Kevin Lawrence: Episode 121

Transcript

[0:00:18] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Kevin Lawrence. Author of Your Oxygen Mask First. Here’s the hard truth about leadership, it either forces you to get stronger or it’s slowly destroys your life, there’s no in between. Over the course of his 20 year career helping hundreds of CEOs and executives break through challenges and grow their companies, Kevin has discovered the habits that allow any leader to transcend the perils of success and to keep achieving. In fact, these habits help CEOs and executives become stronger and more resilient. Kevin is obsessed with understanding why successful people crash and burn. And in this episode, he’s going to teach you what he’s learned by studying and testing virtually every leadership theory known to mankind in his two decades as a business adviser. By the end of this conversation, you’ll have the tools needed to ensure your survival no matter how high you fly. Now, here is our conversation with Kevin Lawrence.

[0:01:49] Kevin Lawrence: The whole book actually started on August 16th, 1977. It’s a very specific date that I will remember for the rest of my life, I was even years old and just imagine, my family had just done a road trip through the US in our truck and camper and my sister and I sitting in the back seat of our truck for hours on end as we toured around the US and we just crossed the border back up into Canada. You have to imagine, this whole trip, we were listening, in those days they had these things called eight tracks which was, you know, kind of like a big thick cassette tape, the size of a sandwich and we listened and we had four eight tracks we listen to, we listen to Neil Diamond, Kenny Rogers, ABBA and Elvis. We would listen to those again and again.

[0:02:32] Charlie Hoehn: Great choices by the way.

[0:02:33] Kevin Lawrence: They were awesome, I mean, I tell you. I know, you could probably play any song from those artists and I bet you, I know almost every single word and I definitely know the tune to all of them because we listen to them again and again. Those are kind of like the soundtracks of my childhood. As we’re crossing the border back up into Canada where I grew up in Canada just outside of Vancouver and we crossed the border and we switched the radio back on because now we’re back to where our local radio station was. We got stuck and there was a big accident which is unfortunate but we were like, 15 minutes from home, listening to the radio in the truck after two, three weeks of constant driving and we’re listening in the radio and all of a sudden, a news flash comes on and Elvis Presley had died and that day, was monumental for me, I didn’t realize it but to give you a back story on it, Elvis Presley was not something that we liked or loved, we actually almost or my parents idolized him. You have to imagine, in our dining room in our home, you know, there was one picture, we had this big lush wall covered in velvet wallpaper and then a picture of Elvis Presley hanging in our dining room. He was like -

[0:03:43] Charlie Hoehn: Wow, the second Graceland.

[0:03:45] Kevin Lawrence: It was. We didn’t have, actually, I since have taken my dad on a trip to Graceland and I mean, that place was actually pretty cool. Our place was not cool but the thing is that Elvis was at the center of our dining room and the center of our lives and my parents just idolized him. As a result, so did I. The day that he died, it really impacted me. And what I realized years after, not just then but years after is, it really confused me as a seven year old because he was rich, he was famous, he had a mansion, he had a wonderful family. He had his own airplane and I’m like, “Why would this guy pretty well end his own life?” We weren’t rich and we weren’t famous and we didn’t have those things and Elvis, having everything that I had thought would be great to make your life amazing but then he basically destroyed his own life. It confused me and perplexed me, I’m like, “But he’s rich, why would a rich person do that? He’s got it made.” It went on and from that point, you know, I was always curious and then there was this guy called Kurt Cobain and this other one called Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, Robin Williams, Prince, and the list goes on and on of these incredibly successful people that we would idolize but then they would end up ending their life early and I was a totally made a huge impression on me. From that point, as I progressed throughout my career, I was always passionate about understanding, how was it that you can achieve great success and have a great life that you want to keep on living? That sort of set the tone for my whole career in business. Especially as I started to see that the problem I thought was isolated to these musicians and rock stars, those problems were visible, when you go into business world, people suffer and have the same problems. You see these wildly successful business people who were absolutely either miserable or in massive pain although materially, and socially, what they’ve achieved is absolutely unbelievable. That’s kind of the, started off with Elvis and then the others and then as I got into the business world, I saw this was sort of almost like an epidemic. Everywhere you looked at these gifted high performing people.

[0:06:00] Charlie Hoehn: Do you remember the first time it really hit you in the business world? That this was the parallel situation going on?

