. They will feel it, and then they are going to go, “Don’t quite trust this person. Moving on to the next thing.” The more you can be yourself, and the more you can talk the way that you talk, have your opinions, have your values, and let that be part of what you let stand for your brand, the more you are going to attract the right people. It is so much easier to be yourself instead of trying to measure in each situation who you are supposed to be.

It is so much easier to just be yourself instead of trying to measure in each situation who you're supposed to be. Click To Tweet

That makes me think and this is going to sound terrible, how do you coach someone to be themselves? It’s because they’re so used to not being themselves, how do you then become yourself, and what is yourself? The executive that’s been in a high position in all those years, having to mute themselves or tone themselves down or whatever you want to call it be the play the part. How do you not play the part and play you, and what are you?

Part of what happens when we do the Crack You Open Bootcamp is we dig into who people are. I work with brand archetypes for that. What it does is it allows them to see how they operate in the world. It allows them to see the light and the dark sides of who they are. Once they read it and I package them with that, I will give them their superpowers based on what they told me in their story and what I found out with their archetypes.

BYW 39 | Better Way
Better Way: The Crack You Open bootcamp really digs into who people are. It allows them to see how they operate in the world and to see the light and the dark sides of who they are.

 

That’s a revelation for people that they have something kick-ass to offer the world. Before that, they may not even realize that they may have been apologetic for being that way. Now because I tell them that’s what they are, then they suddenly go, “Okay.” As we go through the accelerator, if they step out of that, what happens is it’s not just me correcting them. Everyone else in the accelerator knows what this person stands for as well. They will pull them back to what they are and call them when they are not being completely authentic. It’s quite interesting how everyone pulls together to keep everyone authentic.

When you are done with a Crack You Open workshop, what would be the example of the outcome? I’m thinking of people reading this thinking, “I want to be myself. I want to be on camera. I want to start my own podcast. I want to be me, but I don’t know how to do it.” What does it look like? If I went through the Crack You Open workshop with you, what’s on the other side?

You end up with a playbook. I help you pull together what is your brand voice, so you can explain something 60 different ways, but we need to figure out what your way is that you can stay consistent with. What are the keywords that describe you? If you decide to have a team helping you to do writing, they need to understand who you are, what you stand for, and how you show up in the world so that they can represent that in the writing.

BYW 39 | Better Way
Better Way: If you decide to have a team helping you do writing, they need to understand who you are, what you stand for, and how you show up in the world.

 

They have to adopt that into the way that they are going to speak on camera so that they are living into their archetype. With their superpowers, that’s the big summary of all the archetypes and how they operate in the world, and what makes them unique in their space. I also give them their title in their industry, so they become The Something in their industry.

They stuck their flag pole in the ground and said, “This is me.” That gives them so much confidence, and it gives them that playbook to come back to. When I wrote my playbook, it was funny. I was stuck at a speaking competition and I’d written my first speech. It was amazing. I made it through the round and I had ten hours to pull my next speech together. I was like, “I don’t know what I’m going to speak about. I have this idea, but I’m stuck with how I’m going to frame it.”

My friend who’s beside me, she’s like, “You are the arsonist. You would burn this crap down.” The speech became Burn It Down and that allowed me to frame how I was going to approach the subject matter because I was getting stuck in semantics. Once I put on that arsonist hat and started going for it, then everything became clear. All this information started to come at me as to how to write the speech and wrote itself in 30 minutes.

Angela, I know we are out of time here and if there’s somebody that’s reading this, and they want to get ahold of you, follow you, work with you, and go through the Crack You Open workshop, what’s the best way for them to get into contact with you?

The best way is to find me on LinkedIn. You can find me as @DrAngelaMulrooney. What I suggest for first exposure is to join a challenge. You have five days with me. You can level up to VIP as well, which gives you an extra five hours to dissect the information and make sure it’s customized to you. That five days will give you a good understanding of what you can do with your brand, how you can leverage LinkedIn, and how you can pivot well to what you want to do with your life.

My team’s doing it now. Angela, thank you so much for being here. I enjoyed reconnecting and hearing the whole story for the second time but hearing the whole story. Thanks for being here.

It’s my pleasure. Thanks.

You did better the second time.

Even better.

We went longer, but still, you did good. It’s a fascinating story and I love where you are at now, and what you are taking it to. What’s going to be the next thing for you after this? Do you know or just see where it takes you?

I have given myself a five-year commitment to the pivot part. I’m taking people starting their pivot. I will develop higher level programs like once you have hit this point, then how are we going to ten times your company, and start building that stuff out. The people in the mastermind are getting leveled up. Eventually, there will be people coming to me who already have pivoted, but now they want to be able to get multiplied results. That will be the next step.

If somebody wanted to do your Crack You Open, is it a workshop or what is it?

It’s a two-day workshop. They would have to talk to me beforehand. I don’t let anyone in there because they need to be open to coaching. It’s uncomfortable. Especially when you are doing this as a group, it’s going to be quite uncomfortable. I need to push their boundaries a little bit on a phone call and see how they respond to it to see if they’ll thrive in that setting.

What does something like that cost?

