Author Hour with Charlie Hoehn

Have you ever tried to make a living by selling things online? Matthew Bertulli, author of Anything, Anywhere, will give you his personal playbook for making a six to seven figure income by selling products and advertising them on Facebook. Even if you find the eCommerce world intimidating or overwhelming, this episode will give you the confidence and knowledge you need to succeed.  Key points from this episode: * What scares the hell out of digital born retailers. * How to decide on the right platform for your brand and when. * Why you should stop looking at your analytics every day.   Get Matthew’s new book Anything, Anywhere on Amazon. Find out more at MattBertulli.com.   Matthew Bertulli’s Journey Back to Retail Matthew Bertulli: I started my company, my main company, ten years ago. Before that, I’ll call myself a person in a little bit of denial. I say that because I quite literally grew up in a retail family. I was raised in the back room of our family’s retail stores. That was my babysitter as a kid. When I was getting into those years where you’re going to go university and try to figure out what you’re going to do with your life, I was really into software and computers. I was a self-taught programmer, and I’m thinking, “I’m never going to go into this retail thing, because that’s what my family does. That’s super boring and nobody wants to do that. I’m going to be a software engineer.” This was when I was 19, 20. When I look back in my career up until the point where I started Demac Media, all I ever did was just get software development jobs in some form of freaking retail. It never really clicked. I never got that far from what I was raised in. Then, when I started working at a company called Net Suite, before we went public, it really hit me, “Jeez, I’ve never really left this industry. I never really left the space, it’s actually something I really enjoy. I love everything trade and commerce.” I’ve been building DMAC for almost 10 years now, and some other companies that have spun out of it, that’s laid the foundation for everything. I no longer live in denial. Now I’m all in on anything that has to do with trade, with commerce, with retail, with manufacturing. The world of physical stuff is sort of my happy place. Once I accepted that, the whole book thing just became super easy to get my head around. Charlie Hoehn: How did retail become your passion and “happy place?” Matthew Bertulli: That’s actually a really good question. I like retail, and I don’t just like it because it’s the bedrock of the economy and most other businesses bolt on to the world of physical stuff. That’s not it for me. What I like about it is, because of its sheer size, it is a great vertical or a great industry to have a large amount of impact in. Because retail is so damn big. What I mean by that is, what most people don’t know about me is I’m also a bit of a tree hugger. One of my passions in life is mountain biking and hiking. Anything outside. I grew up in northern Ontario where I spent my entire life. My entire childhood was spent on the water, near the water, on a trail, in the bush. The planet is important to me, and I see commerce now—especially eCommerce, which is the version I focus on—as this great way ...

What do you think of cops? I mean, what do you really think of cops? Chuck Rylant — a former SWAT member, cop, and detective — believes the media creates a perception of police shootings that’s very different from reality. That’s why he wrote Shots Fired: to offer his unique perspective to a sensitive situation. For 15 years, Chuck covered homicides and is now a “use of force” expert. This means the defense show him what a cop did, and then asks him if it’s an excessive force or not. In this episode, you’ll learn: * Stories that police officers don’t get to tell * How complicated shootings really are * The consequences that extend far longer than you’d imagine Get Chuck Rylant’s new book Shots Fired on Amazon. Find out more at ChuckRylant.com.   The Big Idea Behind Shots Fired Charlie: Who is your audience? Is it the general public you want to know about this or is it psychologist? Who are you aiming for? Chuck Rylant: I had three audiences in mind when I wrote it. The first would be the public, to help them understand just how complicated it is for an officer and how much of a consequence there is to the officer after he or she pulls the trigger. That was one audience. The second audience was for the officers that actually have shot somebody, because they’re really isolated. They’re alone, they’re not able to talk to anybody, and when you read the book, you’ll see, they’ve gone through some hardships and they feel alone. The feedback I get from those guys is “Wow, I didn’t realize I wasn’t the only one going through this stuff.” They’re usually ashamed to admit a lot of the problems they have. Then the third—I teach at the police academy, and there’s no training for these officers before they get into a shooting. Sometimes there’s a guy in the book who shot somebody after he’d been working only a few months and then he’s being advised of his Miranda rights. It’s very shocking to a young officer that doesn’t know to expect that they’re doing their job, they think they do everything right, and now they’re being treated like a criminal. It’s very startling. I wanted it for those three people, all of those combined. Charlie: What is the big idea that you really hope people take away from this? Chuck Rylant: Well, I guess I’d give you three answers for the three different audiences. I really hope the public reads it, and the feedback I’m getting from them is really what I hoped—the idea of “Wow, there’s so much more to this, I had no idea.” What I hope the civilian will take away is to read it and when they see a video online or on the news to just not necessarily jump to judgment but just pause and say: “You know, there’s probably a lot more to the story.” For the officers, I kind of mentioned it previously, I’m hoping that they get that, “Hey, I’m not alone in this and that these experiences that I’m going through are ‘normal’ for somebody who has gone through this kind of traumatic situation.” The Importance of Officer Support Charlie: What happens to the officers who do kind of stay in their own head? Why is it so important that they need to have this reassurance?

