I’m so honored to have Vince Poscente as my guest on Straight Talk Radio. As the author of The Age of Speed, Vince has cracked the code on dealing with Change in the fast paced world that we live in.
If you’d like to hear the show click here: Vince Poscente on Straight Talk Radio with Chuck Gallagher
Now here’s the transcript of the show: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/straight-talk-host-chuck-gallagher/id850468894?i=298455771&mt=2
Tired of traditional talk? People pontificating about this or that? The left or the right? Sometimes the truth is just off lost in the noise. Having learned life lessons the hard way, Chuck Gallagher, international speaker and author, cuts through the noise to share truth through transparency!
Nationally-known guests talk about what’s important to you – your life, your concerns and your success. So tune in, turn on to Straight Talk with Chuck Gallagher.
Now, here’s your host, Chuck Gallagher.
CHUCK: Well, we are in for a ride today here on Straight Talk Radio. Hi, this is Chuck Gallagher and we are here to discuss issues and ideas that can transform your life. It is time to cut through the noise and get straight to the point about issues that you care about. And today, well, we have a great show lined up for you.
Back in 2006 I had the privilege of kicking off my speaking career in Dallas, Texas, Big D, and I’ll never forget, a very dear friend of mine suggested that if you want to be great, follow in the lead of great people. And then she said, “Check out Vince Poscente, he’s one of the best.” Well, she was right. Vince is a powerful force to be reckoned with. He wows audiences from coast to coast and internationally. Vince has captured the attention of people literally worldwide.
So I have to start off with, I know this is radio, but if you haven’t seen Vince in person, if you ever have the opportunity, you need to do that. Vince has a powerful story that at the beginning it will keep you on the edge of your seat. Literally. Now, I have to say this, radio is great, but it really can’t come close to the visual ride that Vince takes his audiences on as he captures their imagination and attention.
Vince Poscente is the CEO of the Goal Acceleration Institute and is frequently invited to help organizations dedicated to reach big goals in less time. His talent as a master communicator includes his formula used to go from, listen to this now, recreational skier to Olympian in four years. We’ve got to talk about that, because that to me is amazing. We’ve just finished the Winter Olympics and I can’t imagine how that took place so that’ll be fun, but as a New York Times best-selling author on the topics of reaching goals fast, Vince combines his signature wit and wisdom with a high-energy message for corporate and association events. He is one of the most in-demand speakers in the world.
So, to help us answer some of those pesky life questions and to get straight to the point here on Straight Talk Radio, I’d like to welcome my friend and guest, Vince Poscente. Vince, it is great to have you on the show.
VINCE: Well, I’m thrilled to spend time with you, Chuck, and also the listeners as well. Let’s get after it, let’s get some traction here.
CHUCK: All right. Listen, I’d love to start the conversation about your New York Times best-selling book, The Age of Speed, but first, I’ve got to ask you to share with our audience a bit about your background, especially from recreational skier to Olympian in four years. How’s that possible?
VINCE: Well, [laughs] when you consider that I was the second chair clarinet player in a high school band…
[Chuck and Vince laugh]VINCE: There was definitely a slow learner capacity in my world because they just didn’t quite figure it out for years. I remember seeing the opening ceremonies on TV, the Montréal Games, I’m 14 years old. And you know those moments in your life when you’re just captivated and that opening ceremony, electricity was coming out of the TV. I mean, the athletes marching for their countries, and I thought, “That would be the coolest thing. How cool would it be to be an Olympic athlete?” And the seed was planted, but that was it, and it wasn’t until 12 years later that I woke up and said, “If you don’t commit to something, if you don’t engage, it’s not going to happen.” You know what I’ve done? I had a friend in high school who had passed away and, man, I was 16 years old, she was 17 years old. Her name was Jill Cudric, and until listening to the eulogies as a teenager, and I know we can all relate do this, as teens we thought we’d live forever.
CHUCK: Right.
VINCE: The sense of immortality set in and I thought, “Wait aminute, it might not last forever,” so I started to realize, “You’ve got to do everything at least once.” So I used to do all sorts of things; skydiving, hang gliding, diving with sharks. Not because I was like a bucket list, I call it the “butt shows up” list. Right?
CHUCK:[chuckles] Okay.
