Do you ever wonder what makes someone a hero? Jimmy’s guest for this episode is international keynote speaker and author, Kevin Brown. Many of us fail to achieve hero status simply because we don’t know how to invoke our inner-hero. You will learn the secret to becoming a hero by listening to this episode!
You will gain insight into:
- The qualities of being a hero and the unleashing of the hero within you.
- How to find heroes in your world that are doing remarkable acts everyday.
- How to forge a successful future no matter where you begin in life.
- Tuning out the world of chaos and focusing on the goals that make your life abundant and impactful.
Additional resources to help you with implementation, or to learn more on the subject, of being a HERO mentioned in this episode can be found by clicking in Kevin Brown’s The Hero Effect®. For additional savings of 20% off the price of the book, text the word “HERO” to 33777. Once the code is received, you can purchase Kevin Brown’s book, “The HERO Effect”, by clicking the link in Jimmy’s Top Reads.
Podcast Transcript
Good morning! Hey, this is Jimmy Williams with Live a Life by Design your Monday morning moments of motivation. I’m the only one on the air today with a PhD in Positivity and a Master’s in Motivation. Hey, folks, I’ve gotta tell you a giant thank you to all of our subscribers and listeners. Just last week, our engineer reported to me that we are now being listened to in 27 countries.
Man, I can’t even fathom that. You know, my passport doesn’t even have that many stamps in it yet. 27 countries, thank you so much for sharing positivity. Not just in our local hemisphere, but around the world. And in a pandemic, isn’t that really what we all need? It’s not so much that we need to sit around and dream up things to do. Why don’t we sit around and think of how we can serve our fellow man. The key to any type of fulfilling life is the one where you pour yourself out to others instead of trying to retain and accumulate yourself.
Every Monday morning our goal here is to bring you something of great positivity, something to energize you, motivate you, and help you be a bigger, better, and bolder you. The key to this is, others in your sights. As a young man, I will tell you, my father taught us many things about our community. And one of those was is that everyone has a responsibility to others in that community. And what he meant by that was is when we see others that may not be feeling their best, doing their best, and they need a hand up, not a hand out. That’s when you step in.
And today our guest is an outstanding example of this. Before I introduce him, I just want to give a little insight as to what I had seen on the stage, twice now. At a large conference, national conference. And this gentleman was the speaker on the stage, and I was just sitting there taking copious notes in my journal, as I often do when I hear people of great respect that I love to listen to. So I’ve got to be honest with you. Here on Live a Life by Design, you know what, we ask for forgiveness, not permission. So I reached out to him, I wouldn’t say, maybe, he had to get a restraining order or anything. But I sent several requests to this young man, cause he is just highly, highly regarded. He’s also in high demand. And I said, you know if I could just get him on the show for a few moments to tell me how he created this persona of himself on stage, because it’s just genuine. It’s just him.
And so, today it’s quite an honor to have with me a gentleman I now call friend. I just think the guy’s a great man. For nearly 20 years our guest today helped build a little known family business into the number 1 brand in their industry. With annual revenues reaching 2 billion dollars. That’s billion with a B. Along the way he’s learned a thing or two about overcoming adversity, dealing with change and creating a culture that drives organizational excellence and customer loyalty. He’s the best selling author of the book, The HERO effect, and anyone listening at Live a Life by Design knows that we want to give you great value. So today’s guest has, again, blown it out of the park. I’m going to give you at the end of the podcast a means of how you can get his book, the website, and I’m even going to show you how to get a 20% discount on the book. You heard me, 20% off. This guy just gives till it hurts folks. He’s up with us today to share some ideas about you, our listeners, can be your best when it matters the most. With that, I want to say thank you and welcome to my good friend, Kevin Brown.
KB: Hey Jimmy, good morning. How are you?
JW: I tell ya, Kevin, if life got any better for me I couldn’t stand it, my friend. How about you?
KB: I’m doing fantastic, man, just listening to your opening remarks, I’m excited. Let’s go.
JW: I gotta tell you, you know, this is not really scripted much, Kevin, I’m just going to be honest with you. I just get up and my wife, bless her heart, tries to give me a sedative everyday, cause I mean, I just get up like this about 5:30, man, hit the ground running.
KB: I hear ya, I’m with ya.
JW: So, let’s talk first and foremost, I just need to know a couple of things before we ever get started on this. Tell me a little bit about Kevin Brown’s childhood, man. I got to see you on stage, I know you as a professional, you’re an outstanding person. Tell me a little bit about your childhood.
KB: Yea, well, you know, that’s a subject we never get to dive into too much. You know, you’re right. Everybody sees us on stage, and you know, they see the books, they see whatever they see out in public. But, you know, it all begins how we grew up. You know, good, bad, or indifferent. It’s what we do with what we had when we were starting out. And I was blessed to have a great mom and dad. I grew up in a blue collar town, Muskegon, Michigan. A little steel town, and my dad worked in the steel factory. My mom was a stay at home mom. I have an older brother and a younger sister. And we were poor, but we didn’t know it because we had everything we needed. We grew up in a faith based home. A home that was strict. My dad was a military guy. My dad wanted structure and he liked order. He taught us a lot of valuable lessons about discipline, hard work, focus. And had a really good childhood up until I was in my early teens, and then things took a little bit of a turn sideways. Which you know some of that story from the book.