It was $5,500. I do some work with them after the two-day session because I have to write the about section for their LinkedIn. I will help pull their superpowers together, all that stuff. The two days are a big discovery for these people. The work happens for me after the fact as well.

It should have had you do before and after on there, so you could have said, “Here, so and so came,” and you don’t have to give their names. “They were doing this and this. This is what they thought and then they ended up here.” We talked a lot. This will come out sometime around when we are doing the launch. Sorry to make you have to do it twice. We got it. Have a great rest of your day.

Thanks. We will see your team.

Thank you so much for reading the show. If you have not yet discovered your why, go to WhyInstitute.com, use the code, PODCAST50, and you can discover your why for half off. If you love the show, please give us a review and a like on whatever platform that you are tuning into. I will see you all next time. Have a great week.

 

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About Dr. Angela Mulrooney

BYW 39 | Better WayDr. Angela Mulrooney is a global speaker, best-selling author, and personal branding expert. She works with thought leaders around the world to clarify their message through their brand archetype while using various media platforms (LinkedIn, podcasts, and the stage) to drive sales so these experts can change the world with what they know.

 

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Contributing To The World With The Leaders Of Tomorrow With Glen Campbell

Today’s episode is going to be about the why of contribution. Join your host, Dr. Gary Sanchez, as he talks to, who he believes to be the best example of this why. Contribute today with Glen Campbell as he creates the great leaders of tomorrow. Glen is the Chief Executive of Brandheart Method. Discover his long and impressive career before he found his own company. Know when to listen to your intuition and understand how when to leave your job. Glen spent all his life helping people find their who and why that he forgot about himself. Find out when he had an epiphany and how his business now, contributes to society. Learn how he is developing the leaders of tomorrow today!

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here:

Contributing To The World With The Leaders Of Tomorrow With Glen Campbell

We’re going to be talking about the why of contribute. To contribute to a greater cause, add value or have an impact in the lives of others. If this is your why, then you want to be part of a greater cause. Something that is bigger than yourself. You don’t necessarily want to be the face of the cause but you want to contribute to it in a meaningful way. You love to support others. You relish the success and contribute to the greater good of the team.

You see group victories as personal victories. You are often behind the scenes looking for ways to make the world better. You make a reliable and committed teammate. You often act as the glue that holds everyone else together. You use your time, money, energy, resources and connections to add value to other people and organizations.

I’ve got a great guest for you. His name is Glen Campbell. Glen started his career with degrees in commerce and psychology. He also has a master’s in NLP and hypnotherapy. For years, Glen has been a Director and Chief Executive of some of the world’s best and brightest brand strategy and communication companies like Clemenger BBDO, Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett across four continents.

Twelve years ago, he created Brandheart and developed unrivaled methods for leaders, best self-identity and organizational brand identity. He has worked with over 500 business leaders and entrepreneurs from around the world in developing their personal and organizational brands. The results have been nothing less than transformational.

Glen’s unique and proven method is para-disciplinary in nature. It’s a harmonious fusion of his extensive experience, the latest in leadership research, unique brand identity model, neuroscience, quantum physics, Eastern and Western philosophy and spirituality. Glen is considered a world-leading authority in empowering people to profound higher self-realization in business and in life. Glen, welcome to the show.

I’m delighted to be here, Gary. I love that description of contribution.

Let’s start here, Glen. Let’s go back to even when you were in your teens. What were you like? Take us through your journey on how you got to where you are.

I went to a private boys’ boarding military school. I’m sure a lot of people can identify with that. I’m very disciplined, very exact in everything we did. We played a lot of rugby union. That was my sport. This is was in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. I played a little bit. It’s very much a sporting school, very big emphasis on the sport, academia, the military and discipline, all that sort of stuff. From a very early age, you could say that achievement, discipline, being scholarly and seeking answers were very important to us. That was part of the culture of the school. I was a part of that. That starts to forge the way you go through life.

From high school, you went off to get your degrees. Where did you go for that?

I stayed in Brisbane. I went to a university called the Queensland University of Technology. I did a commerce degree with a major in marketing. I was playing rugby at a representative level so I graduated playing for my state Queensland, which in those days was an amateur sport but it was pretty cool because we were probably one of the top five provincial rugby sides in the world. Queensland would play against Scotland and we’d beat them. It was a pretty impressive side I was a part of. I was playing rugby at that level, so I decided not to go into the workforce. I decided to do another degree and that was a psychology degree. I did that at University of Queensland.

If you're feeling like a hamster on a treadmill, it's time for you to find your own brand and what makes you happy. Click To Tweet

Why did you pick a psychology degree?

After I finished my commerce degree, I did a number of psychology electives. For some reason or other, I did particularly well in those subjects and I liked it. I remember the head of the faculty at the time said to me, “If you’re thinking about doing further study, you should do psychology because you’re pretty good at it. You’re bit of a natural at this stuff.”

I naturally went to the other university, which was not far away, that had a specialty in psychology. I went there. I had no problem getting in. The other thing was I’ve done so many subjects at that university, so I got a number of exemptions. Instead of doing a three-year degree, I ended up doing a two-year degree. That was good.

You’ve got your commerce degree and psychology degree. Glen’s off to do what now?