Bad meetings are the worst. They’re a waste of time, and they feel like a distraction from real work. Mamie Kanfer Stewart and Tai Tsao, co-authors of the book Momentum, are on a mission to make meetings more effective, meaningful and enjoyable. Since 2013, they’ve offered coaching, training and even developed mobile apps to help teams support more effective meetings. In this episode, you’re going to get their blueprint for successful meetings, including actionable tips that you can immediately implement with your team. Get Mamie and Tai’s new book Momentum on Amazon. Find out more on their site, Meeteor.com.   About Meetor and Momentum Mamie Kanfer Stewart: About four years ago, I started the company Meeteor, and we actually started not with meetings as our focus but with a strategy tool for project management. If you’re giving yourself a blank stare right now, that’s what I was getting from everybody who I talked to when I said, “I’m building a product and trying to help teams with more effective strategy for their project management.” In the process of trying to figure out how to sell this tool, I was speaking to some consultants, and one of them said to me, “This is really interesting, and I see how it’s valuable but this little meetings thing that you’re doing, that’s really what people need help with. I couldn’t sell your strategy to all my clients, but I could totally sell them a meetings tool. Their meetings are terrible.” I had never realized how bad meetings were until I started talking to people about meetings. When I would go to networking events or just kind of in my daily life talking to people about what I was doing, I’d say, “I’m working on tools and trainings to help people have more effective meetings.” Instantly, everybody had a story to tell me of a bad meeting they attended at least that week, if not that day. It was so clear that this was a problem that needed help with, that people needed a solution for and I felt like, “I know exactly what I’ve got to do here.” We shifted Meteor to focus 100% on helping people have productive meetings. From that came our blog and eventually our book. Why are there so many bad meetings? Mamie Kanfer Stewart: For leaders, if you work in bigger companies or small companies, most of your time is spent in back to back meetings. We heard that from a lot of our customers. People run meetings that are not productive, they’re wasteful. You just invite everyone to the meeting instead of making sure that people who come to the meetings are really the people you want to be there or who are critical to the success of the meeting. You gather people in the room, but you really don’t know what you want to achieve at the end. Without a purpose, without a clear objective for your meetings, you waste everyone’s time. People feel like meetings are taking them away from real work, so if I spent one hour in meetings, I took away one hour that I could’ve actually focused on my own work. That’s one of the biggest pain points we heard from our clients. We don’t think it’s just the meeting leader’s problem—it’s part of your company culture. Tai Tsao: If your company culture is encouraging people to participate in meetings,

Are you considering a career in real estate, finance, or insurance? Are you already scrambling to be seen in the industry? In a field of 18,000 brokers, Dustan Woodhouse was ranked in the top 20 for five years in a row. With everyone asking him for his secrets, he decided to write the Be The Better Broker series. By the end of this episode, you’ll have a much better understanding of what it takes to become a top producer as a mortgage broker. In this episode, you’ll learn: Why some of you will decide not to become a broker. * How Dustan avoids being a salesperson. * How to approach the world of real estate differently. Get Dustan’s book series Be the Better Broker on Amazon. Find out more at BeTheBetterBroker.com. What got you into brokering? Dustan Woodhouse: Virtually nobody grows up as little kid saying, “When I grow up, I want to be a mortgage broker or a loan officer!” That’s just not a thing that happens. Most of us fall into the industry backwards or sideways, and it’s usually through encountering somebody in our orbit who says to us, “You’d be really good at this, you should get into this business.” In my case, I had a number of people around me saying I should look at this brokering, or I should get into the mortgage business. I didn’t even really know what it was, despite having purchased several properties. At one point, we had a portfolio of five properties, a few years before I got into the business. I’d done all that directly through banks and hadn’t dealt with independent brokers. So I didn’t really have an awareness of the industry, which was pretty common ten years ago. It’s a lot less common today. In Canada, where I’m based specifically in Vancouver, brokers actually enjoy about a 50% market share with first time home buyers. Because first time home buyers do their research, they find this independent advocate that works for you and gets compensated exactly the same way. Why wouldn’t I get somebody who can represent 30 different lenders working for me rather than one? And that was a lot of the appeal that drew me in to the industry when I started to learn about it. At 36 years old, with a significant mortgage, a couple of kids and a wife who had been largely focused on staying at home raising the kids: the pressure was on. When I got in, there was a pretty big fire burning at my heels, so I had to make things happen. That always helps. And I had the benefit of significant life experience at that point as well, which also helps. How was your experience as a broker different from industry norms? Dustan Woodhouse: I enjoyed what I thought was typical success and found out very quickly was highly atypical. Well, when you start in the industry, you’re often told not to close a file for six months and not to expect to replace your previous income for three years. Those things aren’t wrong by the way. I struggle with setting expectations that low. Instead of waiting six months to close my first mortgage transaction, it closed in four weeks. In the first six months, I closed 14 files. I replaced my previous income in the second six months basically. I closed up my first calendar year with 95 files behind me. In the industry, average is 24 files a year. In my second full year,

