- Dare to begin before you are even ready – just start, get your mentality in place, dont wait.
- Take care of the small stuff. The small stuff really matters – marginal gains is everything.
- Stay plugged in. Notice the times when you leave the room and tune out. So be IN the room. The more time in the room, the closer you get to extraordinary.
Purpose, Passion and Porn.. How turned on are you? by Daniel Murray
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Not a bad name for a seminar really. Helps if you look like Richard Tyler did, in a room full of girls, the comments flying around the whatsapp group were very quickly filed under “NSFW” and if the reverse was happening the uproar around ‘sexism’ and ‘objectification’ would have been pretty strong.
But you know how equality works, men have apparently ‘4 brains’ (as one of the female speakers suggested, rather than 3 brains for women), are sexist pigs, but put a charismatic confident and cool as fuck dude in a room and suddenly it’s cool to forget all about that.
Anyway, I digress because what man doesn’t want to be objectified, and Richard Tyler was deserving considering he not only confidently shared his passion and the key learnings from his book; Jolt. His job title is “Chief Possibility Architect” and he goes round the world speaking about how to create possibilities in your life by addressing what part of your make up needs to be improved or changed. Oh, and he was the Phantom in Phantom of the Opera for 15 years. Just the main part in the most successful show of all time.
What. The. Actual. Fuck.
By this point the whatsapp group was starting to get filled with man crushes too, as he got us all to sing ‘row row row your boat’ as an exercise in effort, energy and togetherness. It was cringy, singing always is, but there was a point to it, reflecting on purpose intention, passion and practice… Plus we got to sing with the Phantom. Pretty sure that was the point of the whole thing?
Anyway, was he just some musical theatre dude who went around making you sing cringey songs? Nope. He shared a shit load of fascinating insights too. Here are some notes;
Imagine you work in porn. I do that most days. But there’s a point;
PORN
– $3k being spent every second on your product.
– 68 million online searches a day for your product and worldwide industry revenue of $49bn with addicted raving fans that you don’t need to market to.
Not so bad really is it? Anyway, it’s hard to imagine he didn’t just want to talk about porn to add to his allure, I would have done the same if I had the undivided attention of the entire female species too; seemed like a pretty smart time to talk about sex. Sorry, I mean, the porn ‘industry’ as a ‘business’.
Moving swiftly on, Richard explained that going from being crap to good is easy. The biggest leap is going from good to extraordinary. It’s only fair for people to talk to you about being extraordinary if you are too, in fairness to Richard, it’s hard sometimes for people to display their pedigree by simply their business acumen but when you play the main character of the world’s leading show for half it’s existence, you earn the right to know a thing or too about being extraordinary, and so we listened. And we respected. And we learned.
He said: “Those that dare themselves, go from good to extraordinary…”
The problem however (I always feel this way) is if you reach extraordinary you only feel good again. So what do leaders need to do? Every time I reach a milestone of success, I barely even enjoy it, I’m just excited for the next step.
He came up with a nice little saying, after all, all the most extraordinary speakers do this; it’s essential.
Do. Or D.I.E. Disrupt, Impact and Engage.
Disrupt:
Leaders need to be ready to disrupt. Those that lead their own industry are the ones who truly do this. Ask yourself how much do you do this?
Impact.
Not enough to just disrupt, but crafting their messages to be sure that the story lands properly, and resonates with customer to create real impact.
Engage
They make sure they engage with their audiences – how do we do this thing together? It’s the only way we can do this – together.
We know that every 2 days there’s a new version of everything – so how often do you do this for yourself? We are in an environment where we are all required to do an upgrade every day, so when was the last time you did that for yourself?
If you were to do release notes about yourself tomorrow, what would change? Richard pointed out that if you change train tracks by just 1 degree, in 50 miles they are 1 mile apart. There’s a huge ripple effect by even the tiniest change, you don’t see it tomorrow but you do in a few months.
“Try to do” is pre-empting failure… Doing is not trying. You need to ‘do’, not ‘try’.
Most importantly he said to “make sure when you are in the room you are really in the room” At this point I hope he realises that all my typing on my laptop was taking notes rather than appearing to defy this concept by ‘not being in the room’.
The Phantom’s PERFORMANCE MAP (photo below)
Space + Action + Skills. These are the easy bits. The space is the area in which you operate, your actions are the things you do, the skills the ability you have or learn.
Think = Values + Beliefs. This area is the stuff that’s most important in our lives. Our values usually come out when they are compromised or challenged and usually manifest themselves in the space and action areas. The beliefs are the stuff engrained in us – the do’s don’ts, musts, mustn’t etc.
In our lives, our thoughts become things. What you learn early on in your life from your greatest influences; parents and teachers, becomes what you believe.
Richard also discussed Stanislavski’s system “The magic if” which is a progression of techniques used to train actors and actresses to draw believable emotions to their performances where you ask yourself ‘how would I feel if that happened to me’, etc.
Richard argued that if you train yourself to believe that what if you did x, behaved if y, etc then you can start to believe that it is your reality, and start to live that purpose.
We can be totally natural with skills but stop ourselves at the think level of our Performance Map, and if you don’t think you can do something, you are limiting your ability to reach higher.
Identity level– how you associate the end point of the space + action + skills + think = identity. Do you believe in the other bits to make you do those other levels confidently. If you have all the other bits in place, but you don’t feel like you are that persona or identity to carry out that action you can’t convince yourself or anyone else that it suits you. He cited cooking as an example – he can do all the previous steps, but as an identity he doesn’t feel like a chef, therefore it limits his confidence and ability to take those skills further. It all comes down to self belief and presenting yourself clearly and then others will see you the same way.
He cited the hugely influential author Robert Ditts who said: “The higher the level you are prepared to make the changes, the more sustainable the change is – Robert Dilts
Map out what the space is like, work out what the actions you need to take are, if there is a skills gap, what you need to think about and then be assured of your identity by putting it into action. Have someone that holds you accountable of this.
3 important take aways from the Phantom himself;