I got a job straight away in brand strategy and communications in the best agency in Brisbane at the time. It was called Clemenger. It was a part of the Clemenger BBDO Group. The BBDO Group is in America. They had offices in New York. I ended up getting a job straight into the business of brand strategy and communication development and execution.

How long did you do that?

I worked there for five years. It was a very small agency, only about 35 people. It’s a strategic and creative boutique. Amazing work considering it was a small agency in Brisbane, Australia. After five years there, I got headhunted. Things happened. I was asked to work for an agency called Saatchi & Saatchi in Sydney, which at the time, Sydney is the biggest city in Australia with the biggest population density. This agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, was one, if not the leading agency in Australia at the time. Certainly, one of the bright lights of Saatchi & Saatchi was it had a $6 billion global net worth at the time.

You were there for how long?

I was there for five years as well. My role there was to look after the Toyota Motor Vehicle business in Australia. That included the Hino trucks, the Lexus brand, which is the prestige brand and all the Toyota vehicles. It was a very big account for us at the time. In Australia, they were spending $75 million on advertising and brand strategy.

It was a big step up for me from Brisbane to work on such a major piece of business. I certainly learned a lot. They weren’t easy guys to work with the motor vehicle game. They want to see results. Interestingly enough, in that time, I wouldn’t say we did it all but we contributed a great deal to getting that brand from number 3 to number 1 in the Australian marketplace.

Contributing Leaders
Contributing Leaders: Ask yourself the two primordial questions that plague humanity for time immemorial – “Who am I” and “Why am I here?”

Keep us going. What happened to you next?

I got headhunted again to go and work for Leo Burnett, which I’m sure Americans if they knew anything about brand strategy and communication companies, they’ll know that Burnett is a Chicago based company. It’s another global powerhouse, about $7 billion or $8 billion company. I got headhunted to work with those guys. I spent quite a lot of time there.

I ended up going straight into the national board of directors. I was the National Business Development Director. I worked on a number of pieces of business that I led in terms of the strategy and the development of all the marketing and communications work. I’ve worked on brands like Woolworths Supermarkets, which in Australia is a 700-store supermarket brand.

I worked on Subaru, a number of alcohol brands and Gatorade. We introduced the Gatorade product into Australia, which I love working on. That business was a lot of fun. Big brands like that. I worked on our military over here. I worked on the army, the air force and the navy with their recruitment. There was lots of interesting stuff. It’s a lot of fun.

How long were you there? Then onto the next thing.

I was nine years there, then I went into my first chief executive role. I was the chief executive of a small agency that was only turning over about $30 million, $40 million. That was a creative boutique, the creative powerhouse in Australia at the time. It was a dream job for me. I ended up taking that company.

When I started with them, they were doing about $18 million. I got them up for about $42 million in the two years I was there. After that, another chief executive role in another agency called Ideaworks. That was a part of the WPP Global Group, a publicly listed company. That company was turning over about $400 million and I had about 120 people in my team working with me. I did a very successful couple of years there. Then I left the industry and started my own business, Brandheart.

Take us into that moment when you knew you needed to leave the industry and start your own. What happened?

Seriously, Gary, this was the turning point, the epiphany. This is where I started to think about this whole idea of why. I remember it like it was yesterday. There were two things that happened in a week. One, I was pitching a banking business. It was a second-tier bank but it was still a pretty big piece of business. Inside the context of that pitch, there were lots of things going on, which I didn’t like morally, ethically and professionally. That bothered me a lot.

In the same week, I was pitching a burgers, Coke and fries business. I thought to myself, “Is this what it’s come to burgers, Coke and fries, Glen? That’s not you. That’s not your thing.” I remember coming on to my wife and saying, “I’m not happy.” I’m working 60 hours a week on average. I feel like a hamster on a treadmill. It’s Groundhog Day. All I’m doing is all about money. This can’t be it for me. It’s got to be more to it than that. How did I get to this point? It’s like I blinked and 25 years have passed of 60-hour a week. I’m sitting there going, “What am I doing?”

The message from the universe from your perspective is manifesting in your intuition. Trust and listen to it. Click To Tweet

I asked myself those two primordial questions, Gary. “Who am I? Why am I here?” It bothered me a lot. The epiphany was this. I thought, “Hold on a minute. All I do for a living and all I’ve done for the last 25 years is help big organizations develop their why and who. That’s all I’ve done for a living.” I go in there and develop a strategic positioning or their brand identity. Those terms were interchangeable.

It’s like how are we going to position ourselves in the market. Then we do all this work around the personification of the brand, what’s the personality of the brand? How do they look? If this brand was a person, what would they look like? What would they be like? What kind of friends would they have? Where would they live? I thought, “I’m good at this stuff. Why don’t I do it for myself?”

That’s what started that journey of self-reflection contemplation. I took the strategic tools that I’d learned from some of the best and brightest brand strategy companies on the planet. I changed and modified them. Then I took myself through my exercise, which is not easy to do. When you try to do that yourself, it’s very difficult. You’re second guessing everything. I did that for a period of three months where I got to the point and I went, “This is Glen’s brand. This is my brand.” When I looked at it, I had this massive sense of relief. It’s like, “I know who I am. What I’m doing is not it. That’s not me and my passion. That’s not what’s going to make me happy.”