Joanna Penn is the author of more than two dozen books. Joanna knows from experience that writing books can change your life, but that experience comes from a lot of failed attempts, lost investments, and time spent. In order to help other writers, Joanna has turned her wins and losses into invaluable resources on her site, The Creative Penn. In this episode, Joanna will share how you can make a living through self-publishing and marketing your books. If you’re a closet-writer stuck in another career, then this episode is a must listen. Key Points From This Episode: * How Joanna funded her new life as a full-time writer. * Is a book really a passport to becoming a paid public speaker? * Tips for how to effectively market a book, and much more. Get Joanna’s book Successful Self-Publishing on Amazon. Find more of Joanna’s advice on TheCreativePenn.com. Did you always want to be a writer? Joanna Penn: I was one of those people—you know, angsty teenager, writing journals, writing poetry—but I never really considered that you might be able to make a career as a writer. I thought writers were up on this pedestal—god-like creatures where words just strung magically out of their hands. I got a degree in theology and ended up working for a consultancy firm, and I ended up implementing accounts payable systems into large corporates, like mining companies, for 13 years. This is possibly one of the most boring and least creative things you can possibly do with your life. You end up falling into a career if you don’t actively choose it. That’s kind of what happened. Of course, once you do a career for five years and then 10 years and then 13 years—you end up being paid quite well. I ended up with this career that your parents think is great because you’ve got a house, you’ve got the right job, and you’re a consultant and you go to the right parties…and yet I was miserable. You know, my life was good, but I had these golden handcuffs where you’re paid well but you just feel like your life is empty. I didn’t know what to do with myself. This was back in 2006 and obviously, Tim Ferris with The Four Hour Workweek was happening, as well as the early years of Gary Vaynerchuk. I was reading Tony Robbins and I started thinking about all the things that I could do. I have had some other failures in my life in terms of businesses. I tried to run a scuba diving company and tried to do some things in property investment, but none of that made me happy, either. What was it like writing your first book? Joanna Penn: I thought, by writing the book, I would discover the sort of tips that I wanted to tell myself. I distilled all this self-help knowledge that I’d been reading, and it was probably a hundred books and audio courses. Obviously, writing a book from your knowledge is really good, but you can also write a book by researching other people’s knowledge, and that’s important, too. So I wrote that book, and about three years later, when I understood SEO or search engine optimization for book titles, I rewrote that book. We published it under

How do we actually make good money doing what we love? Dorie Clark (DorieClark.com)—coach, speaker, and author of Entrepreneurial You—knows that even when you have incredible talent and great ideas, figuring out how to get a steady flow of clients can be daunting. So she set out to write a blueprint for professional independence. If you’ve wondered how to build your brand, monetize your experience, and extend your reach online, she’s been there, done that for both her clients and herself—adding $200,000 in personal income after applying the principles she uncovered in Entrepreneurial You. Key Topics From This Episode: * How to harness online marketing despite its shaky history. * Why it’s vital to learn from failures and keep looking forward. * How to leverage your existing work to gain new streams of income. Get Dorie’s new book Entrepreneurial You on Amazon. Find more of Dorie’s books and courses at DorieClark.com.   What motivated you to write Entrepreneurial You? Dorie Clark: As I got to know more people in the entrepreneurial community, I would start to hear about friends and colleagues that were doing these outrageous things. One friend had a two-million-dollar launch and then another friend had a three million dollar launch. “What are they doing that I’m not doing? I need to learn this right now!” Because I had started my career as a journalist, I decided the best way to do this was take on a book project that would teach me all of the entrepreneurial secrets. You know, the kinds of things that people have only talked about behind the closed doors of a multi-thousand dollar course. I wanted to learn them, understand them, see what really worked and what didn’t. Try them for myself, make myself the first Guinea pig and then write a book that could hopefully create a roadmap for other professionals to learn from and help them become more successful in their own business. So that is what I did with Entrepreneurial You. How did you begin to diversify your own revenue streams? Dorie Clark: For a long time, I had just clung to a very traditional business model. In the sense that the work that I did was kind of traditional, fee-for-service work. Then, I built up a good business with speaking, consulting, coaching, writing books, and I even do some business school teaching. Those are all great things, and that’s actually pretty diversified in terms of revenue streams. But I had not done online courses or other areas that were internet-leveraged. And that was the difference. It’s not impossible, but it’s extraordinarily hard to make multiple millions of dollars as a fee for service provider. You only have so much time, and people are rationally only going to pay you so much money for what you do. What you need is scale in order to be able to really dramatically increase your income. Why did it take you so long to leverage the internet? Dorie Clark: I had kept away from online marketing, largely because in the early days, it had a little bit of a residue of sliminess or creepiness to it. I did not want that to taint my brand. I’m speaking to major corporations. I write for Harvard Business Review.