VINCE: So the answer’s always yes. If something shows up, say yes. And at one point luge showed up. I’m living in Canada, and I said, “Yes, I’ll give it a shot.” And then the seed that had been planted at 14 started to grow and I started to realize, “Wait a minute, I could be in the Olympic Games in luge,” until the coach of the national team told me, under certain terms, there wasn’t a chance I was going to make it into the Olympic team and then why not try it for nine years from now instead of five. So I quit, I quit luge and then ended up watching the luge event or the opening ceremonies in Calgary and then realize that I made a mistake. I’m not saying that I know I would have made the luge team, but I watched buddies of mine marching in the opening ceremonies and it was this realization at 26 years old, “Unless you commit, it’s not going to happen.” So I put together a very detailed program and over time that evolved and became very dedicated to mental training and then competed in the Olympics in Albertville in a sport called speed skiing, which my fastest speed, the national record [06:30] for years, was 130 mph.
CHUCK: On the skies?
VINCE: Yeah. So, since the Olympics and because I went from a recreational skier to an Olympian in such a short period of time, I became fascinated with the topic of speed and how to accelerate goals and have since then become a student of that and then written six books. Really it has been a fun ride in sharing how we can get further, faster and enjoy the ride along the way.
CHUCK: Well, that’s incredible! No.1, I always loved the intro for the live audiences because if we’re talking about capturing that imagination, you must have some fascination with [07:18] speed because skydiving at 135 mph on two things strapped to your legs! That’s kind of amazing. But, Vince, you did write the New York Times best-selling book, The Age of Speed, and that’s one of your latter books, so tell me, what was the motivation to write that book?
VINCE: It actually started with this whole realization that we want things to happen faster for us. We want faster service, we want faster delivery, we want faster Wi-Fi, everything! We want things to happen faster for us, but we don’t want to go faster. [laughs] We’re in the age of speed. Everything’s going faster, yet everybody is sitting around going or complaining or realizing, “Hey, this is going too fast!” And if the speed of change is overwhelming, what do I do? The genesis of this book came out of teaching my daughter to ride a bicycle. If you have kids, you know what I’m talking about.
CHUCK: Right.
VINCE: I gave her a two-worded advice: Keep pedaling.
CHUCK: Right!
VINCE: If you think of the human psyche, do we want to go fast first or do we want to have balance first? And that’s why learning to ride a bicycle is difficult because we want balance before anything. That’s our instinct, that’s our human nature. Yet, in order to get balance, you have to pick up speed, and in The Age of Speed to be able to pick up speed has a realm of things that would influence it back to work for you so that you do enjoy it more. I’m going to say this real quick, I got reviews on the book from reviewers that clearly didn’t read the book.
[Chuck and Vince laugh]VINCE: Because they got this notion that I don’t want my life to go faster and that’s not what it’s about! Unless I wrote a crappy book, but the point is that in a world that is going faster and faster, how can we actually enjoy this discretionary time that appears along the way instead of filling it up with more busy work and feeling like we have to go faster? So there is an art to going fast and feeling like you’re slow at the same time. It’s almost like writing in the inside of a BMW, or a Lexus, or a Cadillac where in the car it’s quite, and you’re listening to Maroon 5, and you’re tapping your fingers to the steering wheel. Yet, outside, if you’re standing by the road, standing still, not moving, this car going by, like [makes a whoosh sound], it would be chaos around you. So how can we have that experience in our lives?
CHUCK: Wow. I have to say, and I have read the book, but I really like the analogy that in order to find balance, you have to go fast, or at least you have to have a certain amount of speed to get there and I really don’t think that many people connect those two things together. And you’re absolutely right, the analogy of cars are a wonderful analogy because, in fact, once you find that certain speed, that comfort level, than it really is balanced and, sure enough, we have more time in many cases. We just get caught up in what I call ‘mind sleep’ where we just feel like we have to do something and we miss the value that that balance brings to us.
VINCE: Yeah, and we’ve got to constantly be checking in. I wrote the freaking book on it and a few months after it was released, I was at Albert’s, and I made a deal with my wife. I said, “I’ll do everything. I’ll do anything. The one thing that I just don’t want to do is go grocery shopping. I just hate it.”
[Chuck laughs]VINCE: So I was at Albert’s [laughs], picking up groceries, and there were three lines and there were, my Gosh, about six people [11:28] in. I mean, we all showed up at the same time seemingly, and I looked to the right and there was a self-checkout kiosk. This was four or five years ago. But nobody was in that line! Nobody was going through self-checkout and I’ve written a book and I went, “Wait a minute!” And I went through the self-checkout, I’ve never done it. It went bip-bip-bip and I was done and then I had, let’s say, ten extra minutes. Now, the impulse in The Age of Speed is to feel that discretion, that extra time with more busy work. Well, that means I can get this done. You know, PDAs have facilitated all sorts of efficiently, but we’re filling it with more busy work or social media. Oh, my Gosh!
