Where Did Steve's Extraordinary Journey Begin?

Do you struggle with fear, doubt, and worry in your public speaking? Do you find it difficult to connect with your audience and deliver presentations that leave a lasting, positive, unforgettable impact? If yes, then let's dive in the world of public speaking and presentation skills with your host, Eric Edmies. Welcome to the Unforgettable podcast, Steve.

Eric, I want to say thank you for being here. We've known each other a long time. It must be approaching 10 years or so.

Yeah.

Vail, Vail, Colorado. 10 years ago. We're not telling anybody the rest of that story. Let's just say there was. In any event, I've thought many times that the conversations that you and I have had and that you and I and our friends have had sitting around tables have made really great content. I've often thought it's a shame somebody wasn't recording. And that's what I think great podcasts are all about. So I'm glad to have you here to do this as part of our unforgettable podcast with Speaker Nation.

Cool.

So, you know, I. I want to get to a lot of different topics. I. I particularly want to talk about your take on spiritual energy relative to prosperity. I want to talk a little bit about the.

Yeah.

Your past books, future books. But I want to start with. With one kind of key thing, the foundational thing. It's like, where does it all start? So if I can give you the background. What I mean is, is that you and I know many of the, you know, great speakers and authors that are out there. And one day I made a joke at one of our, you know, kind of meetings. I made a joke that it looks like everybody in the room has found a way to make money from their dysfunction.

Yes, we've all.

And so I'm curious.

We put the fun back in dysfunction.

So I'm curious before you get out here, before you launch these books, before you get to work with all these great corporate clients, before you get to have that impact, what started you, what. Where was the moment where it's like, I have a message that I want to get out in the world. What gave you that?

I was a failed musician. I gave myself to 30 years old to make it in the music business, and I did not. And I loved the music and hated the business. The corporate side of the music business just was ugly. And so I put my guitar away and I didn't know what to do. And I had a really, really dear friend who handed me a book called the Dynamic Laws of Prosperity by a Unity minister named Catherine Ponder and I read it, and it was really challenging to me. It felt like some New Age metaphysical stuff. But I had nothing to lose. And one of the exercises in it I did, which was writing down an affirmation that a year or 40 weeks from today, I will be earning $1,000 a week. This was 1984, and I thought it was kind of pie in the sky. I didn't really believe it, but I was open to the possibility. And that opening to possibility and really taking responsibility like I stepped into, I'll do what it takes to make $1,000 a week. That was a real transformation that I was willing to do. But I started a project that did not pan out, but I wound up getting a job as a salesperson selling basement waterproofing and foundation repair right around the Great Lakes. So we had a lot of business. And exactly 40 weeks from the day I wrote that, I collected a check for over $1,000, like $1,036. And I said, there's on here. And so I began to really open up to a different possibility and began living by what I think of as principles and laws. Because what I noticed was there were a series of principles that highly successful people were using. And she spoke about this in the book, and she began speaking about also success laws and the distinction I would make. And you and I were speaking about this at dinner last night. Is that a principle is viable, right? Like the Golden Rule. Wish everybody lived by it. They don't. A principle can be violated. A law cannot. Gravity cannot be violated. So there are certain laws and principles, especially when we're talking about prosperity economics, that I began to study and adhere to. And the more that I worked these principles, these success principles and life laws, the more successful I became.

So, like with many of these things, it started off as your own exploration. Like, I'm in a position of lack. In your case, you had a dream, a dream that would have allowed you to capitalize on something you loved, which was music. And. And when the capitalization part of that didn't really work out, you're like, now I've got to work on the capital side. So I'm trying to figure that out. It starts off being, for lack of a better way of saying, it starts off being a selfish interest. I want to make more money.

Absolutely.

At what point does it become a. I'm onto something here, and it's something that I don't think other people see, and I want to share it with them. Where does that begin?

What an excellent question. It Begins in the commitment to practice a different level of discipline for me. I was undisciplined and I had a lot of fear and I was procrastinating and I was blaming others. And I read about the law of responsibility, that I'm 100% responsible for everything that happens in my life. Now, again, I really didn't believe it. I'm like, so if I get cancer, I'm responsible for that. But it began to influence my decisions. And I came up with a principle of my own from one of the books I read and I took it and I wanted to make it my own. And it happened through a happy accident. I'm driving down the road with a client that's now a best selling author, and he said, he asked me about discipline and I said, well, you know, I'm practicing hard easy. I was actually talking about something different than he was. And he goes, is that something new you're writing? In my last book, Prosperity Paradigm, I that book had already gone off to print, but I began. He said, what is hard easy? And I kind of winged it. And I said, well, you know, if you do the hard thing first, you make the rest of your life easy. But I started to realize that every second, each of us faces a decision in life. If we take what appears to be the hard path, we make our life easy. But if we take what appears to be the easy path, which I notice most of humanity does, easy to blame my parents, easy to blame the government, easy to blame society, Easy to blame my teachers or lack thereof, easy to blame my life conditions. And so I ended all that in that practicing of hard easy. That for me was the moment of change.

I think about that a great deal because it's not just easy to blame, it's also about actions. It's easier to eat sugar, it's easier to watch Netflix, it's easier to not write, you know, it's easier to not start your business. It's easier to not ask that girl out on a date. All those things are really easy, but they end up in difficulty. So that's. I wonder about that a lot because I think for the vast majority of human history, life was hard enough that we had to seek out ways to make things easy. You know, hunting, for example. Figuring out the bow and arrow made hunting a lot easier. And so for a lot of our history, seeking the easy path was, like, incredibly functional. But there came a point in our history where life was so damn easy that choosing the easy path became dangerous. And so I.

What was that point? Because you. It fascinates me. I know we share that philosophy. What do you think that point was? The crossover?

You know, I. I happen to think that agriculture probably did that to us. It was like the minute we didn't have to go out and hunt every day, and the minute we're just, you know, growing stuff and creating a sense of food security. Idle Mind is the devil's playground. And all of a sudden things start to get a little bit different there. And I think that that's on one side. It's what gave it. It's what birthed creativity. And I'll bet you some of the best music and writing and stuff was all born out of that capacity for freedom of thought. But at the same point in time, as a very good example, the minute you're growing food, guess what? You're making a choice about which food to grow. And your priorities are going to be what's easy to grow and what tastes good. And the minute you're choosing that, you're no longer choosing on nutrition. And so I think that's. Yeah, probably right about there is where I think it starts getting tough.