Are your workouts fun and empowering? Or are they an endless cycle of stress, guilt, and exhaustion that leaves you feeling drained and defeated? Nia Shanks is a fitness coach who specializes in empowering women in health and fitness. Her new book is Lift Like a Girl.  In this conversation, Nia breaks through the clichés in weight loss and body image that keep so many women dissatisfied, depressed, and constantly dieting. By the end of this episode, you’ll know how to scrap the “less is better” mentality, so you can have a happier, healthier relationship with yourself. Key Points From This Episode: * How Nia’s restrictive diet lead to a binge eating disorder * Filtering through sensational online food information * Veganism, vegetarianism and fear-based diet pressure * Nia’s approach to lifting, strength training, and food Get Nia’s book Lift Like A Girl on Amazon. Learn more about Nia’s training regimens at NiaShanks.com. How did Nia Shanks’ exercise journey begin? I became a personal trainer at age 19. I got into the gym world very naturally, thanks to my mom because she was the first woman personal trainer in our area. She actually introduced me to the weight room when I was about 14 or 15. Once I turned 16 and could drive to the gym, I was hooked, was doing it consistently, have been doing it consistently since then. I had the privilege of growing up in a healthy household, eating well. I was always physically active and it wasn’t until I became a certified personal trainer, I was 19 and spending tons of time at the gym, that I would hear other women having these conversations about, they ate 1,928 calories that day. I mean, they knew it down to the point. They just knew this off the top of their head. It got me thinking, because I knew how to eat well. I knew how to eat if I wanted to lose fat or to build muscle. But calculating what I ate on a daily basis was never something I had done, it had just been intuitive for me. Out of curiosity, I started counting calories and tracking my macronutrients to know how many grams of protein and fat and carbohydrates that I ate each day. Through that experimentation, I became aware of what I was eating and it led to me experimenting with some other things because I thought, “Well, I’m a trainer, I’m trying to learn, I want to experiment. I want to look as best as I can because it will help me get respect from other trainers and help me get new clients.” Slowly that progressed into obsessive, restrictive eating habits. I got to the point where I was counting every calorie I ate. I mean, I even calculated in a five calorie stick of gum. If I chewed a stick of gum with five calories, I added that in to my caloric intake for the day. You know, for a while, I was just super strict with what I would eat and I was religiously going to the gym. I would not miss a workout if the gym was closed for a holiday, I would make sure to sneak in an extra workout the day before or after. It consumed me. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it at the time, until all of that turned into binge eating. I finally just cracked from depriving myself. I was trying to be super disciplined for so long. I wouldn’t eat junk food, I wouldn’t let myself have pizza or things I enjoyed because you know, I was really big into eating clean at that point.

After 30 years of working in the corporate world, John Elston decided to decentralize his office. The results blew him away, and changed the way his company recruited talent forever. John is the author of The Remote Revolution, which reveals how you can find and hire more A-players to work for your company. In this episode, you’ll learn how to ride the wave of remote work into the opportunity of a lifetime. Get John’s book The Remote Revolution on Amazon. Learn more at JohnElston.com. When did John Elston realize remote work was a big deal? For the very first time, I was losing A plus talent. And I mean, A plus. I remember very specifically, the day that my superstar came in and said: “Look, I’m 24 years old, I don’t want to drive to LA every weekend. I want to have a relationship, I want experiences and a customer hasn’t been in our office in six weeks. I can do this job from LA.” I said, “Hell no.” “That’s not what we’re about. We’re building a culture, we’re doing something here different. You have to be here.” That was the end of the conversation. She left my office and literally 24 hours later, she came back and said, “I really wish you would reconsider” and I said, “I can’t.” She said, “Well then I’m giving you my resignation.” Still, once again, stubborn CEO coming from the corporate world said “Fine, that’s okay.” Then she left. And then I lost another A player. I just couldn’t budge off of what I thought was important to the company. Now, fast forward three years later, my company is decentralized by choice because I couldn’t replace that A talent, they were looking for different things, they had different expectations and coming to an office every day wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t just young people, you know, the millennials. It was mothers with kids at home, it was fathers who needed to get home in time for soccer games. What happened when you told your team that they could work remotely? It was an eye-opening experience. I thought I was bringing them bad news. Everybody sat down and I said, “Okay guys, I have some really tough news. It’s really tough. I want you to know, it’s going to be okay.” I said, “As of Thursday, we’re not going to come to the office anymore. You’re all going to work from home or a location where you can get your job done, and I’m so sorry. I’m letting you guys down, I realize that this is your life and I realize that this is – we’re a family.” My team started slow clapping. People to the left of me stood up, and it was the first time as a CEO of anything that I got a standing ovation. I was in my office, thinking I’m letting everybody down, looking around the table. I was emotional, too. I literally was on the verge of tears saying, “I’m so sorry.” Thursday came and it was amazing. We didn’t lose a single customer, I was able to place ads across the world for people to work for my agency across the country and that was my moment when I said, “This is cool. This is going to get the agency back to a spot where I can compete globally.” “I can compete with wages and I can expand the company because guess what? I don’t need this 5,500-square foot office, right? People will figure out where to play fooze ball. They don’t need a nerf gun armory,