After doing all that work, I came home and sat down with my wife, Victoria and said, “I’m leaving.” She said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “I don’t know but it’s not that because that’s not what makes me happy.” She said, “You have no idea what you got to do?” I said, “No but I’m going to leave because this is not it for me. It’s not my why.” That’s what I was talking about. I can’t do that anymore. I’ve got to be true to my true highest self, my true higher why and purpose. I ended up leaving. What I did was I continued to develop that model. I started to work with business leaders and help them do the same thing.

What was it about what you were doing that you didn’t like or didn’t feel like you?

I was lacking meaning. I felt like this was meaningless to me. I tell you what the thing was. I wasn’t getting up in the morning and feeling enthusiastic about going to work. I was the chief executive. There are a lot of people look at you and take cues from you. I did a good job of masking that and not allowing people to see that. I thought I did a pretty good job but it was bothering me.

One of the other things that contributed to this was when I went into this chief executive role. The group CEO and the group CFO are upstairs and we’d have these quarterly meetings. We sit down and look at the numbers. I noticed they never talked to me about the people or any other kind of KPIs. They only ever sat down and said, “Let’s go through the numbers.” I was like, “Aren’t you interested in the health and wellbeing of my people? Aren’t you going to talk to me about my culture, how I’m improving productivity and all those other things?”

They didn’t want to know about it. They said, “We’re interested in what your EBITDA is, Earnings Before Income Tax and Depreciation Amortization.” “You’re just interested in my profit contribution. That’s all.” All the discussions were around that. The other thing that happened was we went from quarterly meetings to monthly meetings. There was a lot of pressure on the network that was all about contribution to the network. The monthly meetings went from weekly meetings. I go up, sit there and say, “What do you think has happened since last week? I’ve got to cut the biscuit budget or something?”

There are other two things here. There’s revenue. The two biggest costs I’ve got are people and rent. All the rest of it is inconsequential. They’re line items and not very big. I could go through all that stuff all day, cut them by 10%, be the head of the razor gang and cut this stuff. Everybody will know. It has massive confidence.

I’ll fix the confidence of people in a confidence business. Creativity is a high confidence business. When people are seeing little things change all the time, it’s like, “What’s going on here? What are we doing? What’s happening in our company? Why is Glen doing this?” I used to have these discussions since I’m not going to do that week by week. Why are we meeting week by week when the story is never any different?

It’s this constant pressure coming from the top down to achieve things that I wasn’t passionate about. I got into that industry because I was passionate about doing amazing creativity that impacts people in positive ways that can enhance their life and it wasn’t happening. I felt I was the head of the gang of people who was selling more consumables to people that they didn’t need or want. I thought, “This is not good for me. It’s not good for anybody. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Contributing Leaders
Contributing Leaders: Don’t be a business that’s just all about money, that only goes over the numbers and not the culture and wellbeing of its people.

It’s interesting the way this happens. It was like a seismic event where all of these things happened at once all in a short timeframe. I remember talking to Victoria about it saying, “It’s fascinating the way this is happening. I can see it. I can see that’s happened.” It’s like, “I’m getting a message from the universe here to do and change something. I need to listen.”

The message from the universe from my perspective was manifesting itself through my intuition. My intuition is telling me, “This is wrong. I’ve got to change and do something.” I’ve got to trust that. I’m very connected to my intuitive powers. I trust my intuition. I thought, “You got to listen to this. It’s too overwhelming. There are too many signs. There are signs everywhere.” I’ve got to listen to this. I listened and I changed.

I resigned and they said, “Where are you going to? What other job are you going to in the industry?” I said, “I’m leaving the industry.” They were shocked. “How could you be doing this, Glen? This is you.” I said, “It’s not me.” I’ve discovered that. That was what I call the epiphany, that turning point that you were talking about, Gary.

You sat down and asked yourself those two questions, “Who am I? Why am I here?” How did you go about figuring out that answer? What was the answer?

My first answers were the standard answers. Who am I? I’m the Chief Executive of Ideaworks. I immediately went to my title. I thought, “Is my title my identity?” It’s not. Then I went, “It must be my CV, my experience. That must be my identity.” It’s not. The more I went through this, the more I thought, “My experience in my CV, my title, where I live, the car I drive and the brands I buy are not my identity. That’s not who I am. Certainly, that’s not why I’m here. That can’t be why I’m here to accumulate more stuff.”

In fact, I’d feel a whole lot better if I got rid of most of it. I defaulted like most people do who don’t get into this level of introspection and journey. They default to what people or the industry has told them or what we’ve been programmed to believe, all those other classic borrowed identities that don’t mean anything to us. They’re not real anyway. As you start this whole thing, don’t contribute to anything in a meaningful way. To me, it was like, “None of that is meaningful. None of that makes my heart beat stronger.” I’d feel passionate about it. That was what started the journey.