The other piece is to that, to add to that is convenience has made us practice easy, hard.

Yeah.

And it is the destruction of innovation in so many people and value creation, which I call sole purpose. And I don't think it's about. And I love Joseph Campbell's quote, follow your bliss. I do not tell you because one of my companies is called Sole Purpose Institute. And you were saying, what is the dovetail of spirituality? It's following your talent. It's what can you be really good at that you're already really good at that you don't. Can't be drudgery. You can't hate doing it. But like, my bliss was music. But the great truth is I'm a good guitar player and a good singer, but I'm not a great guitar player and a great singer. But the truth is my thirst for serving others, my thirst for knowledge. I'm a knowledge maven and I can be great at that. Potentially one of the best in the world. But it's. I believe it's a. It's a talent that you must follow that. It's. And your responsibility is to cultivate that talent and make it the best it can be. So following your bliss while I honor Joseph Campbell. No, follow the talent and cultivate that talent to be great at it and find a way to take that talent and serve another human being. Because dollars will follow the value you've Created for them.

Yeah. I've often thought about the whole follow your bliss idea. And it's again, I think it comes down to timeframes. The problem is that following our bliss used to be a survival strategy. Now the problem is we can follow short term bliss or we can follow medium or long term bliss. I sort of accidentally created a word, but Kirsty and I often talk about bliss. To me, you're in a moment of blissy. When you feel on purpose and you're enjoying it, when you feel completely destined, like everything seems to be lining up, the universe is delivering and you're enjoying the whole thing. That's bliss to me. You're following the right bliss, not the short term, sugary, immediate result bliss.

Well, the one thing we know about people that are in prison, studies have been done that say that 97-point.% of prisoners in prison have one common trait, which is the inability to delay gratification. Yeah. And so convenience has destroyed our food supply. Convenience has brought to us technologies that we don't have the consciousness to really use wisely. Because think about, right? Consciousness always exceeded technology, right? The consciousness to make a chair, then we make the chair. And now what we've had in the last, what, maybe 50 years, maybe not even, is that the technology has exceeded the consciousness for the first time in human history. And it's not a good thing.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's a, it's an interesting time which leads to this, you know, this issue of, you know, humans really enjoy learning from other people if the information is presented the right way. You know, and I don't think that's new. I think that's, that's, that's long term. I mean, I would say that going back to the very first fire, the.

Cognitive revolution, right there it is.

So these stories are coming out and they become part of the whole thing. And so I think as we head into what in some ways is the easiest time in history, we're also heading into one of the hardest times in history because of all of these things converging. And I think that's going to create a lot more value in the world for, you know, for good education and good storytelling and good experience. So, you know, when you, when you sort of found these things working in your own life and you. I just want to go back to something like when you talk about, you know, giving yourself until you were 30 with music. I mean, it must have been a very difficult thing to one day say, I'm done. I'm not going to get there.

I was so frustrated because I was so scarce. I was not making enough money. I had a child at the time who's now the COO of one of our companies, but she was, you know, in utero. And I was. It was just really, really frustrating to, you know, I was renting a home. I didn't own a home. I drove an okay car, but it was struggling over money, struggling over bills. It just became so frustrating. And also the lack of respect because music is looked at as some subtle, weird little entertainment sidebar thing instead of what it really can be, which is a beautiful piece of art. Transcendent and transcendent. So after having experienced how we were adulterated in the business, I actually put it away with great relief. I put my guitar in a closet, didn't touch it for three months. Wow. And went and got a job. And I started at the very bottom rung, which I was delivering pizzas at 29 years old. And that was really, really humbling. And it's exactly what I needed because I was in pride mode. I had a big ego about I'm going to be a rock star and all that crap. And that was really one of the best things because it humbled me. You know, you had a biblical quote earlier. I'll use this one. You know, he who would be exalted will be humbled. He who will be humble will be exalted. So humility. Start studying, learning and voraciously reading. And I became. Then I got a job as a salesperson. I became a really good salesperson. And I was sitting in three homes a day in upstate New York, over a 500 mile territory. 500 square mile territory, three homes a day, six days a week. And I really learned people. I did that for five years until I began having nightmares that I was running up and down the New York State highway and flame was coming out. I had a briefcase in my hand and I'm running down the highway with flame coming out. I'm like, I need to. Like, I think I'm coming to the end of this. And what I realized was I loved helping. I became kind of like the traveling sales manager for the company. And I liked helping people make the sale more than me making the sale for money. And I realized I really enjoyed helping teach people to be successful. And so I began reading books on success and all the goat books, Think and Grow Rich and Power of Positive Thinking, the Dale Carnegie Stales book, How to Win Friends, how to Win Friends and Influence People. And then I got the AG Mandino series and the OG Mandino really changed my life. That was one of the books that I began doing all the exercises out of. So I really started to become disciplined and that discipline and personal responsibility were really jumping off points for me. But I also realized that I was intelligent, but I was ignorant, you know.

A lot, but the glass is full.

I had the capacity, I'm not far from Einstein, but I had the IQ that I'm smart enough to, to do something good and do something big. But I needed to study. I didn't have knowledge. I realized, wow, I'm really, I'm not stupid, but I'm ignorant. So I began voraciously reading, which has continued to this day.

Okay, you know, since you think a lot about sort of the spiritual side of prosperity, I want to ask you a moment. I think a lot about the different frequencies or energies that people have about money. And so what happens for a lot of people is that they're initial purpose in making money when they're very young is for freedom, right? I'm going to go babysit so I can buy this, you know, video game that I want to play or song or concert ticket or something. But then you then move to another level. And then the new level is I'm making money because I have to. I'm making money because I have bills to pay. And then probably a lot of people find their way into debt now. They're making money to keep the wolves from the door, right? So they're making money as a moving away from exercise. They're making money to avoid pain. And there's two ways that I often think about that, that if they're making money to avoid pain, it's a little bit like you're running away from a grizzly in the forest, but you're looking at the grizzly, so God knows what you're running into. So a lot of people are living their lives financially like that. They're looking at their financial pain, but they're not looking ahead. And then the other problem is is that if you're being pushed from behind, any anything forward is away, right? So anything forward, any direction will do. And so if you ride your horse.