Steve Sims is the modern-day Wizard of Oz. For the past 20 years, he’s operated a luxury travel and lifestyle concierge for the rich and famous. His job is to make the impossible possible, and in his new book Bluefishing, he reveals how he makes his clients’ wildest dreams come true. In this episode, Steve shares the blueprint for how your company can break down any obstacle, accomplish unbelievable feats, and turn your customer’s dreams into a reality. Get Steve’s new book Bluefishing on Amazon. Find out more at SteveSims.com. Where did Steve Sims start his professional journey? I am an east London brick layer and I just remember questioning anything, I always used to joke that I was an 18 year old 40 year old. I would always ask “Why?”, to the point of really annoying my teachers, my friends, my family. I always wanted to know, “Why is this the life I got to lead, why have I got to be a brick layer just because my dad’s a brick layer?” It was that constant inquisitive nature of just going, “Well why can’t I walk through that door” and I would walk through that door. That got me into a lot of trouble. As a youngster, people were going, “Look, this is what you do, this is the life that you’ve been dealt with, you know, accept it.” There’s nothing worse than being told to accept anything and as an entrepreneur. You turn to an entrepreneur and go “Hey, this is the way it is, just accept it.” That’s what sent me off, really just trying to find where that square hole was that I could fit in, rather than where I was trying to be forced in.   What led you to start the Blue Fish Group? The complete polar opposite from being a brick layer is a stock broker. I had a friend of mine in London, they were actually going to Hong Kong because there was, at that time, a mass exodus of British stock brokers going over to Asia, looking after something called the Tiger Market in the 80’s. Believe it or not, I actually borrowed my dad’s suit, went into the bank where my friend was working, and talked to the floor manager into actually giving me a job. Somehow, through the connections going out with people, I actually got transferred from London to Hong Kong as a stock broker. I landed on a Saturday, I got dropped with them on a Saturday night, got drunk with them on a Sunday night, did initiation on a Monday, and I was fired on a Tuesday. They realized that they had basically brought someone over to Hong Kong that had no idea what he was doing. My dad is an Irish brick layer and he used to live on certain quotes. I would remember him saying things to me, at the age of like 12, 14, 18, you just got to look at that and you go, “What are you all about?” But then he’d come back and hit you in the head later on. I remember him, especially coming from a tough industry like construction, turning around to me one day and saying: “The fight’s not over when you go down, son. It’s when you stop getting up.” I remember the time going, “What the bloody hell does that mean?” You know? When I lost my job in Hong Kong, it was one of those things that “Alright, lost my job, now what?” I just went out and tried to find something and I ended up working as god created me to, as a doorman of nightclubs. Before you knew it, I just started talking to different people.