So on the drive home, then I went, “Wait a minute. I’m going to make a conscious decision to pull my daughter aside and take her… She did ask me over and over to go to the dog par with our dog Annie. So I said, “Hey, do you want to take Annie to the dog park?” Her eyes lit up and she said, “Yeah!” So when we make a conscious decision to use that time we’ve saved in the age of speed, then we’re enjoying life and connecting with people more. That is the point.
CHUCK: That is the point and my guest is Vince Poscente. This is Chuck Gallagher with Straight Talk Radio. We’re going to go on a quick commercial break. We’ll be back in a few and you will not want to miss the rest of this show. Straight Talk Radio with Chuck Gallagher. Join us in just a few.
[Commercial break]CHUCK: This is Chuck Gallagher and we’re with Straight Talk Radio and if you’re just joining us, my guest is Vince Poscente. He is an international speaker and author and a man who is a thought leader when it comes to dealing with change and the speed of change. We’ve spent some time here in the early part of the show talking about his new book, The Age of Speed.
Vince, you obviously use a lot of business examples in the book, but yet I get a clear impression that the principles that apply to work in business also apply to work in your personal life. So did you intend it to be kind of both?
VINCE: Oh, yeah, yeah. There is such a blend happening today. Just the dynamics of our lifestyle is where at work, we’re arranging kids’ stuff or a doctor’s appointment or to get the dog to a laundromat, or whatever they call it.
[Chuck and Vince laugh]VINCE: And when we’re at home, we’ve got our PDAs, our iPhones, and we’re working on stuff, maybe sometimes at 11, 12 at night so this overlap is happening everywhere. On top of that, I think, most of us are very curious about what makes us [14:32]. Why do we do what we do? My life’s work has been able to say why do we what we do and how come we do that better and I’m on the path with everybody else. I mean, I’m trying to figure it out with the rest of us, but very much made a student of that dynamic.
CHUCK: Not only change but the speed of change, and I have to say, I’m amazed at what’s changed in the past five years and it’s kind of hard to grasp just how dramatic change will be for all of us in the next five. From your perspective in our age of speed, how are people dealing with the speed of change?
VINCE: Yeah. Well, if you’re listening in on this, you’re going to fit in one of the four categories and we’ve all done all four of these over time, so just know that as we lead to the fourth one, this is the one that seems the most optimal.
But the first is the Zeppelin, and that’s the individual, or a company for that matter, that resists any kind of change or the speed of change. The Zeppelin was a company that didn’t work out so well, obviously. A recent example of a Zeppelin Corporately would be Kodak. I mean, they own the images industry and they even invented the digital camera, but they were a Zeppelin. They had their arms folded they set on our terms and then they go bankrupt. I mean, 35,000 people out of work and families. It’s such a massive detriment to have that I-know-it-all mentality. And we know that, but there are times we’ve done that.
The second profile that we could show up as is to be a balloon and that’s the individual or a company that wants to float along. That’s your typical trial and error, what happens, happens, I’ll just organically, whatever goes. And the balloons can actually check out. They can actually check out a society altogether. I mean, I packed four years of education into six years. [laughs] And at one point under all this stress of going to college, I decided to take a year off and became a balloon, I just traveled around the world and visited backpacked and it was just an amazing year, so what a wonderful thing to be a balloon, especially in the world of the age of speed.
The third profile, and this is the one that’s almost celebrated in America and in a lot of the Western world, is bottle rocket. A bottle rocket is a person or a company that loves speed, execution. It’s all about execution. Make it happen, make it happen fast. Boom! Boom, boom! The king of that would have been Dell Computers. They had tours of their facilities on how quickly their supply change management and how they executed so fast, but a bottle rocket is a firework that just takes off. You don’t know exactly where it’s going to go, and then it blows up! Dell was the no.1 computer maker and now it’s not. It’s playing catch-up because they only focused on speed and not the balance necessary to sustain the ability, I should say, to be able to harness this and to be able to be in control.
That story I opened with about my daughter riding a bicycle, once she got the balance on this bike, she picked up speed. She was like, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy! I got it!”and then bam! She went riding in the back of a cow because she wasn’t looking.