[0:06:07] Kevin Lawrence: You know, it happened slowly. I started to see signs of it because I was oblivious to it, I didn’t realize it because look, I’ve got clients that have won entrepreneur of the year awards, all kinds of awards and accolades and you know. Sold the businesses for amounts that will take care of generations. The problem is that when they receive these rewards or their covered in the media, they don’t really tell you the true story of the struggle, right. They’ll tell you the story of how they came and had no money when they started that, everyone will tell you that story. They don’t tell you about the mental breakdowns and the absolute losing it and almost ending up homeless and addicted to - why do you think? Luck. Whenever a business person –

[0:06:52] Charlie Hoehn: Why don’t’ they do that?

[0:06:53] Kevin Lawrence: Well, there’s a pride thing but it’s more than that.

[0:06:56] Charlie Hoehn: Embarrassing at the most.

[0:06:58] Kevin Lawrence: Business leaders are phenomenal sales people and promoters, right? Look at a guy like Elon Musk right now, he is the master sales man, he is almost like the master person that would be in the carnival, selling tickets and you know, he’s the master of carnivals. Exactly, he’s like Barman Bailey. He is just spectacular at it, do you think he wants to talk, if and I don’t know. If he just had a massive mental breakdown, if he was completely fried, almost debilitated, seeing his psychologist three times a week and being medicated. How does that go for promoting Tesla? How does that go for promoting Space X?

[0:07:36] Charlie Hoehn: Shareholders, yeah.

[0:07:37] Kevin Lawrence: Exactly, look, again, I don’t know anything about musk, I’m just using him as an example because he’s amazing at what he’s doing. For all the other clients, at the end of the day, they are all marketers or sales people that are promoting their company and their brand and it doesn’t go well, you know, if you are the head engineer at Ferrari, it doesn’t go well to say how you’re having a mental breakdown and even hospitalized for a month.

[0:08:03] Charlie Hoehn: Has that happened? Kevin, have you seen that happen and then the stock dives?

[0:08:09] Kevin Lawrence: I’m sorry, the telling of the story, no, because no one’s that dumb, people aren’t going to go and tell that story, the keep it, first of all, because generally in our society, there is a lot of shame around when people have challenges personally. Especially if you’re wildly successful. People generally don’t. It only happens when it leaks out. Travis from Uber, right? It started to leak out and show up and then this back story comes out. Only because it was essentially forced out. No, people don’t – people are smart, they keep it very quiet and that’s the problem though.

[0:08:40] Charlie Hoehn: I’m just curious though, I understand, it’s smart from a business perspective. I’m just wondering if anybody’s actually done it before and come out, you know, I think of this situation of like Tylenol. When those poisonings were happening and they came out ahead of it and they said, you know, “We messed up and we’re horrified that,” – they didn’t even start with we messed up, we felt so sorry for the families and then we messed up, this is what we’re doing, we’re recalling all the products. I wonder if there’s just a way to communicate that sort of thing in a way that doesn’t damage the company that you can be honest and vulnerable and truthful but do it in a way that communicates like look, “These are the steps that I’m taking to kind of remedy this situation, everything’s still good,” getting out in front of it rather than having it leak out.

[0:09:36] Kevin Lawrence: Yeah, I think though, I mean, that’s what I’m trying to accomplish with this book. I’m trying to get the story out so people can understand that it’s normal and to almost normalize it because I’ll tell you what happens, is that every time, a leader that I work with hits a wall and it’s really messy and whether they start to doubt themselves or their brain stops functioning, which is a very common thing. The brain will go from nine and a half out of 10 intelligence down to about four. It terrifies people because they’re like, what is going on here? These are some of the smartest people on the planet who really become dumb for a period of time. It’s shocking. What I’m going back to is my objective is to help people to understand that that’s a normal part of the game. It’s like if you’re playing hockey, big sport up in Canada here. If you you’re playing hockey, it’s normal to get injured, right? It’s normal to fall on the ice once in a while, that’s part of the game. For a lot of these people, they think they’re a loser, they’re weak, something is wrong with them. A CEO I was talking to yesterday, he has gone down this path and it’s been a brutal path for him. He was probably in the worst shape of anyone I’ve ever worked with. I mean, he was down to about a two out of 10. In terms of his own mental state and some of his intelligence, he’s back up around at eight and a half, nine. Which is phenomenal and he’ll just get better and better. For him, Even yesterday he’s going, you know, “Is there something wrong with me? Am I just weak?” He’s like one of the most resilient guys I know, he is a very good CEO who went through a rough patch for a logical reason. My goal is to help to normalize it so people understand it’s part of the path and when things get weird, no matter what the struggle is, your own head, your team, your business model, your own learning, there’s all kinds of struggles but it’s for them to see it’s normal and then just to do the things to get past it. Back to the other questions. There was one CEO I work with who is starting to talk a lot more about mental health, he’s including it as part of the culture of his company and he is starting to do it. He has a passion around it, he’s had his own challenges with it as well. He’s starting, it’s just – it’s usually – it’s safer when people do it and they talk, about what happened years ago versus what might be happening in a moment. My goal is to have it so a lot more of these leaders talk about their stories. Because they all have – they all have them. All had situations where they didn’t think they can do the job because there’s no course to be a great CEO or high performing leader, particularly CEO, or where they’ve had situations where they mentally almost lost it and felt like they couldn’t come back. They all have them but I’d like to get them to share a lot more of them. Just to normalize it so people realize it, it’s just a normal thing.