Faster, if you're coming from lack, you.

Might head that way way or that way. But there comes this transcendent moment where you are not in it for the money anymore. You're doing it for another purpose. And that purpose is due north or it's a particular direction. And now what's interesting is you start going only in that direction, which means Somebody offers you an opportunity to make money over there, you're not really interested because it's not about lack. So tell me what that was like for you, because I know you kind of transcended like, this one goal is I'm going to one day get to this place where I make $1,000 in this period of time. But then there comes another point where the knowledge, it becomes financially viable and you start choosing projects differently.

Yeah, that's a great, great question. So I have a deceased friend who I love a lot, and his name is Jeff Locker. And Jeff handed me the book Dynamic Laws of Prosperity by Katherine Ponder. And he taught me how to dress for success. I kind of was out on the streets at about 14, 16, not dissimilar from you. Interestingly, I heard your podcast, recent one with Jordan Peterson. I didn't know how to dress to meet people. And so he taught me how to dress for success. And I began studying how do we communicate to people? How do we have relationships? But what really happened, interestingly, was I've always had an interest in spirit. I've always had an interest in a higher power. I've always had an interest because of art. And I was very right brain dominant. My left brain was lagging behind. So I began to feed my left brain, the scientific side, the mathematics side. And what I found was that my friend Jeff had gotten a job working for Tony Robbins. He was selling Tony Robbins programs, putting people in seats for Tony Robbins. And he eventually broke away and started to take some of those principles from Brian Tracy and Zig Ziglar and Jim Rohn, which really, they were the purveyors of the. But Tony was the marketer of it. And Tony could deliver in front of an audience. Great speaker. Tony took a lot of those principles, packaged it, marketed, made it happen. Jeff saw what Tony did and did it for himself. And then he hit a roadblock. And he looked at me as kind of like his spiritual teacher. I was teaching him meditation and things like that. And one night he called me up and he said, listen, I'm in serious trouble. Like, I've built this huge life. I need a lot of money to fund the life. I've got a hotel rented for my next seminar. I've got nobody showing up. I don't even know what my message is anymore. We sat and talked for two hours. I just thought I was just helping my friend. But we hung up the phone like, midnight. And he calls me back at, like, two minutes later, and I go, miss me? You know, he said, if we ever packaged what you just taught me. And I said, I don't. I don't really know. I just. You're my friend, I love you. But what I was really talking about was the principles and the laws. And so we did that in the symposium. He wrote up a whole new synopsis for his symposium, and. And we delivered that. He put like 60 people in the room with that message. And at the end of that three days, the first time I ever spoke in front of people, two guys in the audience came up to me, both financial advisors, and said, hey, we really love Jeff, but what do you charge for a coaching session? I had no idea.

I didn't.

I didn't know. So I thought, well, a dollar an hour, a dollar a minute would be cool. 60 bucks an hour they go sold.

At which point you realize, it should have been better.

No. I was so in scarcity. I'm like, that's amazing. And that's how I began my first coaching clients.

So there's a couple cool principles in Speaker Nation. We talk a lot about something called Rembrandts in the attic. And it's, of course, the old real estate metaphor, right? You're selling an old farmhouse or you're going to buy an old farmhouse, and in looking through the attic, you find a dusty old Rembrandt. Suddenly the asking price is very reasonable. Right. And the way we show that to our members is that very often they have ideas, they have perspectives, life experiences, stories, wisdom that they. That are basically dusty Rembrandts in their attic. They don't recognize the value. So what happened is your friend saw your Rembrandt and made you show it to 60 people, and all of a sudden they started being willing to pay. That must have been a special moment.

Incredible moment for me. Life changing.

And then. So you take on these first coaching clients. Where does it go?

I don't know what my message is. I don't know what to say to them, but I was a really good listener, and I discovered something amazing. What I discovered about many coaches, at least the two that I knew, was they were kind of yak, yak, yak. They were constantly talking. And I realized I don't know what to tell these people, but I can ask them questions. And so I started asking what would have now become the three basic, what I call the value based enrollment questions, which is, number one, what. What wins have happened in your life recently? Like, let's. Let's hack their biology. Let's get dopamine flowing. Yeah. So, you know, so I Would say things like, what are you working on that's got you really excited, you know, tell me about a case you wrote recently that really went well, or, you know, something like that. And the next question I would ask is, you know, if we work together for the next year and you had the greatest year of your life, what three things would we have accomplished? I call that now value creator question.

Right?

Just creating a vision, creating a pathway. And I started to realize that value didn't live in the coach, value lived in them. Yeah, value lived in their mind. And what I discovered was when I was asking questions, oftentimes I actually looked up. Once I had an hour long call, coaching call with one of the guys. He spoke for 58 minutes. At the end of the call, I would, I asked him, you know, how valuable was this meeting on a scale of 1 to 10? I just wanted to get a sense of how valuable it was.

Right?

He said, you kidding me? It was a hundred. Now I had done another call with him where I spoke maybe 50, 50. And I said, how valuable was that? He said, well, 70, 75. So I really saw, wow, people, they need to be heard. And so the third question became, I found they were super eloquent. They knew the answers to their problems, but they weren't asking the right questions. So I began to ask the right questions. Then I went and got ICF certified, International Coaching Federation. I realized, and in that and in the master certification, the key is really drawing the answers out of them. And that's what I eventually learned.

I have a metaphor you might like for that. But it's like when, whether you're coaching, mentoring, or for that matter, even psychotherapy, very often you are able to see the breakthrough they need to have the new belief they should adopt, or the correct meaning they should have assessed or whatever the case might be. But if you selfishly give them that, they will never take ownership of it. And so the metaphor I like is that you're almost like an archaeologist that's there with gently, with the brushes, trying to like get at the fossil to let them see it. And you do that through asking the right questions, listening. I like this a lot because one of my little principles in life is that very often our weaknesses are what trigger the expansion of our strengths. So for you, for example, to not know what to say, as you put it, you're like, I didn't know what to say, so I just did a lot of listening. Well, the truth is, is that great speaking, great coaching, great mentorship is all preceded by understanding A client which starts with listening. So even though you didn't know, maybe know that you were forced to do that because you didn't have the material, and you discovered one of the most powerful things there is. And I know this about you in my relationship and in our greater community, that you are inquisitive and caring, empathetic, and you listen. And that's probably why, you know, by the way, one thing, I don't know if you. You got this, but you said that client, he spoke for, say, 58 of the minutes.