[Chuck and Vince laugh]VINCE: We can embrace speed, but unless we harness it, that is a huge issue. So the fourth profile is the jet and that’s the individual or company that has these three qualities in the book The Age Of Speed, which is alignment, agility and aerodynamics. So, you’re one of those four profiles and to be alive, to be agile, to be aerodynamic or efficient is [18:47] to have that lifestyle you, we all want, which is to feel like we’re not overwhelmed that we’re feeling like we have some sense of control. And overwhelm is, you know when you’re speaking, every single audience we speak to. We even see it in their eyes. People are just overwhelmed!
CHUCK: Oh, yeah.
VINCE: There is just a ton on their plate.
CHUCK: I really like the analogies that you use to kind of define us. I have to say, [19:14] humor by because when you said the balloon, I thought, “That’s my son.” Well, one of them, I have two, and he’s just kind of floating around right now, which absolutely drives his parents crazy because we’re like, “Dude, you’re missing the point,” but like you said, you took a year off and backpacked and did whatever and you know no words [19:38]. So it would appear that you could be one of these, but yet recognize, “Hmm, maybe I’m in a place that is not going to give me maximum opportunity or output.” So if you find yourself as a Zeppelin or a balloon or a bottle rocket, how do you change?
VINCE: Well, I think, what’s the Alcoholics Anonymous where they say, “Admission is the first step or … Admitting you have a problem?”
CHUCK: Right.
VINCE: I don’t know. I haven’t tried the alcoholism thing. [laughs] Anyway, the whole notion of saying, “Hey, wait a minute, I’ve got my arms folded here. I am being resistant. I am not being curious.” Of those three things if you could focus on the first, alignment. Being aligned is about having such clarity of what your emotional quotient is and find your emotional quotient, which is a thought that creates a physical reaction where you think about accomplishing or building something or being a part of something, and that thought alone gives a physical reaction. That’s an indication of alignment and then staying in that mode of alignment is also contagious with other people.
CHUCK: Yeah. It is fascinating and, of course, I’m sure you’ve seen it, especially in the sports world and you’ve have a really unique opportunity that most people never have to connect with some of these folks, but if you are aligned, or I guess some people would call it ‘in the zone’, boy, that’s contagious.
VINCE: Oh, you can’t help it to pick up on it. I went at the dentist’s one day and he had this fish tank. I thought, “That’d be cool to get one of those,” so I Googled salt water tanks and up pops Dallas North Aquarium. I call this number and the owner of the company, this guy’s name is John Holcomb, said some on salt water fish. He said, “Oh, you’re going to love these fish,” and I’m thinking, “Get a life, pal!”
[Chuck and Vince laugh]VINCE: I mean, it’s sushi swimming around!
[Chuck laughs]VINCE: And he says, “You’ve got to come down to the store,” and I said,” I [22:02]. No, you have to come down! What are you doing right now?” I said, “Well, I guess I could come down.” So I got to the store and this John Holcomb guy was vibrating. I mean, he loved fish! I walked out of that store 35 minutes later holding a 3000-dollar receipt that had put on my American Express for fish, for fish tanks. It was the craziest thing! I went in there not knowing what was going on, but it was so contagious. His alignment, his emotional buzz around that fish, that then becomes something worth paying attention to because if somebody has that not only if they’re aligned, either people pick up on it.
CHUCK: Wow, that’s true. Okay, you had the three. If you’re the jet, go back for our listeners the three components. Alignment was the first. The second?
VINCE: The second is agility and I’m going to diverge from the book, The Age of Speed, a little bit.
CHUCK: Sure.
VINCE: Because it is so competitive in the marketplace today. The internet has facilitated so much competition everywhere that you need to change how you compete. Having the experience of raced in the Olympics and getting to the Olympics for that matter, my competition wasn’t locally or nationally. In order to race for your country, you have to be ranked, in Canada at least, top 16 in the world. So if you change your mind-set of who your competition is, it’s not a company, it’s not an organization, it is an individual and in this case it was the top 15 guys in the world were my competition and they’ve been racing since they were five years old. So what I’m asking your listeners to think about or to do is instead of trying to do what those top 15 people are not doing, do what they’re not willing to do because they may have a head start on you, they may have been racing since they were five years old, metaphorically. If you can do what the competition is not willing to do, you will discover things the competition hasn’t thought of. That makes you very agile in a changing landscape, and the landscape is changing so fast that this agility becomes even more important in accomplishing that.