[0:12:22] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah. I love that you're doing this work Kevin, Truly, the leaders at these companies affect all the people at the companies and as a result, all the customers,, it ripples out and cascades all throughout the world so this is incredible important work and especially - the tide is starting to turn I think on mental health and the stigma, it used to just be, “You’re crazy, you go see a shrink,” it was all these – the terminology was just almost derogatory and it started to take a turn. Thank you for doing this work first of all. Second, while there’s the cultural component of mental health is still a little bit a frightening thing for us to talk about and still has a stigma, it sounds like there’s a lot of bad advice out there for CEOs just in general. I mean, if that guy’s just wondering, am I really weak, is that a fair statement?

[0:13:19] Kevin Lawrence: I mean, the reality is, whether it’s a high performing, highly driven leader or someone running a charitable foundation who is also deeply obsessed with doing something great or a small business person or community member who just wants to do something massive. I was with a guy yesterday and chatting one of his business, I’m a real car nut and this guy has built some of the most amazing custom cars in the world. He has won the top award for building the top custom car in the world is something called the Ridler Award. I was chatting with this guy yesterday, he’s an awesome guy and that’s him, he spent 22,000 hours working on one car, him and a team of people, 22,000. I mean, that’s intense, that is not normal, right? Selling assets and working like crazy to build a show car which he then won the most prestigious award in the world. You know, whether it’s like a person like that, anyone who is up to something really serious and wants to do something significant in the world, all of those people have different types of challenges. If you go to your job and you work from 8:30 to 4:30 every day and you got a two 15 minute coffee break and a 30 or 60 minute lunch, that’s one path in life. That’s just you know, it’s almost like a – it’s going on a nice walk in nature and for some people, it’s a perfect way to live their life. There’s other people who choose to climb mount Everest every second weekend basically, is what it’s like to be one of these almost obsessed, very highly driven, high performing people who do almost not normal or unhuman things in their lives. They need different tools and structures and supports, you know? Start a second weekend, you need different training and nutrition and mental conditioning, physical conditioning, everything. Then the person who goes on a nature walk every second weekend.

[0:15:22] Charlie Hoehn: Right, yeah, this leads us perfectly into your book which has a ton of great content specifically for these high achieving executives, these leaders. Let’s start at the beginning? You talk about living an amazing life. Now, these leaders and execs inherently have an amazing life just given the nature of their position, I assume, but what do you really mean by live an amazing life?

[0:15:51] Kevin Lawrence: Well, be careful with that assumption, they don’t necessarily have an amazing life. They have an amazing work, right? They have an amazing job or an amazing business that is usually full of amazing headaches and amazing stress. The first part of the book called Live an Amazing Life is basically make sure that your business or your career doesn’t consume all of you. There’s a model I talk about in the intro of the book which is really looking at your existence or your whole you in three different kind of circles. On circle is work, one is life which is your family and friends and community. Then there’s self and taking care of yourself which we’ll talk about in a couple of minutes. The life piece, usually what happens is there’s a lot of – when, then. You know, when I make 10 or 50 or a hundred million dollars then I’ll start to enjoy it. When I retire, I’ll start to have some hobbies. It’s all this future or deferring the pleasure in life to the future which by the way is really good for the business. If you’ve got an owner or a CEO or an executive that is willing to defer pleasure in their own life for a decade and just work like a mad man or a mad woman for 10 years, that produces unbelievable results. Actually, that’s what some of the most successful people on the planet do. Problem is, once you do something consistently for 10 years, it kind of builds some heft to the pattern and you’re stuck. What you see often, very often is that people who have been insanely successful and whether it’s in terms of impact in the community with a community organization or whatever achievement they wanted to do in their life or their business or building a very valuable business. They put all these energy into their business to find out at the end, they’ve achieved their goal, you know, they got to their Everest or in the case of a business person, they sold their business for a hundred million or a billion dollars or whatever it is. Then there’s a shell of a life that they have kind of left over to the side and they have a whole bunch of money and they’re miserable.