JW: Right. Well, so, I’ve gotta tell ya, very similar backgrounds. I gotta tell ya, Kevin, I didn’t know I was broke, until I went to undergrad school, and I figured out those guys have money for gas and food. But I digress.
KB: No choice to make.
JW: Yea, that’s right! So let’s talk a little bit about a couple of things. So how did you determine how, you know, I’ve been helping this business, you’re excellent at what you do in helping businesses grow and doing things. You’ve brought a company up to the pinnacle of its industry. And then you said, ‘Hey, you know I’ve got more to give’. How did you determine that? How did you decide you want to get into motivational speaking?
KB: You know, it picked me. Jimmy, I didn’t pick it. And it’s funny, because from the outside looking in, people think that I’m an extrovert. They think I’m a gregarious outgoing person. Truth is, man, I’m an introvert. I’m extremely shy. My two biggest fears in life are speaking in front of people and flying. And so, it’s proof that when life has another plan for you, when you’re called to do something else, you can overcome those fears. You can overcome those things that hold you back. And I’m super blessed to have a gift. To be able to communicate, to be on stage in front of people and tell a story and it really picked me. I didn’t pick it. I fought it for a long time. I had a great corporate career, and I was blessed to be part of a family business that they adopted me into their fold. I wasn’t one of the family members, but I was one of the two non-family executives of the company. And I thought I’d spend the rest of my career there. That was going to be my destiny. Like I said, sometimes life has other plans for us. And so, this thing kept tapping me on the shoulder, saying we’ve got work for you to do. There’s people that need to hear this message. And for a kid who dropped out of high school in the 10th grade and never went to college, it’s been quite a ride.
JW: You know, you remind me a lot, the first time I heard you speak, and you told your background, and you said, you know, ‘I had all I needed to know about the world from sophomore year, I’m good’. You reminded me of Jim Rohn, one of my mentors. Jim’s an outstanding speaker himself. He said, “You know, one year of college, I knew all I needed to know”. So he quit. So how did you develop your storytelling capability. I’ve got to be honest with you Kevin, you have a capability of reaching out in that audience of thousands of people, grabbing them by the shirt collar, as my dad would say, and looking them right in the eye and going, ‘You need to hear this’. So how do you get that approach?
KB: I think it’s a couple of things, Jimmy. Number one, I think it’s truly, there’s a gift there. And I try not to overthink it too much, and I try to work on honoring that gift and being better at that gift. And using it to serve the world. To serve the people. The other thing is, I’m a student. Jim Rohn’s one of my great heros. I listen to all the greats. Earl Nightingale, Zig Ziglar, Les Brown, Brian Tracey, the Chicken Soup guys. You name it, I’ve listened to them. And so I think over time by osmosis, knowing what I like to listen to. Knowing what draws me in, I think some of it just happened as an outcropping of that, so in the way I do what I do, you probably hear a little bit of influence from all of those mentors. And they didn’t even know they were mentors. I was just soaking it up, taking their stuff. I think you can have mentors in your life that they don’t even know they’re your mentors.
JW: You know, I agree totally. So I don’t want to brag on this too much, but the closest I came to my mentors that I met in person is Zig Ziglar. I met him three times through speaking and actually had garnered favor. I think sometimes providencial things happen in life. I think God put you in a place, you know. So I got to go back stage two of those three times and see Zig, speak with Zig, shake his hand, and if it hadn’t have been for one of his handlers, bad term, one of his assistants, that said, ‘Hey Mr. Williams, we gotta go, we gotta plane’. I picked his brain like you wouldn’t believe, and it was incredibly moving for me, if you could read my journal entries for those days, like four or five pages, you won’t believe this guy.
KB: Absolutely.
JW: So, real quickly then, let’s dive into a little bit of the book. But before you go there, I want to preface something about the book. It’s called The HERO Effect, and for those of you listening, I’m going to not encourage, I’m going to almost insist you get this book. And the reason being, it is, it’s not voluminous, it’s a great read, it’s filled with impactful motivation. It’s filled with true stories of how Kevin and his family have experienced some challenges in life and what he did to overcome those. We’re gonna dive into some of those here in just a moment, but I want to, first of all, ask you, Kevin, how do you see and how do you find heroes in the real world?
KB: I think part of it’s just being aware. You know, I have people say that to me all the time. I went through a really, really bad patch when I was a teenager, 13 to 16. Life got ugly and complicated, spiraled out of control. You know, people look at where I started and where I am now and people say, boy you’ve been really lucky. And you’ve been lucky to have some mentors in your life, some heroes. And you know, I wish I had that for me, I can’t tell you Jimmy how many times I’ve heard people say, I wish I had heroes in my life. And my response is always the same, are you looking for them? You see, I think heroes are all around us. And one of the things that drive me, that drives my wife and I, and everybody on my team is that we have a passion for helping people recognize the hero, recognizing the heroes around them. But also discovering the one within them. And I think you can look up and down Main St., of course we’re in the middle of a pandemic right now. You can turn on the news, you can walk outside. You can see heroes everywhere you go from truck drivers to grocers, to healthcare workers, to moms and dads, educators. People who are pulling together to get us through this, but for me I look at this and I say why does it take a pandemic for us to see each other and see who we truly are. To see the kindness, to see the heroic. To see the compassion. To see all of the things that emerge in a pandemic. It should be that way all of the time. I think heroes are all around us.