Yeah.

And here's. Here's the real issue when you ask him, how much was that worth? And he goes, it was everything. But I wonder about what? If he'd spoken the 60. The whole 60 minutes, it wouldn't have been anymore.

Right.

Because by you listening to that 58, you said exactly the right things in the two that you grabbed, and that's why it was worth 100.

Well said. Well, he, you know, he was venting initially. There was a lot, like, I remember in that call, I was like, so, tell me something good. Like, I didn't know how to say, give me some wins. I was not really not eloquent. I said, tell me something good. You know, what's the word of the day? And he said, hatred or something. I mean, really, I was bad. I'm like, what's going on? This guy stole a case in my office. And I go, tell me more. All I said was, tell me more. That was probably a half hour. He goes, I am verbally puking. I go, know what? It's a great catharsis. Go. Go for it. And he kept going and going and going. And then he ended, and he goes, am I battling here? I go, I think you're actually healing. I don't know, but it sounds like it. Keep going. What else is on your mind? That was the whole call.

Yeah. Very often the answers are inside. And it just. It's our job to help that.

But I love what you said, which is they have to discover the gift.

Yeah.

The gift is in them. Our job, if we're really whatever we are, revealers, is to ask the questions that lead them to the answer. Because when we give people answers, to me, I call it pride mode. It's arrogant, because where do answers lead? They don't lead anywhere. They're just like, bop blob. Here's the answer. Boom. But questions open us up. Questions lead us to possibility. Right. We talk about open space. Right. We've done. We're going to be doing an Open space today.

Right.

Or later on, and they open up possibility. So I started to realize. And again, I don't want to demean myself at all, but the beauty of the ignorance brought out the Rembrandt.

Right.

I had the farmhouse. Didn't know the Rembrandt was up in the attic. Yeah.

Okay. So these days you do incorporate music into your work as well, though, right? I do, yeah. I'm curious. Did you resist doing that at first? Like, you had pain, right? Like, it was like, I don't know if I want to bring that back.

That was it at first. And then one of my very first big symposiums. I actually did a concert that night, and it confused people. Like, okay, wait, is he like our coach, leader guy, or is he actually masquerading as that? And he's really a musician. It was really odd. And I realized I want to be really, really clear with people. So now I might open up and do my. I did a symposium last week in Rochester, New York, and I opened up with George Harrison's Here Comes the Sun. And then I did Here Comes the Sun. Everybody was kind of surprised. They're all business people that own, like, insurance companies and hedge funds and whatever. And I said, what do you think George meant by the sun? Here comes the sun it's been a long, cold, lonely winter Little darlin' It's. What do you think he meant by the sun? And everybody started giving their answers, and they were all kind of spiritual answers, the light of awareness, God, consciousness from these people. So that's how I'm incorporating it now, leading them metaphorically to another place.

Yeah, I. I like, you know, our mutual friend Mike Rayburn, who also incorporates music into his.

You think a little bit.

Hey, you know, it's funny, if you go, look, he's so good on the guitar that if you go look at his YouTube comments, there are people going, I own six guitars now that I've watched this video. What should I do with them? It's intimidating, right? But I love the way he did that today. He played what. I don't even know what that's called, what he did. It was incredible. But then you know why I did that? Because I can. Right? That's very cute, but it's.

It's.

I think it's. I can. I can understand this thing you're describing.

Where it's called tapping, by the way.

Tapping. When he does. That's incredible.

Eddie Van Halen perfected that.

It's just incredible when you show up. So I have another friend that does some speaking and he integrates some music in. But the truth is he's not really a musician. So it's really. The truth is he's quite a good storyteller and speaker. And then he likes to play the guitar and he's got a captive audience. It's very different than what you're doing or what Mike's doing. I think maybe one of the things that you ran into there is that you are so good at that. And what I think audiences get confused by sometimes is how can anybody be good at. How can they be world class at two things? And that's an issue for people. So if you go in there, which is why I think when you then integrate it in, like you did with Here Comes the Sun, you stitch the things together and that makes it really powerful.

That's exactly right. It's hard for people to hold in mind that we can do these two things because, you know, we've talked about we're not in an either or world anymore. We're in a both and world. Yeah. So how can we take our bliss, once we learn our real gift, our real value creation to the world and then maybe incorporate the bliss in that?

Do you know, I. In my speaking career, I've run into this because, I mean, I'm a good speaker. I know that I'm a good storyteller and what have you. The challenge is that I have eclectic interest. So one minute I'm out talking about nutritional anthropology and evolutionary biology.

I wondered about that. How does that go?

It's actually.

So is he a speakers coach? Is he a wildfit guy? Is he a technology guy? What do you actually do?

Well, do you know, I'll tell you, I finally got the answer to this, and I got the answer by my own publisher, Vishen Lakhiani from Mindvalley. He was doing an event in Dubai, I don't know, two or three months ago, and he was explaining that as a speaker, it's really quite important to have an identity and a niche and a personal brand and what have you. And many keynote speakers, like Mike, for example, Mike Rayburn or Steve Farber, they will sit through November and write a keynote, and that keynote will be their keynote for the year. That's how niche they become.

That's not you.

No, I admire it. I admire it. Right.

Don't.

Don't get me wrong, but it's not me. And so Vishen was teaching this and somebody in the audience raised their hand and said, what about Eric Edmeads? You know, he's talking about this and he's talking about that. And Vishen said, oh, you don't seem to understand. You think that Eric's talking about diet, nutrition, you think he's talking about speaking. You think he's talking about entrepreneurship. But what Eric really speaks about is transformation, and therefore, he can speak about anything that interests him. And my own business manager has been trying to say this for how long? From the first day she basically started working. You know, we gotta. We gotta work on that piece of it.

Yeah.

So I think that, you know, when you. I do identify that bliss, any moment, where you go, this is like, I'm feeling emotionally rewarded, I'm feeling spiritually rewarded, I'm feeling financially rewarded. And it's working. Magic happens at that point. It's. It's really special.