Mark Baird believes lifelong financial health is possible for everyone — regardless of their income level. If you’re like most Americans, you probably don’t feel financially secure. In fact, money might even feel like a daunting problem for you. Mark hopes to change that in his new book, Rules to Riches. In this episode, you will learn a few simple steps that you can take this week to improve your financial future and start building wealth. Get Mark Baird’s book Rules to Riches on Amazon. Learn more at RulesToRiches.com. How did Mark Baird’s financial journey begin? My wife and I had great jobs in Houston, and this is back in the 80’s. I would say we were living a mediocre financial existence like I said, we did have – we both had great jobs and more money than we had ever made before. We both grew up on a farm so it was a big culture shock when we moved to a large metropolitan city like Houston. You know, the mortgage payments and the car payments and the thinking about kid’s college expenses, started to do a lot of interplay in our thinking. We kind of got bogged down with the debt load and with the obligations that just come with normal everyday life. But in my heart, and to my wife’s heart, we knew that there was a better way. We were ordinary but we wanted to become extraordinary and I knew we could do that because I’ve seen people around us do that very thing. We became very interested in being better when it came to money. While money is not everything certainly, it allows you to get to the next step or the next level of life that you want to be. I remember it very clearly. I got invited to one of these “free” seminars and everybody knows what free means, it means that there’s probably a course or a video seminar workbook that you’re going to be buying, or that they’re going to be at least selling. I don’t even remember who gave the talk but I remember a few other points very distinctly and I walked away from that seminar and I started to implement those. One of them was a systematic savings program and at the time, IRA’s had been around for a while, but I had not set up one and my wife had not setup one.   When did you officially start building your wealth? We were just married, so we were probably 25. We started an automatic savings plan in an IRA. We started very small and I remember exactly the amount: it was $25 per month for both of us, but we watched that continue to grow. It was revolutionary to me when I heard the guy say, “You know, you could make extra principle payments on your mortgage,” and I’m like, “Wait a minute… I signed up for a 30 year mortgage, how could I make extra principle payments?” He said “Yeah, you can make extra principle payments.” He said, “Go to your bank,” – at the time, you know, you had to go to your bank – “and get an amortization schedule. which lays out a 30 year stream of payments for every month.” It was a document that had 360 lines on it and it showed the balance, the payment, the amount of interest in that payment and the amount of principle. And sure enough, you’d look down that list and we started to make extra principle payments. Each and every month, we would send in an extra $100 or whatever we could afford, and I would start to take off extra month’s payments. We whittled that down and paid that off in under 10 years.

B.J. Shonk, author of Missing Pieces, Broken Heart, lost her beloved family dog after 16 years of companionship. The loss left a huge hole in her life and in her family, but B.J. was often taken aback by the responses from others when she expressed her grief. To many of us, pets are a part of the family, but pet loss is largely misunderstood in our society today. In this episode, she’ll guide you through the grieving process after the death or disappearance of your beloved pet. Key Points From This Episode: * Why loss is loss: no matter what, who, or how. * How can we support friends who have lost a pet. * Positive ways to process the loss of a pet. * How can we be better pet owners? Get B.J.’s new book Missing Pieces, Broken Heart on Amazon. Find out more at BJRandolphLLC.com. What was it like to lose your pet? We had Wookie in our family for 16 and a half years, which is basically about a quarter of my life. She was just another fluffy family member. We went on a vacation, and she was home with one of our sons, Will. We went to Wookie’s secondary clinic and met Dr. Quillivan the first time. We knew that three seizures in a matter of less than 24 hours was not going to be good news for a 16 and a half year old dog. My son and I took turns holding her—hearts breaking, tears flowing, just one of the most heart-wrenching moments in my whole life. Then my husband came. Same thing. He got to hold her, spend time with her and with Dr. Quillivan. These are all things that you have to go through when you’re very emotional. And it’s very difficult. We had been on this wonderful vacation visiting family in Colorado, but when we got a phone call about the dog, everything went downhill from there. The 20-minute drive back home seemed like hours in misery. Then, we walked through the laundry room and there’s her kennel and her bowl and her blanket and her tennis ball. I couldn’t look at those things. I quickly got them out of sight and we tried to progress, but it’s kind of like you’re doped up. You don‘t know what to feel, you don’t know what to do, you’re totally miserable.  There were the three of us — myself, my husband and our son Will who was finishing his degree and living with us. Wookie was absolutely one of his best friends in the world. Where Will went, Wookie went. Every place. We had already — all three of us — shed buckets full of tears, and you don’t know what to do. You don’t know where to go, you don’t know what you’re feeling or how you’re supposed to feel. It’s devastating and it’s hard. But I think in our society today, that pet loss is just not accepted or totally understood by a lot of people. Find support and guidance after the loss of a pet. Available on Amazon: link in bio A post shared by Missing Pieces… Broken Heart (@missingpiecesbrokenheart) on Nov 29, 2017 at 5:49pm PST We kind of got through that day and the next day, we went to church, and I knew that it was useless for me to wear makeup because it would end up all over the place.