I’m at my best when I’m helping other people to realize who they are as well. In my work life, whenever I sat down, forced as a leader to do these quarterly reviews, HR would say, “You’ve got to do quarterly reviews or bi-annual reviews.” I always would find myself in those meetings, putting the checklist aside and saying, “How are you going? Why do you get out of bed every morning? What keeps you awake at night? What bothers you? What basic questions can’t you answer?” I would have these searching discussions. I never tell anybody anything. I’ll just ask these questions.

The questions I was asking were prompting them to think about it. I would leave the meetings like, “Go away and think about that. Think about why you’re doing this job, why you love it and what it means to you. Then come back and talk to me.” I was getting into these amazing conversations with people where they say, “I thought about what we last talked about. This is where I’m coming out on this stuff. I found that we were going on this journey of self-discover, which is what I did for myself.”

We’re going into this discovery. I had many people sitting in front of me going, “I’m doing this introspection work and I’m not liking it, Glen. I’m revealing things that I don’t like to see.” I was like, “It’s okay.” I’ve studied with psychology. I’ve studied Freud, Jung and all these guys. Jung used to call it The Shadow Personality. I was like, “You’re identifying your shadow. Do you know what the shadow is? It’s a part of you. It’s okay. You just got to know who it is. You’ve got to work to minimize that. Go back to the light side of who you are. What’s the light look like? How would you describe the light?” We’d had those yang-yin discussions.

I was doing that with myself as well. I’m aware of my dark and light side. I’ve got to continue to stay myself to that light side, work, build and define that. To me, it was about what does my source self look like? It is the why, Gary. You call it the why. I call it the why too. It’s the same thing. What’s that person here to do? Everybody’s here to do something. That contributes to the planet. All human beings are good people.

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They all want to do something that’s good and contribute to people. That’s what we’re here for. That’s when we’re at our best. How do I be my best self? It’s through contribution, which I loved what you started. Through contribution, it’s serving others. How can I help others to find their why, get a stronger understanding of who they are, why they’re here and then have the courage to pursue it?

There’s a basketball coach here in the US called John Calipari. He has your same why. He says, “I want to be the pebble that causes the ripple effect in the lives of those around me that goes on and on.” It keeps multiplying your ability to contribute to the world by the people that you help have a bigger impact.

He calls it the ripple effect. I call it the butterfly effect. I borrowed that from a movie. This butterfly effect is where the vibrational energy of you is going to affect the vibrational energy of somebody else, which is going to affect the vibrational energy of somebody else. You want that vibrational energy to be high vibrational energy like, love, wisdom, insight, acceptance, joy, bliss and peace. They’re the high vibrational energies that you want to have the effect on other people.

This was the quantum physics side of it when you talked about that at the front where I do quantum physics. It’s knowing and understanding energy. How can you energetically impact somebody in a way that’s positive? Daniel Goleman does this work. If you read any Daniel Goleman’s stuff like Emotional Intelligence and amazing best-selling books like this, he’s one of the US profound psychologists in leadership and EQ, understanding the role of EQ, what he calls emotional intelligence.

Emotions are energy. The quantum physicist and the neuroscientists have proven this. What kind of energetic or emotional level are you vibrating at? What energetic level you’re vibrating at? How does that impact others? We know from quantum physics that like attracts and impacts like. If I’m operating at a very high emotional level, those levels I was talking about of love, bliss, joy and harmony, that’s going to affect other people as well and infect in many ways. They start to feel it too.

Have you ever walked into a room and felt the vibe of a room? It’s the energy of the people in the room. Creating a vibe through your own energy is very important. You got to know what that is, your energy and so to your work. You wrap your energy around your why. Your why is a high vibrational energy. You can’t have a why that is around death and destruction like, “I want to go out and hurt people.” That is not why. It’s the antithesis of what a why is. Why is something that is positive, powerful and profound that enhances life and the planet that we live on.

Therefore, you wrap this high vibrational energy around it and it becomes massively contagious. That’s what creates the ripple effect. The ripple effect is another way of talking about quantum energy. The ripple is the energy that impacts everybody else. The butterfly effect is the energy that can impact 1 to 5 minutes.

Tell us about how those conversations then led to Brandheart. What is Brandheart?

Brandheart is all about working with leaders. All I’ve done from the beginning of Brandheart is work with leaders. Mostly it’s C-Suite leaders, chief executives, chief financial officers, chief technical officers and chief marketing officers. My rationale was always to influence the influences. If you can positively influence an influencer, then that influencer is going to have the butterfly effect to a lot of people. If you can get to one that’s an influencer, you’ll get too many. That was my rationale.

I want to work with the leaders of businesses that impact their clients, team and culture that has this profoundly positive impact on their business. Coming from a brand strategy background, I knew how to do that from a positioning point of view. What I did was escalate that up and say, “Before I do any work on the organization, I want to work on the leaders first.” Get them to know and understand what their role is as a leader. Unfortunately, the vast majority of leaders on this planet have been organically programmed to be command and control leaders. They command and control.

Contributing Leaders
Contributing Leaders: Be aware of your dark side and your light side. You have to continue to steer yourself to that light side so that you can work on that, build that, and define that.

That’s very low vibrational energy. That’s motivation through fear, coercion and negative persuasion. That doesn’t work. That creates destructive disharmonious cultures. That’s one of the reasons why 3 out of 5 businesses fail within the first two years. Why did they go broke? It’s because it’s a leadership problem. It’s not so much that they’ve got a bad product or whatever they’re doing.