Beautiful.

All right, so one thing that I know that many of our members are interested in is, I mean, largely they. They come to us because they want to become a better speaker or a better trainer or what have you. But the truth is, is that speaking is often the introduction. It's the beginning of a relationship with people. So as you had the experience, you went on stage, you spoke in front of these 60 people. Two guys come along, and they want to hire you. And I had the very same thing when I first started speaking. I was on tour with Tony Robbins, and these guys walked up to me after the event and immediately tried to hire me. And I had a similar conversation. They're like, well, we want you to consult for us. And I'm like, well, I don't really do that. Well, how much would it be? And instead of saying no, I thought I'd say no with the price. And I gave them a ridiculous price. I'm talking like a low grade annual salary for a week's work. And they said yes. And that was a moment when I realized something really powerful, which we call the stage effect. And that is that a business consultant that simply goes to an event and networks with people will create a certain level of attraction value. But another consultant that stands on stage, puts themselves at risk, shares good information, makes them think, makes them laugh or cry, like, really engages them. That person is like, literally worth five or ten times what the person who can't do that is. And that's a big part of speaking. The challenge is a lot of people don't know how to transition from that. They're like, okay, I'm on the stage and I'm doing this, but now I want to do like you do. I want to go and do like high end work for big companies. Because I want to have a big impact. Yeah, how, how do you make that transition? How do you, you know what, how do you get there?

Start out by joining NSA or taking your course or taking a really good speaker's course and. Or an acting class. Yeah, because you know, in acting they throw you the ball and you can't say no, you got to go for it. They throw you a little comedic skit. You got to go. You've got to learn to be able to hold the room and you've got to be able to walk in with a vibration and a presence of confidence and not arrogance. And we've seen arrogant speakers and they don't work. You know, people don't want to be sold, they want to be served. And it is an art form. And you know, I love the way you speak, but it didn't come without the study because I know essentially most people would probably hearing you speak, would think you're an extrovert, but really you're an introvert, which tells me you're doing your homework, you're backstage, you're writing two books right now, et cetera, et cetera. And writing books is lonely.

Isn't is a little less lonely now that I can speak to ChatGPT.

And it doesn't speak back. No, it actually.

And sometimes I've renamed her so she speaks back to me and sometimes she's not very nice.

That's a little creepy, Eric.

I don't talk to her like that, Steve.

But yeah, I would say, you know, find somebody who's doing what you want to do and study with them and pay them and recognize. And this is where prosperity economics comes in. You are not paying them. You're investing in yourself and commitment. We say commitment creates value, meaning one of the greatest ways we commit ourselves is with our money. And I had this experience. I hired a coach at one point where I was really about to break through. And I hired this great coach. He's actually an ATL Los Angeles. And I asked him what he charged. He charged 50k for the year. And so I was doing a really big speech in front of this like, lamp, which is the Worldwide Life Insurance Managers Programming association went and auditioned for it in Chicago. They took me. So I had to rewrite my speech. It was 10 pages and the homework was rewrite my speech. Now honestly, if I was only paying $1,000 a month, I would not have done it. I'd winged it. Yeah, but because I was paying a little over 4,000amonth, honestly. And this sounds terrible coming from a prosperity economics guy, theoretically, who wrote the prosperity paradigm. But I said, I'm not going to waste the money. So, commitment. One of the greatest ways we commit ourselves to create value is when we commit ourselves to invest in ourselves. Big distinction between expense dollars and investment dollars.

I've seen lots of these sort of coaching programs and mentorship programs, that kind of stuff, and I've never really been particularly attracted to them. And then a few years ago, a friend of mine joined one. It was a hundred thousand dollars a.

Year.

And they also had a $25,000 a year version of it. And I was like, you know what? In for a penny, in for a pound, I'm going to do it. I'm going to make $100,000 investment. So I invest in this program. And what I found immediately was that exactly the kind of thing you were talking about. See, because as a speaker, I get invited to these things for free all the time, right? So I noticed that I attend very differently when I'm there for free. And I'd like to think I have greater consciousness than that. But the truth is, when I'm there for free, I'm like, I might opt out of that section or I might not show up for that bit. But when I had paid and I'd invested, I'm like, I'm there, I'm showing up for everyone. And there's something very significant about that. And one of the things that shocks me to no end about people that want to be like, say, business coaches, life coaches, coaches of any kind is when they don't have a coach. Yeah, I'm like, they've never had one. I mean, look, if you don't have one today, it is what it is. But if you don't have mentors and coaches, what business do you have? Mentoring and coaching. You're right, it's a tough one.

I have a coach now who is really a spiritual teacher. That's part of tlc. And, you know, a lot of what you're talking about is Maslovian in that I went through survival and then I got safe. Right? And then love and belonging. Like, I kind of found the tribe that I was meant to be coaching in, which is the financial services industry, typically. But then I moved to self esteem, which was the development of my own message and then self actualization, which is I see I can do something and I'm actually afraid of doing it, but I see the potential within me and I want to actualize it. But what our friend Dawson Taught was he knew Maslow and he said, no, very few people know that Maslow was working on a sixth level, and that level was transcendence. And that's what we're talking about. I really believe we're moving into a time period because it's a dangerous time period, right? Technology is going like this. It's brilliant beyond imagination. And consciousness is still somewhat flat. So what we've got to do is use the technology to help raise people's consciousness.

I work a lot of obviously thinking about evolutionary biology and such, and so add a third paradigm to that is that our evolutionary biology, which is much more fixed and steady and grows very slowly, it takes hundreds of thousands of years to change the DNA. Then technology comes along and it can change so very quickly. So we've created this gap, right? There's this gap between our evolved biology, our evolved psychology, and our social and technological change. And there's no way to marry that gap. There's no. I mean, okay, we could arguably go in and start doing genetic modification and such. It's not going to work. That. That means that the only option we have is to scale our consciousness up with that change. It's the only way. Because as we've, like, we are now living in the safest times in the history of ever, and yet more people are on antidepressants and more people are committing suicide. Like, somehow it seems like the easier life's gotten, the harder it is for people to live it. And the only way we're going to deal with that is that's easy.

Hard.

There you go. It's about it. Consciousness.