[0:17:54] Charlie Hoehn: Or do they create another Everest for themselves because they’re so addicted to that habit?

[0:18:00] Kevin Lawrence: Exactly, they have to. Because, at the end of the day, if I just worked for 10 years or 20 years, sold my business for a billion dollars or half a billion or a hundred million or it doesn’t matter the number and I have more money than I thought I’d have in my life and I get it and I expect there to be this love and sparkles and fireworks and I’m finally achieved my life’s dream. It’s the biggest scam going. Because you're not going to be any happier and I’ve seen it again and again. The childhood dream is make a lot of money and get rich and then life will be grand. The truth is, make a lot of money and get rich, well, you have a lot of money and you're rich. Life can only be grand if you make life itself grand. You follow the thinking? It’s like, they’re separate things, making money is one thing, having a great life is another thing. Live an amazing life is yes, keep on making your money and please, I’m all about people building a business and selling it for a hundred million, a billion, 10 billion. To me, that’s fun, I like that. It’s a totally separate path you have to work on at the same time to actually have an amazing life too, the business success does not actually benefit your lifestyle much. Having some extra cash is cool but you know, life, things that make a great life are completely different and require their own time and energy to come alive.

[0:19:23] Charlie Hoehn: Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, Book in a Box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, Book in a Box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. This brings me to a question which is, a lot of these high performing executives are going to tell you, in order to get to the level that you really want to get to, you have to sacrifice, they’ll talk about sacrifice. Do you have to sacrifice a good life in order or an amazing life in order to be a super successful CEO?

[0:20:32] Kevin Lawrence: You know, that’s the fascinating thing about this. This game of high performing success, it’s a mental game more than anything. It’s all between your ears. If you believe you have to sacrifice the life, sacrifice an amazing life to be successful, you’re right, if you believe you don’t have to, you’re also right. Right? It’s like that little engine that could which is a book that was popular when I was a kid. You know, if you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you can’t. It’s all a mind game. Now, let’s be clear. You are not going to build a company that you sell for a billion dollars, not likely going to do that by working 40 hours a week, 8:30 to 4:30 every day. That’s not true. But there’s nothing to say you can’t put the extra energy in to be a very successful leader and business person and have a great life. Because having a great life doesn’t take a lot of time. You know, what I talk about in the book is this thing called ‘passion ratios’. You got to imagine you have a hundred units of passion every week. Passion being your best, most engaged energy. If you take that and I think everyone’s got a ratio they run best at, right? Mine is about somewhere around 60/20/20 or 70/15/15. Which is, 70% of my best energy to my work, I love to work. I work hard. You know, I work harder than I probably should but I love it. 15 of my best energy to myself, that’s me going and playing at the race track with my friends, you know, exploring the things that make me happy and working out time, writing, thinking, stuff like that. Then life, quality time with my family and friends and community. The idea is, you can build a very successful business, you just have to be conscious of how you apply that time. What some of these people that tell you that with sacrifice, what they would do is, they’d have 95% of their energy going into their business and making money. They probably have two for themselves and three for their family and life. As a result, you end up with out one, you and yourself aren’t going to be very healthy, your life will pretty well fall apart but your business will make a ton of money and hence, the divorce rate and all those other things with a lot of successful people. My belief is that you can run a 70/15/15 or a 70/10/20. I’ve seen lots of people who have done it. The main point of it is it’s a story. Two things, that’s a story and that’s a muscle. If you don’t’ have the muscle of having an amazing life, it’s not going to happen. So I’ll share a couple of tips that I recommend people do. First of all, figure out what makes your life amazing. You know a few things that I’ve realized in my own world is some sort of adventure with people that I care about. Again, I have already mentioned the race track. I love racing cars, it’s fun. I have a great time. You know my son gets involved in it and doing some of it, my wife and I do these adventure tours around the world, where we go with a group and go and do driving adventures and things like that. So including people you like and something you caution about, things like that and building that in and pre-planning it obviously. Another thing for having an amazing life, believe it or not a lot of people don’t take enough holidays so pre-book them.

[0:23:38] Charlie Hoehn: Really?