The buck always stops with the leader. When we’re talking about leaders, we could talk about leaders of businesses, basketball teams, families or leaders of anything. You’re being a leader of your own life leading your own life in a way that’s positive. It doesn’t matter. Everybody has the opportunity to be a leader and should be a leader. At the end of the day, I went, “It’s not just leaders. It’s everybody.” I want to help everybody do this work like you do. We’re in the same game in many respects. That’s why in our first discussion we got on so well.

It’s like, “A kindred spirit here. This guy is great. I love his work.” I’m not competitive like that. I look at you and hope you’ll be immensely positive and influence a lot of people to do this work. It’s fundamental and essential, in fact. I’m doing the same thing in my small way. It is the same thing. When you asked me a question about, “Glen, what are you doing?” It’s like, “Pretty much the same as you, Gary. I want to help people to find their why. I want to help people to know and understand that deeply right into their DNA.” That’s neuroscience and quantum physics.

I go very deep into the journey of seeing and understand how this affects your neural pathways. How can you create new neural pathways? How can you create new belief systems that are held in your subconscious mind? How can you get this conscious and subconscious mind coherence where you’ve got this single-mindedness or whole mindedness? Every part of my conscious, non-conscious minds, every part of my body, my cells are in harmony around my why. I’m in harmony.

I’m a walking, talking and the epitome of my why inaction every minute of every day. I try to take people deeply on that journey. It doesn’t become something that it’s conscious. It becomes unconscious competency. I do this naturally. It’s me. It’s who I am. What happens in that process? It’s a similar process to what people go through when they get programmed to be somebody who they’re not, which most people are. We were mostly brought up to be programmed to be something that we’re not. It’s reprogramming into who you are.

Take us through somebody going through this process. What would they like to begin with? What would they like afterwards? What was the impact in their life? Give us an example of how this works.

I worked with a guy who was a group CFO of a big supermarket chain in this country. After seventeen years, he was sacked unceremoniously. He was referred to me by somebody I know who knew him very well. When he came to me, he was a basket case and a mess. He had attributed his identity to his title and job. What happens when you take the title and the job away? Identity gone. When this happens in their life through their work and they’ve attributed their identity to that, they feel this sense of helplessness, hopelessness and may go into, “I don’t even know who I am anymore because it’s been taken away from me.” I don’t what to do.

This guy put on a lot of weight. He was doing a lot of comfort eating. He was lying around the house. His relationship with his wife and family was badly affected. He stopped doing anything because he didn’t know what to do. He lost all sense of purpose and meaning. His life didn’t stand for anything anymore. This is a guy who got a couple of university degrees. He’s an accomplished leader in his field and worked with a very big company but they took that away from him. When they took that away, he had nothing left to deal with, hold onto and take forward.

When he came to me, we went through my methodology. I saw him straight away. He was a blubbering mess. A guy with his credentials couldn’t articulate what he was feeling and doing. He was having all sorts of problems. He had no idea what he wanted to go to either. In fact, when I said, “What do you want to do?” He said, “I need to get another job as a CFO of a supermarket chain.” I said, “You want to go back to doing exactly what you did before?” He said, “That’s all I know. I don’t know anything else. I’m good at that.” I said, “Let’s put that aside and talk. Let me take you through my methodology and we’ll go on this journey.”

We did that. Fast forward about two months later, we’ve discovered his why and who. We’ve been going about the reprogramming work to get that from the conscious that develop new neural pathways to get that from the conscious mind into the subconscious mind. We’d be doing that programming. We’ve been working hard. I must say he jumped in. He said, “I’m going to give you everything I’ve got.” He did the work.

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Everything changed quickly. His relationship with his wife is so much better. For the first time in several years, he was going out and having lunch with his daughter. He had no relationship with his daughter. He never had the time. He was spending time with his daughter. His daughter was saying, “Dad, what’s going on with you? Where’s your magic dust? I want some of that magic dust. It’s good. You’re so much nicer. We can sit down and talk. It’s lovely.” He was having those relationships as well.

He stopped talking about his previous employer. He wasn’t talking about that anymore. He looked at it and said, “I’ve got that in perspective. That was experienced. That’s a good thing.” He saw the positive in it. He started being very positive. He was back at the gym. He’d lost a lot of weight. He was eating well. His skin was glowing. He was smiling. I hadn’t seen him smile through my whole process. He was laughing and joking again. We’d finished our work.

He rang me one day and said, “Glen, I want to talk to you. I’m going for this dream job. Remember you told me I shouldn’t be a CFO anymore? I should be a CEO. I should be running the company. I’ve been going for CEO roles.” I went, “I didn’t know.” He said, “I wanted to sit down, talk to you about this role and what it’s all about. This is my dream job. It’s in an industry that’s very different to supermarkets, very socially focused, very positive and are good for people.” He’s landed there.

I said, “That’s okay. Let’s do a role play. I’ll interview you the way they would interview you.” I’m going to listen carefully to the way you talk about yourself. If it’s not around your why and who you are, I’m going to be pulling you up on that. If you default your CV all the time like everybody does, you don’t want to play that guy talking about CV. That’s not who you are. We did a couple of role play sessions and a bit of corrective work, also defaulting back a bit.