We are taking the easy path. Convenience has killed us. Every food on tv. If you see it on tv, it's poison. I mean, where'd I learn that? But yet, Right?

Yeah.

I mean, it's easy. Hard. Convenience is really killing us. We're becoming like. I don't know what the little kids cartoon was. Wall E, where humans are now just these little blobs that roll around in a spaceship.

You know, when they made that movie, it was extreme. Now, sadly, in many cities, in states I won't name at the moment, that's like you're walking down the streets of Wally. It's, it's. It's crazy.

You're right.

I want to get to the book you have coming up. Before that, though, I just wanted to ask you, just from a sort of grassroots people on stage, you've done a lot of events. You, you and I mean, we know many of the top speakers in the world. You've seen the good, the bad, the ugly. What, what are, what are some of your, you know, what are some of your keys to really being able to connect with the audience and leave them with an impact?

That's a great, great question. I like telling stories. I like telling stories. I almost always lead with a story. Yeah, you know, I was going to lead with a story here, but you, you got me. Right. We just jumped into our friendship, which is cool because it's kind of our continuing story. And I like having jokes that fit the audience. Like, I want to be thoughtful with it. And I think humor is a really important piece. You know, one of the jokes that I work with a lot of financial advisors and one of their big problems is prospecting. You know, they've got to constantly be prospecting. So I tell this joke about a guy that dies, passes away, goes to heaven. St. Peter's at the Pearly gates said, listen, you've been a really 50, 50 guy. We both know it. So I'm going to do something unusual. I'm going to let you go to heaven. I'm going to let you go to hell. You decide where you go. The guy sounds terrific. Where do you want to go first? Because let's go to hell. Down, down, down, down, down. Gets warm, starts getting red hot. Kicks open barroom doors. People are dancing, spinning. There's a rock and roll band. Satan's behind the bar whipping up drinks with his tail. The guy orders a beer. He's on the. He's having a great time. He goes, St. Peter, this is how I never thought it'd be like this. He goes, what? Wait. Gotta go to heaven. Up, up, up. Gets cool, blue, beautiful. Opens up pearly gates, golden gates. People are sitting on clouds. There's. They're reading Shakespeare. They're listening to all this glorious, you know, like Mozart music playing in the background. He goes, okay, here's heaven, here's hell. Where do you want to go? And he goes, I was kind of a partier in my life. I never thought I'd say this. I'd rather go to hell. He goes, are you sure? He goes, absolutely. Down, down, down. Opens the barroom doors. Two huge guards grab him, whip him up against a clammy wall. And the guy gets in, legs there. St. Peter, where are you going? He goes, well, before you were a prospect, now you're a client. And of course they love it, right, because they're not prospecting. But so humor, you know. And then I think one of our friends said, jab, jab, cross, you know, get people to laugh, get people moved, and then give them a nugget and, and keep it simple and, and tell them what you're going to tell them. And like, one of the things I tell people is the hard easy concept. I'm going to speak here today for eight hours and you're going to be probably exhausted by the end of the day. And we're going to play games, we're going to do a lot of exercises. But the one thing I want you to walk away from the room with is the concept of hard easy. And I'm going to ask you to do hard easy with a 1 degree shift. I don't want you to try to do 10 degrees different tomorrow because you'll never sustain it. But you can do one degree each day. One less drink, one pass on the sugar, one more phone call, one more asking for a referral. Just one degree shift, hard easy. If you take that, I'll have done my job here today. So I try to keep it simple and try to make them laugh, try to tell them stories that make them think.

All good sense. I think that makes good sense. Prosperity economics.

Yeah.

So what's that all about?

Great question. Well, first of all, I wrote a book called Prosperity Paradigm. It was a bestseller among financial advisors, not in the world. And I still get a lot of orders for Prosperity Paradigm. Wrote it almost 15 years ago now, 2006, and then had a second edition 2006, 2007. And I make a distinction that prosperity is a mindset. Because the truth is we live in a world where scarcity is a reality. Scarcity is a reality in the physical world. The only place that prosperity exists is in your mind. And because we are initially fear driven beings, and that is not a bad thing, we fear for our life to survive. So fear has an adjunct to it, which is scarcity. Time is scarce, energy scarce. Human beings cannot create energy from within. We need to go out to hunt, right? We need energy. And so scarcity is a reality in the physical world. But as you start to study value creation and innovation and invention, you start to recognize that that is a mindset. How can we, instead of saying, I can't, right, Like I can't hunt, I can't shoot a bow and arrow, I can't write a best selling book, I can't start a new company, it's how can I? How can I? That opens possibility. The question opens the possibility. And what I have found is in asking the question, the answer begins to come from the nonlinear domain into linear thinking. And then you experiment and you try. So prosperity is really a question in your mind that you begin to develop a mindset of how can I? And then you have some failures and then you have some successes. And the successes are based in serving other people. And that's what I call value creation. So scarcity is a reality in the physical world. You're going, we're all born into scarcity, we all think that way. I don't have enough, I don't have enough time, I don't have enough money.

If people never felt hunger, they would starve.

That's exactly right. So prosperity is the other side of the coin and prosperity is the cause of value creation and abundance is the effect of it. So when people tell me they have an abundance mindset, I'm like, okay, I got that. And I've seen a lot of. There was a slew of abundance books and I read some of them and most of my can't stand, I'm sorry to say, because I think they're metaphysical fufu. I do. I believe in the law of vibration and attraction. I don't necessarily believe in the law of attraction. I know, I mean, come on, where are we? Right? But what I mean by that, the distinction is if you put a poster up on a wall, it might be beautiful. Terrific. That's not going to get you what you want, I'm sorry to say. It might keep you focused on. It might keep you focused on key performance activities to get what you want. And that's terrific. I believe that's terrific. But it's not what you want to take out of the universe. Tell me what you're willing to do to put in to the universe to get that thing out. So it's a vibration first. A choice, a thought, a word, an action. This is what I call the law of co creation. Like we didn't really plan any of this, right. But we're co creating out of a choice to serve whoever may watch this and out of a thought that, hey, it's fun to be together. And then we spoke about it and now we're acting on it. This is the way all things come into manifestation, a choice. But what is the essential paradigm that we're choosing between? Well, many people say between fear and love, positive thoughts, negative thoughts, prosperity and scarcity. Scarcity is. I can't. Prosperity begins with how can we? And who are the people that we can align with? Because the first move in prosperity is people are assets.