CHUCK: You know, Vince, do what the competition is unwilling to do is, I think, incredibly powerful and before we come back from this next break, I want our listeners to understand, we’re talking with Vince Poscente, an international speaker and author, a man who is a thought leader, a New York Times best-selling author, and we’ve been talking about his book, The Age of Speed.
By the way, let me mention, you can sign up for his weekly 70 Second eBrief by visiting his website www.vinceposcente.com, and let me spell that, it’s V-I-N-C-E-P-O-S-C-E-N-T-E.com. Stay with us here on Straight Talk Radio. This is Chuck Gallagher and we’ll be back in just a few minutes with Vince and we’re going to talk some more about The Age of Speed and some other ideas that might help our listeners actually transform their lives. Stay with us.
[Commercial break]CHUCK: This is Chuck Gallagher with Straight Talk Radio and I am thrilled today to have Vince Poscente, an international speaker and author, as my guest. We have been talking about Vince’s book, The Age of Speed, and we’ve got a lot to really get into. I’m amazed at how quick this is going, Vince. I’m having a great time and I do want to mention, as I said as we ended up our last break, you might want go to Vince’s eBrief. I love this, it’s a 70 Second eBrief and you visit his website, vinceposcente.com, V-I-N-C-E-P-O-S-C-E-N-T-E.com.
Right before the second break, you made a comment and it really resonates with me. I’m a person who says in presentations that every choice has a consequence and having been the perpetrator of some really dumb choices and experienced the consequences from them, I know that to get my life back on track, I am absolutely convinced that the only way that was going to happen was to be willing to do what other people were unwilling to do. I know from personal example, if in fact you do that, there is nowhere to go but up.
You mentioned then the jet. You had several examples at The Age of Speed. You said the jet was the optimum way to thrive faster now in the world. You mentioned two components of that. Let’s go to the third. First was alignment, second agility and the third?
VINCE: Aerodynamics. Now, a jet is aligned, obviously. A jet is agile, but it is absolutely aerodynamic and think of aerodynamics in your life as eliminating drag. If you are more efficient, then you will get things done faster and well. This isn’t a world of just about speed because often in the past, speed was associated with poor quality. Well, now, that’s not the case. If you get me something fast, that’s my minimum expectation. And if it’s a quality thing, that’s why I page you. In the days gone, it was if you want it fast, quality is not going to be there or the price is going to go up. Everybody wants it fast, they want the quality there and they want it for the best price. If you can’t provide that, the Internet is a great equalizer and there’s something I heard called Yelp [28:27] of our world.
[Chuck chuckles]VINCE: I just had my transmission changed on my car and because it was an older car, there was no warranty on it and I absolutely got annihilated by this company that starts with two As and ends with MCO.
[Chuck and Vince laugh]VINCE: Anyway, these guys were actually mind-boggling how the price was high, the speed was low and the quality of the service… I mean, I was just so put off by these guys that I went on. I don’t want to take a shot at a business, but I’m going to go Yelp and say, “Whatever it takes, avoid these people. This was my experience and you go there, go in with eyes wide open.” That great equalizer means that we need to be able to eliminate those things that cause drag.
Let’s think of drag in two ways. It’s funny, I thought of this after I wrote the book so I’m glad you’re listening in on this. Microdrag are the things that, on a daily basis, you’ll see this in the book about interruptions and multitasking. Here’s some statistics for you: We are interrupted on average 11 minutes into any task. This is an average in the US and Canada. To get back on task takes 30 minutes if you get back on task at all. In other research found that 80% of interruptions are of little or no value. If you anticipate interruptions lasting, let’s say, 10 minutes, last year, Chuck, you spent 744 hours of interrupted time of little or no value.
CHUCK: Wow!
VINCE: Listen carefully. Right now spent 744 hours of interrupted time of little or no value. So if we want to be more efficient and eliminate drag, figure out how to manage those interruptions and if you’re in a position or a job where it’s all about interruptions, also know that microdrag has something to do with multitasking. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you’re on the operating table and Dr. Jim Currie is operating on you. You’ve got something to do with one of your bones in your feet, right?
CHUCK: Right.
VINCE: Well, this guy specializes in broken bones in the feet. I think there’s a term for that.
CHUCK: Yeah, broken bones in the feet, but that’s okay.
[Chuck and Vince laugh]VINCE: I played man hockey and I was out there and I stopped a slapshot but with my foot and it broke my first metatarsal. They gave me the X-ray and I looked at it, “Yep, that’s broken,” but the nurse said she had to walk it down to Dr. JIm Currie and ask him what he wanted to do, how to proceed. Now, if you’re a fan of multitasking and you want to defend multitasking but you are now on the operating table and he’s about to look at my X-ray, are you still a fan of multitasking? Not so much.