A week later, he rang me and said, “I need to talk to you. It’s important.” I said, “What’s happened?” He said, “I’m standing outside the building. I’ve finished the interview.” I said, “How did it go?” He said, “There was a panel of five people. They kept talking about my CV. I kept elevating the discussion up to what they were buying and that’s me. They’re buying my why and who I really am. I kept saying you can read my CV. I’m happy to talk about specific things but that’s not who I am. I am so much more than that. That’s history and I’m better than my history, a whole lot better.”

He was talking about that and kept going back to his why. “Let me explain to you why I’m here, who I am and what I’ve got to offer here.” The discussion was so unique to this panel. They said they’d never heard anybody talk like that in that way with such confidence, conviction and understanding of self-awareness. He finished the interview. He walked out to the elevator. One of the guys came out from the panel and said, “We’ve talked about it. We want to offer you the job now.”

He went, “Oh, really?” They said, “We don’t even need to think about it anymore. You are a standout candidate. We couldn’t believe the kind of conversation we had with you. It was extraordinary. Everybody was so focused on wanting to tell us about their experience and you didn’t do that at all. We were stunned.” He said, “Glen, I got the job and this is my dream job.” This was $500,000 a year salary, Gary.

It’s extraordinary. One interview, done. He said, “I talked about myself, who I am, what I’ve got to contribute and my passions. When I talked about being sacked from that job, I talked about it openly and honestly. How the experience has made me a better person and why I’ve gone through this journey. They went, ‘You’re in. We want you. You’re the guy who’s going to develop this business and this culture in a way that reflects you. That’s what we want.’”

Instead of what he’s done, he talked about why he does it and who he is.

He hardly talked about the what and the how at all. He talked about the why and who, Gary. Mostly, about the why. He got his narrative going around that. He changed the narrative of the discussion where they said, “Tell us more about this. We want to know more.” He was very clear on it. I had massive clarity and focus around his why and who.

Contributing Leaders
Contributing Leaders: Influence the influencers. If you can positively influence an influencer, then that influencer is going to have the butterfly effect on a lot of people.

Whenever they deferred back to the what and how, he kept saying, “You can read my CV for that. If there are specific things you want to talk about, I’m happy to talk about them. Quite frankly, that was who I was then. Now, I would probably do that a bit differently. My answer would be different because I am different. I’ve grown a lot since then.” They couldn’t believe how open, vulnerable, passionate and compassionate he was.

What would a statement, a sentence or an introduction sound like if he had started with his why and his who? I don’t know if you could give us that example or maybe your own why and who so that the audience can understand what that would sound like versus just, “I’m a coach. I can help you with your brand strategies.” What would it sound like from the perspective of, “This is why I do what I do and this is who I am?” How do you do that?

I’ll give you an example of mine. I’m happy to do that. This is through my own process and method. I always start with the two words I am. The power of those words is profound. My vision statement, which is my personal why is, “I am the light that awakens people to higher self-realization.” What’s light? Light is love and a very high vibrational energy. It’s not telling, persuading or influencing people. It’s helping them to wake up to who they really are. The waking up is to their higher self-realization.

Realization is, “I’m not thinking it. I’m doing it. It’s happening all around me.” Realization is the impact and influence I’m having on people, the butterfly effect, the results I’m getting in my personal life, relationships, through my reputation and revenue. It always comes back to revenue because I find leaders who do this always make more money. It shouldn’t even be a focus. It’s a natural outcome. They always make more money.

Why more? They attract people who want to be a part of that. They attract the best employees who want to do the best work. They attract the customers because the customers go, “There’s something about this company I like. Therefore, I’m not going to ask them for a discount. I’m not going to question them because this is the way they work.”

Leaders like that have a tendency to develop powerful leading brands to make a whole lot more money. Even if you take that thought away from it, these people are a whole lot better in their relationships, family life, friends, their associates, strategic alliance partners or whoever. They have better relationships. That doesn’t mean they’re passive or at walkover. It means I have better relationships. I know how to handle that stuff in a way that’s quite positive, as opposed to, “This is not working for me. I’m going to throw a tantrum, go into command and control and get aggressive.” It doesn’t work that way. People don’t do that once they get that.

My why statement is, “I am the light that awakens people to higher self-realization.” I have a purpose statement that sits underneath that as well. My particular model has the vision, the North star. My purpose statement is, “Why am I getting out of bed every morning to get me on the fastest possible track to that North Star? What’s my purpose?” My purpose is I am empowering people to be in heart lead conscious success flow.

What’s flow? It’s effortless. I don’t have to work at it. It’s not a struggle. There’s no frustration. There’s none of that stuff or those low vibrational energies. I am in flow. I know Americans call it in the zone. When I’m in the zone, I mean flow. I’m in this state of effortless flow. I talk a lot to the people I work with about the effortless flow of productivity. Don’t be busy. Be productive. How you be productive? Be in the state of flow. When you’re in flow, that’s when your creativity and imagination are working at its best. That’s when you’re problem solving. You’re getting solutions that come to you. You do your best work when your creativity and imagination are released.