I think there's a couple powerful distinctions in there and that is that very often people feel like they either do or they don't believe that that belief is a black and white thing. I either believe that I can become an author or I don't believe. And one of my little favorite expressions about that is that if you can't quite believe in your dreams, then the first step is to doubt your own doubts.

I love the double negative.

It's awesome, right? You know, because you start off going, well, well, I can't. Well, maybe I'm wrong about that. Yeah, maybe I can. And then I also like what you're, you know, when you talk about this, like, well, maybe I can. But there's something really powerful in the way creatives often think, and that is that creatives are often very good at answering the question, what? Like, what will I create next? What will I do? What will I serve? And so on. But they often get stumped at that when they get to the next question, which they think is, how. How will I write the book? How will I get it published? How will I launch my podcast? How will I become a speaker? How will I land my corporate gigs? And how is a terrible question for most creatives. It's not their favorite question, but you alluded to the right question, and the right question is, who? Who could I align with? Who could I work with? Who could I hire? Who could I pay? Who could I joint venture with? Who could I partner with?

That's it.

That's getting those results. And that's. That's a really. That's a powerful thing I think that everyone should be looking at. If they're an aspiring speaker, they should be like, who can I hang around with that's making that stuff happen? If they're aspiring to move to consulting, writing books, whatever it is, who do I know that's getting the results that I want?

We were listening to Sean Gallagher speak about this yesterday, and he ran for president and was, like, on the cusp of winning.

Yeah.

And this evil tweet came through, that fake tweet. Fake tweet that got him defeated. And then he had nothing and nobody would answer his phone.

Right.

He went for president of Ireland. And the story is, you know, he leveraged his house to buy real estate to. That he believed in. And now he's, you know, obviously he's doing okay. He's doing okay, but it's exactly what you're talking about. Yeah.

When does this book come out?

January of 2024.

January 2024.

Yeah.

Good deal.

I want to define, though, also economics, because people don't you know, one of the things that's interesting to me is, and this is going to sound sad, but most people don't know what money is like. When I did Prosperity Paradigm and I wrote Prosperity Paradigm, this group brought me in 100 people, mostly women, two men in the room. It was women had just become new mothers who were professional women. So they just left professional life to become moms. And I said, I just have a curious question. I'd like to do this just spontaneous. I want to pass the mic around, and I want some people to answer to me, what is money? And these are really sharp people, really bright, and the only two people that really lie were the guys. Well, I kind of know that. So one of the things we have to understand is, what is money? The second thing is, what is prosperity? Prosperity comes from the word to flourish in medieval English, to flourish. And it's the idea of, how can I create something that creates value in the world that has value? That's prosperity. And it's. It's in here. It's not out there. It's in here. And it's. The first move is the lie is that money is the prime asset in the world. The truth is wise. People are assets. So align with the people that can help you when you say, how can I write this book? How can I do a podcast? How can I do these things? People are assets, not money is the asset. Knowledge is power. Wisdom is power, not money is power. We love people and use money. We don't love money and use people. These are really key distinctions in prosperity economics. These are all from the idea of to flourish, because it is people that are going to help launch your sole purpose and your dream. Without people, you're a guy standing at the front of the room talking to yourself. You're a madman, essentially, and probably not the first time you've been called that. But also, what is economics? If we look at a basic definition of economics, and it's really true, the word scarcity is in it. It's the allocation of scarce resources to serve unlimited alternative needs. Right? That's one definition. The other definition I like is it's the quantification of choices. We're not making good food choices. We're not making good money choices. We're not making good political choices. We're not making good health choices, oftentimes not making good career choices. Many of them are based in fear and security. And as you know, Benjamin Franklin said, he who surrenders his freedom for security shall have neither. So I think it's really important that people understand prosperity economics, understand what money is, and once you start to understand how to create value and not follow your bliss, follow your talent. If we look at the old hedgehog concept from good to great, it had three kind of a Venn diagram. And the first one was what can you be one of the best in the world at? That's not drudgery. It can't be drudgery. You've got. It will lead you to your bliss. Topia, what did you call it?

Bliss to me.

Bliss to me. It will lead you there, you'll find your bliss within it. It's not follow the bliss to the talent, it's follow what you can be great at to the bliss. The second thing is that it should do good in the world. It should have a purpose that it does good in the world. It should be moral and legal and everybody really knows what that is. And the third things, well, legal, I.

Don'T know, sometimes I think that's flexible.

I'm going to stay away from that walking over that landmine. But the third was. And driving an economic engine that you're clear that if you do this in a way that is one and two bubbles, that you'll have profit, you know, so it's kind of that passion, purpose, profit, which is what my socks say, passion, purpose, profit.

Whereas I have guitars in honor of you and Mike and everybody.

Wait a minute.

Look at you.

We're like trading here. This is amazing. You're wearing the musician stuff.

Anyway, Steve, how do people find you?

Stevedenunzio.com missiondrivenadvisor.com solepurposeinstitute.com Simple.

And book in January.

And book in January. Prosperity economics. They can get prosperity paradigm now. But there's a really great person that you and I both know that I interview, which is the opening story for the book. Do we have time for me to tell you?

Go ahead.

You remember Matt Weinstein?

Yeah, of course.

So Matt owns a company called Playfair and he built this beautiful multimillion dollar company and about five years ago he was on his winnows. Actually, it must have been way more than that because.

No, it's a while back. I already know the story.

You know the story, right. He's on a ship, a Russian icebreaker going to Antarctica. Academic Yaffe was the name of the ship. And he gets called to the bridge of the ship land, you know, satellite call. And he's thinking something exciting. He was about to get a big speakers gig somewhere around the world and he was really excited and he goes, and it's his wife Janine, saying, bernie Madoff's been arrested. We just lost our money. And they had almost all of their money with Bernie Madoff. Why do brilliant people like man Janine, of course, he gave me permission to use the story. I wouldn't have written it in the book. But why would brilliant people do something like that? Why do we hand over our money.

To a guy with the last name made off? Made off. I don't know.

Did he make off with it?

He made off with it, yeah.