[0:23:41] Kevin Lawrence: Yeah. It’s crazy because look it, as a CEO or a business owner or a leader, stuff always comes up and the trick is unless you’ve booked it and paid for it, it’s way too easy to be tempted to cancel it.

[0:23:52] Charlie Hoehn: Yes, I love that tip, love it. It’s seriously true.

[0:23:56] Kevin Lawrence: It is and I mean it happens to me and the thing is these things are not rocket science. They are basic, basic habits.

[0:24:05] Charlie Hoehn: No, it requires just spending the money just putting it on the books, putting it on your calendar and then going when that day arrives. But most people just never buy the ticket and I include myself in that category, yeah.

[0:24:17] Kevin Lawrence: I’ve become much better at it myself. Much, much better like I am always planning the year in advance.

[0:24:21] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I realized I was never going to take a trip unless I bought the tickets and then I bought them one night and then the next day I was like, “Oh damn I am going to Argentina in a few weeks. This is crazy!” But I wouldn’t have gone.

[0:24:34] Kevin Lawrence: Yeah, I better get it going, yeah.

[0:24:35] Charlie Hoehn: If it happened, yeah so I love that.

[0:24:37] Kevin Lawrence: You got it and again, it’s not rocket science. The essence is, you know we have a tool in chapter 17 called The Master Plan, where you have to put energy into planning what you want to accomplish at work for yourself and in life and it’s such a basic thing. So most people have great goals for their business but they don’t have good enough goals for their life and for themselves and so to have an amazing life, you need a plan and you need to pre-plan and implement some of those things that make it work. The other thing about an amazing life as I have realized it’s usually some very simple things. Like if we have friends and we get together for dinner, that’s good. If we have friends and we get together, have dinner and play a game that is mind-blowingly amazing. For our family, playing card games, board games is like the best probably thing we can do. It sounds so darn simple but we have a riot. The best of our personalities are somewhat, are the worst sometimes when we do that. So it’s basic things like have the goals for an amazing life, don’t expect that it’s going to get amazing all of a sudden in the future when you stop working or slow down. You have to be doing it today and I’ve got a question earlier, what would you do if you inherited $50 million? But the catch was you actually had to really enjoy your work and really enjoy your life, what would your life look like? And usually it boils down to simple stuff that has something to do with you pursuing something that has you connecting with other people in some sort of experience.

[0:26:04] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah and does it require having $50 million in the first place usually?

[0:26:09] Kevin Lawrence: It doesn’t.

[0:26:10] Charlie Hoehn: Like you said, it’s in your head.

[0:26:12] Kevin Lawrence: It is and look it, cash makes things easier. Don’t get me wrong, right? It’s better to make a $150,000 a year than to make 50 because you have more options, right? Make 1.5 million over 150, there’s incremental improvements, don’t get me wrong. You can do nicer things, well there’s lots of research that shows your personal satisfaction doesn’t necessarily increase that much and I’m with the school of thought, I want to see people make, whether it’s executives to make massive bonuses and make half a million a year and business owners to make 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 million a year, why not? But have to have a separate plan for their life.

[0:26:44] Charlie Hoehn: Absolutely, so Kevin you have 17 chapters in the book and I want to tackle all of them but I want to ask you which one is your personal favorite? If you have to pick one that you could give to every executive, what would it be?

[0:27:01] Kevin Lawrence: Well you know the funny thing is in the book, there is, and on the website as well we should be writing it next month or so is a self-assessment so they could figure out which one is most meaningful for them. It’s hard because everybody’s situation is different so depending on where you’re at today, people write to me in different challenges or chapters. So the chapters resonate with them. You know lots of people say Licking at the Toad Chapter is the one that resonates with them or quadruple your idea.

[0:27:28] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah so let’s talk about lick your toads because that was the first one that caught my eye. This is about getting high off of toads?

[0:27:35] Kevin Lawrence: How did you know? Smart. No, lick your toads is a very simple metaphor. So imagine this: So imagine you and I are sitting down and I said to you, “Hey man, here’s the deal. See this big ugly toad that’s in my hands which is probably the size of a loaf of bread, I am going to hand this over to you,” this thing weighs about 5 pounds and you’re going to have to lick it by the end of 2018, by the end of this year, you’re going to have to lick it from the tip of its tail across its slimy back down the front of its jaw and down on its under belly and under its all special parts. You’re going to have to lick this thing and you have no choice in the matter and I said, “But you have to do it by New Year’s Eve 2018,” and right now we’re in March. When are most people likely end up to licking that thing?