Before you buy a motorcycle, there is a lot of information you need to know in order to keep you safe. In this episode, Lee Heaver, author of Your First Motorcycle, will teach you the critical tips before you buy your bike so that you can have the confidence to safely hit the highway. Key Points From This Episode: * Lee’s advice for buying your first motorcycle. * The costs of getting into bikes – What’s the damage? * The essential drills Lee puts new motorcycle riders through. Get Lee’s book Your First Motorcycle on Amazon. Learn more at 1stGearMotorCycleSchool.ca. What’s the #1 idea you want people to take from your book? If you’re going to get into motorcycling, start with a smaller motorcycle. About 300 cc’sor 500 cc’s. In that range. It will have enough power to get you around town and ride on highways, and you’ll still be faster than most of the cars on the road. If you start with a smaller engine motorcycle, and those are all a lot lighter and easier to manage, it’s so much easier to learn how to ride, get comfortable with it and learn the advance riding on a smaller motorcycle as well so that when you get to a bigger one, you’re better prepared. Why does it really matter to start small? It’s just easier to learn on something smaller. If you want something that you can grow into, you absolutely will, but the learning curve is a lot steeper, and if it’s stepper that means you have a greater risk to your health and safety. That’s the real key point here. Sure, you may avoid transaction fees. Buying the motorcycle and selling it for less. It may cost you a bit of money there, but you will get so much more forgiveness with a smaller motorcycle when you make mistakes. On a bigger motorcycle, you just don’t get that forgiveness. The cost of starting with a smaller bike is really, really small, because when you own a small bike and you’re ready to sell it, you’ll be selling it to the biggest possible market that wants to buy it. It will be a quick sell.   What do I need to know about buying my first motorcycle? The salesman or saleswomen, whoever is selling you the motorcycle, their job is to get you into a motorcycle no matter what. Whatever motorcycle you want, they want to put you there in it and they can set you up with a loan that have really unfavorable terms. It will get you the bike, but you’ll be paying this loan off for longer that you have planned and interest cost could be a lot higher than you really realize and understand. Part of my book is dedicated to buying for your first bike or any motorcycle, the smart and efficient way. Because motorcycling is not cheap. There’s definitely a good startup cost to getting into it and joining a club.   What are the costs? If you want to learn and buy the gear and buy a motorcycle, you’ll need at least $5,000. If you want the nicer stuff and maybe a nicer bike, it can get closer to $10,000.   Is a course required to ride motorcycles? No. You can learn on your own. It’s not a law that you must take a course. You have to go through the licensing. Technically, you can learn in a backyard or an empty alley or street. Is a motorcycle course a worthwhile investment? Absolutely, because we’re going to force you to do exercises and drills with a lot of repetition.

Are you just starting out in your career, or do you know someone ambitious who’s in an entry level job? That’s who Lorenzo Gomez (@lgomez123), author of The Cilantro Diaries, most wants to help. Lorenzo went from the stockroom of a grocery store all the way up to the board rooms of two private companies without a college degree. One of those companies was Geekdom, Texas’s largest co-working space, where Lorenzo was the CEO. In this episode, you’ll learn: * Principles that got Lorenzo to the top of the ladder * How to find a mentor, build your network, and establish your reputation * Catapult yourself into high-impact positions throughout your career. Get Lorenzo’s book The Cilantro Diaries on Amazon. Learn more at CilantroDiaries.com. Where did Lorenzo Gomez begin his journey? When I was 17 or 18, I started working at the grocery store near my house and I got promoted to the produce department which was my first kind of brush with arrogance and I thought I was the coolest guy in the neighborhood, because this was a big promotion and you get your own box cutter, you get your own knife and I thought this is the coolest thing ever. While I was working in produce, my mom would shop at the grocery store I worked at and she would cook almost every night, and so I was doing my homework at the table and my mom came in very excited about something and she looked at me and she said, “Oh my gosh! I was at your store today, I was shopping, and there was, I saw it on the wall, above the cilantro was your picture.” She said, “I’m so proud of you.” I thought, “What?” I forgot that they had taken our pictures of all the produce guys and put them up so that customers could ask for help by name. I remember feeling — I had two emotions. I felt really kind of proud that my mom was proud of me, but also felt very embarrassed. I remember thinking, “This is the worst thing ever.” I thought, “I am not going out like this. Having my picture above the cilantro is not going to be the pinnacle of my career.” I remember it was just an internal, like “This is no.” I thought, “If I want my picture on the wall above the cilantro, I want to do something worthy of having it up there.” That was kind of a little moment in time where my mindset changed and I thought, “I’m going to do more than this. I’m going to aspire to do something worthy of having my mom be proud of my picture and not just because they took my picture.” That’s how I kind of set up the book and that’s the story of where the title came from. I’ll tell you, the story was many, many years later, probably a couple of years back from right now, I was with Graham Weston, my mentor, my boss, my friend. We went to A&M, Texas A&M, to launch a sales program there with a professor that he’s a huge fan of. While we were launching this program, there was a Q&A and one of the students at A&M asked Graham, he said, “Hey, what is the greatest piece of business advice you can give us?” I thought, “Wow! What a great question.” Who is your mentor, Graham Weston? Graham Weston is a local San Antonio business legend. His family there just comes from a family lineage of entrep...