So. And again, in their defense, I understand what the. You know, somebody that they trusted knew somebody and somebody and somebody, but there was no individual or personal research or responsibility. And that's something that's big in this book that I.

There's also really important principle. When you're doing placebo testing of drugs, for example, there comes a point in time when it is so clear that the drug is working that it becomes unethical to continue using the placebo. Now, what happens to a lot of people with investments is that when they see one of their investments working so well that it would become unethical to continue using other investments. And so what Madoff did is he made people feel that way. He made them feel as though this is working so well, that nothing else is a good idea. And so I can totally understand how they fell into that trap. It's scary.

The beautiful end of the story is that Janine winds up writing this amazing book and winds up getting on Oprah, and they just struck gold.

But it's even better than that because she gets on Oprah. Do you know the story about the rerun? So she gets on Oprah, and then, like, a few weeks later, Oprah's doing a live taping. And something goes horribly wrong with the live taping. I don't know what it was. And they go, just grab any tape.

And stick it in. We gotta go live.

And they grabbed Jeanine's episode and put it back in. So she got to be on Oprah twice. And they made back. I mean, if you got on Oprah with your book, it was everything.

Yeah, it was at the end of her career where the book club and everything.

But there's a really important part of that, I think. And I heard this story, actually. You know, they live right across the street from Skywalker Ranch.

Oh, that's awesome.

And I was out there. I used to live in Marin county with them, and so I saw them a lot, and they told me the story over the dining room table. And there was a really important part that got me and that was that, first of all, when Matt got the phone call, he was on a satellite phone. And the first thing he said to Janine was, I need to put the phone down now. We are no longer the type of people who can afford satellite calls. Like, it was devastating, right?

It was devastating.

But she had a friend who told her not to descend into despair. She had a friend who told her to live like it was going to be okay. She had a friend who said, stay in your bliss and stay in your happiness and stay in gratitude. Look where you live. None of this is perfect. In this moment, it doesn't look that way, but live as though maybe it is. And so she and Matt lived as up as they could. They lived positively. And you know, I always have this because I went through something in Marin County. I went through something incredibly similar. I invested in a movie studio there.

I remember we were talking. That's right. When we first met.

It was a very similar story to them. In fact, the guy that sold the studio to me was a, was a Bernie Madoff. He had changed his name, so I didn't know when I did the background checks, but he was facing 493 years in prison for previous investment scams and managed to do a plea bargain with the government. So that's why he was out and able to, you know, to scam me. But I had a very similar thing happen where I'm in, I've invested everything I've got. I'm running this movie studio. We're working on Avatar over here, Pirates of the Caribbean. We're doing amazing stuff, but we are losing money every day. And I am Industrial Light and Magic. Right. Well, it was the original ILM workshop. Hallowed ground. It was where Photoshop was invented, Pixar. It was this special place. But every day I was going to work to this special place under the knowledge that every single day we were going to close down. Every single day there was a threat, another legal thing. Like we were, I'd been ripped off terribly by those guys. And every single day and I, and I stopped sleeping and I went through the same thing that Janine and Matt went through where I was walking along as I am not enjoying my life at the moment. And I don't think I've ever been like that.

Yeah.

And I need to get back to that. And now here's the crazy bit. And I, I, we can, we can get into the metaphysics because I think you and I are similarly a little Too much metaphysics. Like, I. I admit I'm wearing crystals because I think they look nice.

Notice I didn't say anything, but what's.

Interesting is, is here's Janine getting that advice. Don't let it get to you. Live your life with gratitude. Live your life with appreciation. I did the exact same thing. I was like, I am no longer. I cannot do this anymore. The worst case scenario is I lose everything, and I got to start again. And I'm going to make that work. Now, in both our situations, she got the phone call from Oprah and ended up getting on Oprah twice. Turned everything around. I immediately got a phone call from Lucasfilm. Can you do the Iron Man 2 movie? Then I got a phone call from Neil Blomkamp. Can you guys do Elysium? Suddenly, we start landing all these projects. Now we can get into this interesting metaphysical question. Did our vibration law of attraction. The secret. Did our upbeat attitude cause some shift in the universe to change fundamental reality? I don't care. What I do care about is two really important things. And the one is that irrespective of whether those changes came along or not, we enjoyed ourselves.

Yeah.

Yeah. So. So just that alone. But then the second thing is, and I'm so grateful for this, it's one of my deepest lessons. And I know Matt and Janine feel the same way. Thank God I turned myself around before the circumstance changed, else I would have continued the myth that money is what made me happy.

This is the law of sympathetic resonance. Forget the law of vibration attraction. Let's talk about physics for a minute. Like attracts like. In physics, it's called the law of sympathetic resonance.

We don't.

I mean, I don't argue with science, and we can prove it a hundred different ways. You can Google the law of sympathetic resonance and watch the. They do experiments with, you know, tuning forks and all sorts of different things. So. And we do live in a vibratory universe.

Metronomes. Yes, even metronomes will do it.

Of course, I show that at my symposium, all the metronomes align. Right. This is a vibration. Right. This error has a certain vibration and frequency. I mean, we know it's physics. So did you keep your energy up? Yes. But you also kept going to work every day. You showed up, you created value. You didn't blame. You took responsibility, even though it stunk. And I don't believe the law of responsibility is you are 100% responsibility for the events. You're 100% responsible for your response.

Yeah.

Not the event. Even the outcome you can't control. You cannot control either. But it's like Buddha, middle, middle path, bad event happens to all of us. How will you respond? That will then dictate outcome, which even that we can't control. So I think this, you know, we talked about with Jack about e plus r equals O, right? Event plus your response to the event creates the outcome. So in both your cases, you both kept your energy high. You kept going to work every day, you kept creating value, and sure enough, it turned around. Not powerful by you. Powerful about you when they're with you.

Steve, it's been a genuine pleasure to share this opportunity with you and to share it with everybody at speaker nation. Thanks for making the time for us.

Appreciate you.

Cheers.

Being unforgettable to me is making people feel powerful about themselves when they're with you.

So that's it for today's episode of unforgettable. Head on over to itunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week who posts a review on itunes will win a chance in the grand prize drawing to win a private $25,000 VIP day with Eric Edneads himself. Be sure to head on over to unforgettable show and pick up a free copy of Eric's gift and join us on the next episode.

Sam.