[0:28:26] Charlie Hoehn: Right at the very end, yeah.

[0:28:28] Kevin Lawrence: Exactly, at the very end. It’s human nature so here’s what will happen. Imagine how this thing is going to follow you around and be with you everywhere you go every day. When you’re sleeping, it’s going to be in the pillow beside you or on the night stand. When you get up, it’s there with you. When you’re having a shower, it’s sitting up looking at you right? It’s everywhere you go, it’s with you when you go to work and when you don’t, blah-blah-blah. And imagine what would happen is it will start to think about this thing a lot, right? And it will consume valid because it’s this weird ugly thing following you around and almost haunting you. You wake up in the night thinking about it, you know? The next thing you know, it starts to collect friends. Next you know, you’ve got two of them and three of them and five of them and now you’re trying to avoid 27 of these darn things. By the thing you get to the end of the year, I predict that it’s really starting to mess with you and you probably have well over a 100 or a 150 of them and most people actually have about 150 of these and you will understand at the end. So now we’re standing there at New Year’s Eve. It’s five minutes to midnight, you and I are out on a party and having a great time. Everyone else is at the main part of the party, you and I are in a separate room. We’ve got this bar height table with the toad sitting there who’s not become a very good friend of yours and it’s about time for you to lick it. At two minutes to midnight, how do you think you’re feeling?

[0:29:38] Charlie Hoehn: Not good.

[0:29:39] Kevin Lawrence: No and you’re looking at this thing and there’s a pretty good chance for most people as we get down to 30 seconds, your heart is pounding, your palms might be sweaty, a little anxious about it. So at the stroke of midnight, you pick this slimy thing up and you finally do the nasty deed of licking the whole thing. When you’re done, what’s the first thing you mouth to me?

[0:29:57] Charlie Hoehn: I wish I had done that sooner.

[0:29:58] Kevin Lawrence: Yeah because?

[0:30:01] Charlie Hoehn: Because it tortured me the whole time it wasn’t being done.

[0:30:05] Kevin Lawrence: Yes and was it as bad as you thought?

[0:30:07] Charlie Hoehn: No.

[0:30:08] Kevin Lawrence: No, it never is and that is the guaranteed reaction. So for all of us humans, we have generally between a 100 and a 150 of these things. These are low value non-strategic. These are not super important things in the context of our business goals or our life goals or things for our self. But they burden us down and burden our subconscious mind in the back of our head. We are thinking about these things wasting energy on them. So I have found how this has destroyed many a leader, believe it or not and this could be a leaky tire on your car or a scratch on your car or a squeaky door on your kitchen or a squeaky door on your oven or a loose molding on your bathroom, a report you have to finish, a glitch on your computer and a phone that keeps dying, a will you need to complete, a conflict you have to sort out. I mean it could be all these little tiny things that don’t matter today but burden you. And the idea of licking the toad is to catch up on a lot of these things and basically de-clutter your mind and de-clutter your experience of life and it takes thousands of pounds off your shoulders. It’s shocking. It has a direct correlation with a lot of stress. So there is a technique in the book, there’s 5Ds, which is five ways to get rid of them and prevent these toads and it’s an ongoing maintenance program to try and make your life more Zen-like and more free and clear and not burdened by all of these little seemingly inconsequential things that can really mess you up.

[0:31:35] Charlie Hoehn: I love that. We all carry those things around in the back of our minds and they’ll pop up during meditation and actually this chapter reminded me of a quote by Jung that is, “That which you most need will be found where you least want to look.”

[0:31:53] Kevin Lawrence: Yes.

[0:31:54] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:31:55] Kevin Lawrence: And the idea of this is like purging and cleansing your life constantly and I am very, very disciplined around these things and I will tell you one of the Ds to make sure they get done is called delegate. There’s a whole bunch of stuff in life I do not like doing but somebody else does. So they’ll very easily become toads if I don’t find someone else to do them. So I’ve got to list 40 different people that help me with all kinds of different things that I just don’t want to do. So and say it’s like five different things like that are great for things like this but the point is you don’t think they’re invaluable but they deeply, deeply burden you. Have you ever seen that show on TV called Hoarders?

[0:32:35] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:32:36] Kevin Lawrence: Toads make you like a mental hoarder and yeah it is. It is seriously. Yeah seriously it’s exceptionally important and a lot of people resonate with.

[0:32:45] Charlie Hoehn: Is that - play a part in quadrupling your IQ that you talk about in chapter 11?