Here’s an awkward question: Do you have end-of-life plans? Most people avoid thinking about life after they pass to avoid having difficult conversations or getting overwhelmed by the logistics. But you wouldn’t want to leave your loved ones with a lifetime of belongings and information to sort through, so how can you unburden your family members before it’s too late? In this episode, Jonathan Braddock (@jonbraddock), author of Click Here When I Die, will help you thoughtfully prepare for your own passing. Get Jonathan’s book Click Here When I Die on Amazon. Learn more at MyLifeAndWishes.com. Why did Jonathan Braddock decide to write a book on end of life plans?  It was four years ago, a beautiful Monday morning. My wife and I were actually playing golf and on the fourth hole, when her cellphone started ringing. We found out that Michelle’s father had just passed away at home on the bedroom floor. Naturally, we left the balls where they lay and headed home. My father-in-law, Ted was still on his bedroom floor when we arrived, the police obviously were there, the paramedics were there and you’re in a state of total shock and it was the first time I had experienced this or my wife with a close family member. The questions started to flow. Such as, what funeral home should we take them to? We don’t know, there are several in town and we’re forced into making decisions from that point forward. Within 24 hours, we’re sitting at a funeral home, getting marching orders from the funeral director, obituaries have to be written. Is it going to be cremation or a burial? Is it going to be a religious or a traditional ceremony? What about flowers? How many papers should we put the obituaries in, what places has he lived throughout his life that we might want to put an obituary in and on and on. Such a completely overwhelming and stressful time and trying to think through and come up with all the answers and hope that we’re doing what my father in law would have wanted. Because you see, he never really ever had the conversation with his daughter, my wife, with his own wife as to what happens when he leaves. To flash forward to the end of that story, it took us an excess of 10 months to locate everything, close out all the details of his life. During that process, it occurred to me that if something were to happen to Michelle and me, our children would have no clue. They would have no idea where to locate documents, where we bank, what kind of accounts we have, proof of ownership. Do we have life insurance, do my children just going through college really understand what life insurance is really all about even, how are they going to locate it? They don’t know who our attorney is or accountant. Much less, are they going to be able to log in to my technology, close down everything that’s setup on auto pay or recurring payments, try and figure out the two newspapers that I read every day which aren’t delivered to the driveway, they’re delivered to my iPad. Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon Prime, Netflix, there’s going to be a stinking mess on the front porch if they don’t stop the subscription to the Blue Apron account because meals will continue to stack up. I thought, “Something has to be done” and as I talked with people, going through this process and explaining what we were going through, everyone wanted to share their stories with me. They said “jeez, when my mom passed” or “when I lost my brother̷...

Is self-doubt and negativity holding you back—in business, sports, or life? Craig Willard, author of The High-Performance Mindset, believes that you need more than just exercise or a change in diet to achieve peak performance. You need to change your thinking. In this episode, Craig shows you how you can immediately sharpen your focus, boost your confidence, and shift your personal performance into hyperdrive. Whether you’re an athlete, executive, or an entrepreneur, this episode is for you. Get Craig’s book The High Performance Mindset on Amazon. Learn more about Craig’s coaching program at CraigWillard.com. When did Craig Willard first become interested in mindset? I actually was diagnosed with general anxiety disorder, so I was on some pretty strong medication. That experience became a bit of a turning point for me as I felt like I was in this fog of sorts; the medication had gotten me to a point where I was just bland. I didn’t have the highs, I didn’t have the lows, I was right in the middle and at that point I said, “This isn’t okay. There’s got to be a better way than medication to help my anxiety and I have to figure this out.” I literally went on a road trip of sorts to figure out what it was about our mind that created this fear. I wanted to figure out what anxiety was. A lot of that I put into this book. I go into great detail about anxiety because I think it steals so much from us. From that point moving forward, I realized that the mind was key to everything and thus, I was able to move on from my anxiety. What did you learn from your anxiety? Let me fast-forward a bit to my coaching career. When I started working with people with all different backgrounds, I started to recognize that people all have different opinions of the word. It’s almost as if my clients were creating their own dictionary of sorts. It was a really big breakthrough for me to recognize that because I could then begin to change how people perceive the world and how they think based on the words they use. If you think about motivational speakers, they love to tell you what to do and why you should do it but they don’t really tell you the how; that middle ground seems to get missed quite a bit. You hear this phrase, “Change your mindset, change your life.” But if I just tell you to “change your thoughts, change your outcomes,” that doesn’t help you. I know that I need to do that, but how? Figuring out the how was a really big breakthrough for me. I’ll go through it with you. First, ask these questions, “What is self-talk?” and “What is thought?” When I would ask my coaching clients they’d give me sometimes odd, strange answers. Then I would ask them “What is focus?” and they would usually say something like “concentration.” Well okay, “What is concentration?” and they would kind of laugh and say, “Focus?” So people really don’t have a true definition of these words, yet we tell people to focus, to concentrate, all the time. But what does that mean? Well, here’s how I break it down. If you have a thought in your head, you’re consciously thinking to yourself about that thought; essentially you’re talking to yourself about that thought. Over the course of a day, we may have 40, 50, or 60,000 thoughts. So we talk to ourselves all day long. While we have a thought in our head, we’re focused on it,