What happens with most leaders is they’re suffering stress, anxiety and depression. They’re in fear. What happens when you’re in fear? You go into your reptilian brain, that primordial brain. What’s the primordial brain? Fight, freeze or flight. What happens when all the blood flows from your prefrontal cortex, your executive function to your primordial brain, your reptilian brain? All the creativity and imagination shuts down. You go into fear and protection.

That’s why you see a lot of intelligent people in this pandemic are in fear and doing crazy things. They’re in fight, freeze or flight. They can’t solve problems with their creative and imaginative mind. It’s shut down, so it’s not working. How do you make sure that you’re a great leader and you have great people working for you? You empowered them to their higher why. The higher why is not a state of fear. There’s no fear.

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This is the last question I got for you. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given or you’ve ever given?

The best piece of advice would be this. Stop spending money on personal development. Don’t go get another degree. Don’t do further training and coaching. Find your why first. It is essential and fundamental. There is nothing more important because everything else comes from that. Once you find your why, what happens is you then understand what further development work you need to do to take you on the direction of your why.

Then you can say, “This is the further training and education I need to do. This is the coach or the person I need to work with that’s going to help me most to go on that journey and that direction towards my why, my North star.” I’ve worked in Chicago and New York for twelve months on two separate occasions. I do know and understand in some respects the American culture, the American psyche and the American business because I’ve worked with a lot of leaders there. To me, save that money. Don’t spend any more money at all on that. Get to your why first.

Once you get to that why, what happens is clarity, focus and meaning, then what happens is this journey of fulfillment and joy because you’re doing what you love, which is right for you, which is around your why. That’s the best piece of advice I would give for you, Gary, which I already know you’ve done all this well. For anybody that reads or wants to work with you, it’s crucial. It doesn’t get any more important. This is my final statement if we had a planet that knew their why, we would have a planet in absolute productive, joyful harmony.

Glen, if there’s somebody reading this that would love to connect with you, wants to work with you, wants to hire you, any of those things, what’s the best way for them to get in touch with you?

They could find out more about me at my website. My website is simply BrandHeartMethod.com. You could go there and find how you can contact me. You can find out more about the work that I’m doing. By the way, it’s very simpatico with your work, Gary, which I loved. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. “I want to have a chat with Gary. It’s going to be great. I can’t wait. He’s a kindred spirit.” I love kindred spirits who are out there trying to help the world in a way that’s profoundly positive. You told me about your journey, which I loved. Your journey from being a dentist to where you are, which is an extraordinary shift. I want to say I love your work, Gary. You’re a treasure to the planet. Keep going.

I appreciate that, Glen. Thank you so much. Thank you for doing your best thinking with us. I look forward to staying in touch as we go on our journey because I know you take a lot of what we do and you go even deeper. You help people manifest that, bring it to their world and see it in the right light. Thank you for being that light that awakens the soul of the people around you.

Thank you, Gary. I appreciate the time. This is a great conversation.

It’s time for our new segment, which is Guess The Why. I want to pick somebody that I’m thinking most of you know. If you’ve seen the TV series Breaking Bad, it was filmed right here in Albuquerque. It’s funny driving around town. You see so many of the scenes and places that were in the TV series. The one I want you to think about is Walter White. What do you think Walter White’s why is?

Contributing Leaders: People have been programmed to be command-and-control leaders. That’s motivation through fear and coercion. That creates really destructive disharmonious cultures.

I’ll tell you what I think it is. Even though he did a lot of wrong stuff, I think his why is right way, to do things the right way in order to get results. At the beginning, he was appalled by the way things were being done and he was on the side of good but then he rationalized the right way and that it was the right thing to do to make meth in order to make money to pay for what he needed to pay for.

He got way too deep into it but he was always still about doing things right, doing them the right way, creating the structure and processes around getting a predictable result. That’s what I think his why is. What do you think it is? Thank you so much for reading. If you have not yet discovered your why, you could do so at WhyInstitute.com. You can use the code PODCAST50 and you can get it for half price. If you love the show, please don’t forget to subscribe below. Leave us a review and rating on whatever platform that you’re using. Thank you and have a great time.

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About Glen Campbell

Contributing LeadersGlen started his career with degrees in Commerce and Psychology. He alsohas a Masters in NLP and Hypnotherapy.

Overa period of 27 years Glen has been a Director and Chief Executive of some ofthe world’s best and brightest brand strategy and communications companies likeClemenger BBDO, Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett across four continents.
Twelveyears ago, he created Brandheart and developed unrivaled methods for Leader’sBest Self Identity and Organizational Brand Identity.
Inthis time, he has worked with over 500 business leaders and entrepreneurs from aroundthe world in developing their personal and organizational brands and the resultshave been nothing less than transformational.
Glen’s unique and proven method ispara-disciplinary in nature: it’s a harmonious fusion of his 30 years of extensiveexperience, the latest in leadership research, a unique brand identity model, Neuroscience,Quantum Physics, eastern and western philosophy and spirituality.
Glen is considered a worldleading authority in empowering people to profound higher self realization inthe business and life.