[0:32:51] Kevin Lawrence: No. Quadrupling your IQ is about having the best advisors all around you in every area of work, self and life. You can’t know it all yourself but I call it having at least 24 experts a text message away and it’s relying on their brains and look, a lot of people that are mediocre in terms of their achievements have the mindset as “I need to do it myself,” or “I need to know it myself,” and that is a very slow scarcity oriented mindset and it doesn’t go that far. So it’s just about having a whole team of experts that can help you in anything and everything so you move ahead quickly on things and it’s extremely powerful and it could be as formal as a board of advisers you have to having a great massage therapist or lawyer or nutritionist or councilor or gardener or tree expert or a person who can clean your house or experts on anything and everything.

[0:33:52] Charlie Hoehn: I love that, yeah that makes total sense.

[0:33:55] Kevin Lawrence: It does because it makes you smarter and it’s a lot faster.

[0:33:58] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:33:59] Kevin Lawrence: The key on that though, there’s two things on that that’s very logical but there’s two things about them. They need to be what I call 14X advisers, they need to have done what you want to do at least 14 times before. Don’t be someone’s guinea pig. Yeah, okay 10, nine, eight, seven but not three, not zero. So it’s you want the seasoned - for example, I go back to racing. You know I’m near the racetrack where I like to go and play with my friends. And when I get the person to coach me, there’s this guy named Stephan. He’s in his early 20s but he races Porsche Cup cars. He’s one of the fastest people in – actually there’s two instructors, Scott and Stephan. They are the two of the fastest Porsche Cup car racers in North America. So when I wanted to learn to drive faster, I ask them, not my buddy, right? I get the best people in North America when I want to get my own coaching so that I can become more like the best. You learn from a novice, you become a better novice. You learn from a pro, you become a better pro. And a lot of people they don’t use the 14X. So pay a little bit more and just get the best if you want to be the best. The second thing is there has to be a good fit. So these two guys, Stephan and Scott, they are great instructors for me and I’ve learned lots from both of them and I get along really well with both of them but if there wasn’t a good fit, it doesn’t matter how effective they are. You’re not going to get that much better anyways because it doesn’t take if you don’t have a good fit with those advisers. So 14xers and a great fit.

[0:35:24] Charlie Hoehn: Got it. So Kevin, I am curious at this point, you’ve done a lot of coaching, you do a lot speaking, made a big impact on these executives, these leaders, what’s been your personal favorite transformation or success story that you’ve seen with the people you’ve worked with?

[0:35:43] Kevin Lawrence: That’s a great question. You know there’s so many, I was having breakfast with my daughter yesterday and she’s 12 and just talking to her about work and thinking forward if she has ideas of what she wants to do when she finishes her school and I said, “You know the greatest thing you could do with your life, the most fulfilling and rewarding is when you’re somehow helping other humans,” which I was explaining to her about why I love what I do and how it just feels great. And I do it constantly and love it. So you know there’s so many different ones. I mean it’s nonstop. I will tell you the story which is kind of the first story in the book which the guy has become a great friend of mine named Nigel. I could probably tell you 50 stories because everyone I work with goes through transformations at different times. I got one, another guy I won’t say his name because it’s not in the book but he’s a guy that took over their family business. And was not capable of running it and the stress was destroying him. He was totally ineffective and over the last couple of years, he’s gone from a three out of 10 CEO to probably about a solid seven and he’ll get to a nine. It’s a lot of work but he actually didn’t think he could it. He actually didn’t think he’d be able to run his own business. He had someone else run it for a while and they just destroyed it. So that’s pretty darn exciting when you see someone who can’t or - I’ve got another CEO I worked with, I had two CEO’s I’ve worked with last year that one sold their business for close to a billion dollars. One sold for close to half a billion dollars and there was lots of growth and achievements obviously to do that. From a business side, those are very exciting but to go back to the story of Nigel and it’s a very common story. When I first met him, he hated his business. He hated it and he was already very, very successful. He would go to his business and he would put his hand on the door knob to go in the back door and he would feel like he was getting electrocuted emotionally. He hated it that much. So long story short, Nigel is also a guy who can’t sit still like a lot of really successful entrepreneurs has ADD and dyslexia. So our first meeting, we sat down for about 30 minutes and he said, “Hey, let’s go for a walk and we’ve been going for a walk for the last 12 plus years every time since. We would sit down and have breakfast or lunch at the end of a walk but we’d walk for two to three hours and talk it all out. And Nigel has dialed in everything in his business and his life. He has the dream that everybody wants, literarally and it’s very rare. So his business got dialed in and we found a way to exit his partner and set it up now that he’s got a new partner that runs the business day to day. Nigel works on the strategic things that he loves and that part couldn’t be better. It was challenges with kids, with different challenges along the way which we worked through and help one of his kids to graduate that normally never would have graduated and seeing that kid go on to do amazing things. Actually all of his kids are great and working through all of the challenges that he has gone through to the point where I would suggest that almost every area of his life would be in the nine out of 10 range which is exceptional. And by the way, when we first started you know what his solution was? He was going to just give the business away or sell it for whatever and go sell t-shirts on the beach and he wasn’t joking. He wanted out. So his was pretty darn – he’s wrote a new book called Take That Leap that released pretty recently where he shares his stories. He’s got some wild stories so I think that’s another one. This other one where I told you about the CEO who thought something was wrong with him. And that he was weak that was a two out of 10 almost mentally after going through some crazy stuff and now is doing really well. His was pretty cool too because my belief is if he didn’t come to me when he came to me and get the help he got, I don’t know where he would be today but it would not be pretty and both in terms of business commercially and inside his own head. So it is like asking me which one is my favorite kid is, right? There’s just so many great stories. The root of it is what I have seen, here’s the best of it all, it’s all very predictable. All problems are solvable if you take the time to understand the root of the problem and fix the root of it. And whether it’s people problems or business problems or partner problems, every issue in business can be dialed in. To me, it has actually become very simple. To take a person who is driven, really motivated and wants to learn it in a row and hardworking. In almost every single case, we can get them what they want or very, very close to what they want. It’s just hard work and good strategy or knowing where to focus your energy. That’s the part I love. I feel like I have got a degree of mastery of helping to build a high performing businesses and to grow higher performing CEOs that it is, yeah it’s fun. I love it.