CHUCK: No, absolutely. You’re right.
VINCE: What he did was he was in a very significant activity, which was working on you, and what he had to do was finish what he was doing to make sure everything was stable, then turn and go over to that X-ray, look at it, say, “Yes, this is displaced, we’re going to have to pin plait it and pin it. Book him for two weeks from now.” And then he stopped what he was doing with the X-ray, came back to you, refocused, picked up where he knew he had to pick up and then went from there. So multitasking is not about doing two significant things at the same time. It’s absolutely intentional; one thing and then turn your attention to the other. If everybody’s nodding, “Oh, I get that,” well, how about this? Have you ever been on a conference call? There’s many people on the conference call and then you see something on your screen and you go, “Oh, that email. I’ve been waiting on that,” so you click it, you start reading the email and then you hear this, “So, Chuck, what do you think?”
[Chuck and Vince laugh]CHUCK: Yeah, I’ve had that happen, oh, that is not good.
VINCE: Yeah! Oh, it’s embarrassing and you just go, “Ummmm… Could you repeat the question?” If you mitigate the damage from interruption or, actually, reframe multitasking, you’ve taken two giant leaps forward in eliminating drag on the microlevel and very quickly the macrolevel is about, let’s put it this way, when fear is high and confidence is low, that creates a gap. Let’s look at the economy we just came through or somebody that was afraid of losing their job or whatever. If they have high fear and low confidence, then that gap between those two impedes performance and when performance is impeded, it goes down. When performance is down, your results are down.
So what we’ve always done in the past is looked in our results and say, “You know what? I need better results so I just need to do things differently. I need better performance.” You have to go back to the gap between fear and confidence and flip that. You have to have high confidence and low fear. And a very, very quick solution on that is a simple decision prior to every race run, and this is what I learned in ski racing. I found that if I just decided, even though I was terrifying to think I was about to ski at 125 mph or 135 mph in that case in the Olympics, I made a decision prior to every race run to have fun. I just said, “I’m going to have fun. I’m just going to have fun.” In that mind-set set [34:53] flip the gap of fear and confidence where fear became low and confidence was high in a mental state, then performance goes up and the results go up. So, that’s worth remembering, that one.
CHUCK: That’s absolutely true, Vince. I really like the idea of fear and confidence and I think that’s important for the listeners to kind of connect with because, you’re absolutely right. When the recession hit, confidence was low, fear was high, and there were lots of people who lost lots of things, money, investments and their 401(k) and so forth, and yet, those people who were confident that… The ocean comes in and the ocean comes out. Well, you know that there is ultimately going to be a shift the other way, so those people who acted confidently in the recession have turned out to have some incredible results today. Disney is one of the examples of that.
VINCE: Yeah, well, look at Warren Buffett! When the recession hit and all these companies were at Bargain Basement, what did he do? He didn’t get catatonic. He was buying stuff!
CHUCK: Oh, yeah!
VINCE: Do you know what he’s buying right now? He’s buying publishing companies. Think about it. I mean, it’s confidence and publishing and they go, “Oh, there’s no money in print. We’ve got to sell. Mayday, mayday! Get off the ship!” And Warren Buffet goes, “Thank you very much!” You watch, in five or ten years from now, how that’s going to work out for him and Berkshire Hathaway. To have confidence is just to say, “Have confidence.” Confidence comes from experience. What if we don’t have experience with a five-year recession? Then of course we’re going to have impeded confidence and we’re going to be tempted or whatever.
So it is this stretch that is absolutely necessary and is putting everybody uncomfortable, but it the antithesis of overwhelm if you can just engage, if you start to move forward. You are alive, you are agile and you are aerodynamic. This plays out. You and I both together, we’ve had some accomplishments in our lives, but it wasn’t over night. I mean, it was just a constant drip of being able to stay the course.
CHUCK: Absolutely. Absolutely! We’re going to go to a break here in just a minute, but I had an interesting conversation with a neighbor the other day. She insisted on writing notes and letters and using the postal service. She said, “You know, those are nice people who work for the post office and if we don’t use the system, they might lose their jobs,” and she didn’t want that to happen. Now, I have to say I admire her compassion, but I thought to myself, “Wait a minute. There are so many disruptive things taking place with robotics and changes in technology and writing books and publishing, as you mentioned, even how we’re able to create this radio show.” All that being true caused me to think about how many people can so easily become displaced or unemployed because life has moved past their skill set. So, we’re going to go to a break. This is Chuck Gallagher with Straight Talk Radio and when we come back, my guest is Vince Poscente. We’ve been talking about the book, The Age of Speed, but, Vince, we’re going to whirr away from that a little bit, perhaps talk about displacement and what people can do to really work through the age of speed. So join me here on Straight Talk Radio, we’ll be back from the break in just a minute.