[0:40:29] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I can tell. I know you have more clients right now than you’re able to take on basically at your capacity for coaching but if people want to get in touch with you for speaking or potentially working with you, what’s the best way for them to do that?

[0:40:47] Kevin Lawrence: Just go to the website which is lawrenceandco.com and reach out and you know I have other coaches I can refer people to that want help. I am building a network of coaches around the world that can help people to work on the tools in the book and master the tools and principles in the book. For myself, I’m interested in speaking and helping a lot more people. You know I’ve spent more than 20 years working with amazing leaders around the world learning what I have learned. And I feel it’s been a great gift and I really, really want to share that with a lot more people. So yeah, if you’re interested in me speaking in an event or you want to learn more and get some help, just reach out to us so we can help you get the right help. There’s one last thing I wanted to share if that’s all right and if you go back to the title of the book, Your Oxygen Mask First, the main premise of the book, the real main premise is if you don’t do the things you need to do for yourself and if you take those passion ratios and give yourself 10 or 15% of your best energy, you’re not going to do it. Or if you do it, you’re not going to be happy at the end and you’ll make a big mess. So the key thing I talk about with these leaders again and again and again and I think it is early in the book and it’s chapter two – three, sorry Double your Resilience, it’s probably the most important chapter everyone needs to focus on and this is What Your Oxygen Mask First is about. It is about figuring out what you need to do to be your best and it breaks out into three simple categories, body mind and spirit. You have heard of it all before but what do you need to do to yourself physically, what do you need to do for your mind which is in the direction of meditation or writing or something that strengthens and clarifies your mind and what do you need to do for your spirit so you stay inspired and full of passion and joy and that is the one that most people mess up on the most. They’re usually very committed to their work, they do what they know what they need to do for their family, they want to do for their family but when push comes to shove, people self-sacrifice. And they generally self-sacrifice too much until they end up in the hospital or in a financial mess or their brains go to mush. So the one thing I really leave with is that chapter three, you must master and even if you’re good at it, you need to be great because that’s the one that separates the people who can endure and continue this wonderful crazy journey and do what they want from those who end up falling by the wayside. Whether it’s they say that it’s not for them or they get burnt out or they give up, whatever happens to be that is a really, really key piece.

[0:43:16] Charlie Hoehn: The book is Your Oxygen Mask First, Kevin Lawrence thank you so much.

[0:43:21] Kevin Lawrence: Thanks, it’s been fun.

[0:43:24] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to Kevin Lawrence for being on the show. You can buy his book, Your Oxygen Mask First, on amazon.com. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about book with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.