[Commercial break]CHUCK: Well, welcome back! This is Chick Gallagher with Straight Talk Radio and my guest for this hour has been Vince Poscente, an international speaker and author, a man who is a thought leader when it comes to dealing with change and the speed of change. He’s a New York Times best-selling author, he wrote the book The Age of Speed, and another book we’re going to talk about in just a little bit, called The Ant and the Elephant. I think you’ll find that to be interesting, but for anybody that has an interest in someone that absolutely captivates audiences, visit his website vinceposcente.com, V-I-N-C-E-P-O-S-C-E-N-T-E. Vince, thanks for joining us.
Before we went to break, I shared a brief story about my neighbor who is concerned about, I’m going to say, keeping the status quo. She wants to continue to use technologies that are slowly becoming obsolete because she’s concerned that people could lose their jobs and they may not be able to replace them. So, in and out our age of speed, how do we talk to people who are, let’s say, baby boomers that all of a sudden find, “Gosh, what I’ve been doing no longer is needed or useful.”
VINCE: I was watching TV and this was a couple, three, four years ago, and the newscast was about how people couldn’t find jobs and this guy got on there and he had a lineup of people behind him and he was just passionately going, “I can’t find a job! I can’t find a job! I’ve been trying to find a job and I can’t find a job!” And I was sitting there going, “Well, sell something!” [laughs] I’m still teased about seeing that because in this country alone there are 20 million small businesses that are driving our economy. These 20 million businesses can grow and provide more jobs for people as they move forward. Instead of being in the mind-set of, “I need to go find a job,” sell something, create something. If your listeners are on there, I hope, and this is what I do at my coaching practice, as I help people develop this small-business mentality. If you don’t have your own company, you don’t have a company ID, then get one because then everything becomes a catch right off and then you’re able to maybe grow something of significance where you have control of your life. So this coaching stuff that I take people through is to be able to have this kind of small-business mentality and create something, build something, sell something, be a part of something that you have control of and that is the future of this country.
CHUCK: Vince, I have to say, I absolutely agree with that. I’ve been in both worlds. I’ve been in the world of, we’ll call it, corporate America where I’m an employee, subject to the whims of those people who are senior to me, and I’ve been in my own business, and I’m in my own business today. It’s a world of difference whenever you control what’s taking place in your life versus someone else who decides that, “Oh, well, in the interest of whatever, we’re going to cut back and we no longer need your services.” But I can’t no longer need my services because I’m the one that’s creating the experience where the services are needed.
Now, I’ve got to ask you a question and I think this is important for the folks who are listening to Straight Talk Radio. You have, on your website, that you talk about coaching, you offer coaching, and it’s getting big goals in short order. So tell us a little bit about how that coaching works? If somebody is listening to this show and say, “You know, I like that guy and I need some help.” How does that work for you?
VINCE: Well, the foundation of what we do is, you referred to it earlier, the book The Ant and the Elephant, and The Ant and the Elephant is a 5-step process of clarifying your vision, committing to it, executing consistently, the five Cs, creating confidence, we’ve talked about that, and then the final seize control. How you maintain control leading into a sale or negotiation or speed or just a presentation, whatever. You want peak performance. The ant and the elephant concept is being able to create this very clear vision of your emotional buzz so as we coach people through this, let’s find out what lights you up. Is it making a difference in the world? Is it being able to be a part of something with a team? Is it being able to security? Make it very specific where you see it, smell it, taste it, touch it, hear it, all five senses. So there is all four things surrounding that. We actually put on webinars, I’ve got a free one. I don’t know when the listeners will hear this, but the next one is April 1 at noon. You just go to my website and you’ll be able to see. Register for that.
The other stuff that we do in the future with coaching sessions and we do group coaching and I do executive coaching. I’ve coached CEOs of 6-billion dollar companies to the Chief of Protocol to the White House. So there’s some individual coaching. That’s really expensive.
[Chuck and Vince laugh]VINCE: But if you’ve got money, call us up. [laughs]
CHUCK: Look, if you’re going to get the best, you do have to pay for it and I respect that. Obviously, you wrote in the book The Ant and the Elephant, which by the way I think it’s just a classic title, I understand that’s really caught on especially with sports teams that are looking at using those processes that you have to really focus their vision on what they’re able to accomplish.
VINCE: Yeah, well, I wrote the book in 2004 and I self-published it. If you want a book to sit in your garage, just self-publish it. [laughs] But this book has just got attraction over the years and as I was reading Sports Illustrated, this was strange, about a year or maybe two years ago, and LeBron James was being interviewedabout his transition from Cleveland to Miami, and he attributed his ability to be able to do that well to the book The Ant and the Elephant. My eyes almost fell out! I kind of went, “What?” Then I just heard yesterday that the head coach from the Dallas Cowboys is using The Ant and the Elephant with his team.
Let me give you a real quick synopsis of it. The ant is a metaphor for the conscious mind and the elephant is a metaphor for the subconscious mind.
CHUCK: Right.
VINCE: Research done by a guy named Dr. Lee Pulos out of Vancouver found that in a second of time your conscious mind processes with 2,000 neurons and your subconscious mind processes with 4 billion neurons. So we can consciously make a decision, but it’s the subconscious mind that has to be engaged. Two thousand conscious in a second, four billion subconscious. The ratio between the conscious and subconscious is the exact same ratio between an ant and an elephant.
So your ant may say, “Hey, I want to go on a diet,” but the subconscious mind goes, “I don’t think so.” But, think of this, if you had your ant and your elephant headed in the same direction, how much easier would life get? How much easier in a world of drastic changes would things be? How much would it be almost like effortless the things that start to appear and happen to work for you? So create this alignment between your ant and the elephant and it just gets so much easier.
CHUCK: Well, that makes perfect sense. I do completely understand the circumstances of the subconscious to the conscious mind and I think if there’s anything that if I could wave the magic won, it would be, “Boy, I would sure like to reprogram some of the subconscious,” because you’re right, it would be a whole lot easier if everything was going in the same alignment.
VINCE: Yeah, that’s what our coaching does. I mean, we’re not psychotherapists here the Goal Acceleration Institute, but what we do is skip all that. Sure you’ve got child wounds, sure you did stuff when you don’t even remember that set you up to have a phobia or whatever. We’re not in that space. We’re in the space of being able to accomplish goals fast. One of the fastest ways to create that kind of alignment with your conscious and subconscious, you ant and the elephant, is to first find that emotional buzz and couple that with what you never want to experience again.
And I’m going to say this, this decision to go to the Olympic Games, how we started this whole thing, didn’t happen because I wanted to go to the Olympic Games. A lot of it was to do with standing at the opening ceremonies at the Olympic Games, seeing my buddies march in the opening ceremony and me in a stand for a ticket. That was a defining moment, it was a decision right then and there – never again.
So, get that state of the emotional buzz and what is absolutely unacceptable from today moving onward and you will start to dial into that alignment, your ant and elephant.
CHUCK: Folks, this is Chuck Gallagher with Straight Talk Radio and that was powerful. And let me do this. As we wrap up the show, let me encourage everyone to pick up a copy of Vince’s books The Age of Speed, which we first started talking about, and The Ant and the Elephant. You can find them at Vince’s website vinceposcente.com, V-I-N-C-E-P-O-S-C-E-N-T-E.com or you can visit Amazon and pick them up or probably pick them up in a book store near you. I know especially when The Age of Speed came out, I saw all over Barnes & Noble and it was exciting for me. I know you were excited, but I was like, “I know that guy!” It was really kind of cool.
I’ll also say, if your organization is planning a powerful meeting that seeks a truly inspirational presenter and the one that earns standing ovations time after time, visit Vince Poscente’s website. I’m sure he’d welcome the opportunity to talk with you.
Vince, thank you so much for joining me and to all our listeners, join us next week for more of Straight Talk, transformational talk radio to live by. This is Chuck Gallagher and remember every choice has a consequence. Here’s to the power of positive choices in this age of speed. Thank you and join us next week.
You’ve been listening to Straight Talk with Chuck Gallagher. Tune in each week on transformationtalkradio.com, each Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern, as Chuck Gallagher, international speaker and author, cuts through the noise to share truth through transparency. Nationally-known guests talk about what’s important to you – your life, your concerns, and your success. Visit gallagher.pcgdev.com for more information and turn on to Straight Talk with Chuck Gallagher.