JW: Oh, man, that is fantastic. I gotta tell you, when I first heard you speak, and you talked about the hero effect, and I just flashed back to all these times. I go, that’s what I was seeing but didn’t recognize. You brought a word aware into this. You know, I think sometimes the pandemic did positive things for us, Kevin. I think it said to us, it’s time to slow down folks. Look at how good you really have it. Look what you’ve got around you, who you’ve got around you and be thankful for some of these things. And so you’re right on the awareness, and I love some of the stuff you’re putting on social media. I like to follow your stuff. I actually share a lot of it, because it is so impactful, but you share a lot of things about the heroes in our world today, Kevin, don’t often wear capes. It’s the guy dragging that fire hose to the fire, it’s the lady working on the patient that just got dropped at the ER. It’s the doctor’s 16 hour days and still going strong.
KB: That’s right.
JW: These are our heroes, you know, today. So let me ask you a couple of things. Let’s talk a little bit about the book. You’ve got four, the HEROs kind of an acronym if you will, acrostic, talk to me about what those four attributes really are and let’s just start with the letter H, and just go through them, brother. Tell me about them.
KB: Yea, so the H is, stands for help. Heroes help people. Plan and simple. Heroes help people. And on the surface, when I share this with groups, when I share this with people, and you know this. At first, people are pretty underwhelmed with the first principle of the HERO effect. Heroes help people. But as you know, there’s a part two to this idea. On the surface we all understand that being helpful is good for our business, it’s good for society. It’s a good thing to do to be helpful. But what I’ve learned is that most people are only willing to be helpful to the extent that there’s a return on investment. Right? There’s a what’s in it for me component. There’s a contract or a negotiation, if you will. I’ll do this for you if you do this for me. And what I’ve learned about heroes, heroes have another gear. Heroes there’s a dot, dot, dot, if you will. Heroes help people…with no strings attached. And it’s that no strings attached that begins to create separation. It’s that no strings attached that begins to move people away from the crowd. We start to pull them out of the pile so to speak. We say, ‘Man, when they show up and do what they do, they do it at a different level’. They play at a level that most people don’t even aspire to. And it’s that no strings attached. It’s that moving beyond conditions to make true connections that I believe truly begins to separate heroes from everybody else. Think about the people that you do business with. The people that you want to be around. The people you want to be led by. The people you want to be married to. The people you want to be friends with. They all have that extra gear. They have that extra mile mentality. And the truth is the extra miles only one more step than everyone else is willing to take. It’s really not that far. But most people are just unwilling. Most people want to know what do I get? I’ll scratch your back, but I have an itch too. Heroes are … masters.
JW: I love that, man. I gotta tell you, I’ve always used this phrase. I want to go out everyday and help someone in the world that needs a hand up, not a hand out. That can do absolutely nothing for me. You see what I’m saying?
KB: Absolutely.
JW: So go out and help people just to be helping people, man, that’s what you’re really saying.
KB: Absolutely, and the irony in that, Jimmy, is you get so much in return even though you’re not looking for anything in return.
JW: Absolutely.
KB: That’s what comes on the inside, the intrinsic value of helping other people. Oh man, listen, I can’t focus on my problems when I’m helping other people. It energizes me, it makes me feel good. It makes me feel like I’m living out my purpose, my destiny, the reason I’m here in the first place.
JW: You know, that’s fantastic, Kevin. So I will tell ya, I do know of someone in your life that you probably don’t even remember me even saying this, because I haven’t talked to you that much. But there’s someone in your life, I know of, that helped you tremendously and I think her name’s Lisa.
KB: Yeah, you got that right. My bride, my bride of 24 years we’ve been married. And this woman, I tell you what. You want to talk about marrying a hero, I married a real life Wonder Woman. She’s absolutely amazing, most positive human being I know. Beautiful inside and out. I do everything she tells me to do, because I’m afraid she might leave. She’s one of my greatest heroes. You know our story. And one of the reasons she’s one of my heroes, not only, I mean, she’s raised two boys, me and my son.
JW: Right, right.
KB: She has inspired me, she’s loaned me confidence in me that I didn’t have in myself. And what she’s done with our son, you know, our son has autism, he’s a brilliant young man. But this woman has single handedly shaped this boy’s life and future and it’s an incredible thing to see.
JW: Well, man, since you brought it up. I’m gonna tell my listeners today that in the hero category, so we’re talking about the H of HERO, helping others and expecting nothing from that. I gotta tell you, there’s a young man that’s been placed, almost on my refrigerator, figuratively, if I had an 8 x 10 black and white, or something, I’d put it up there, I tell ya. His name is Josh Brown. And Josh is the son of Kevin and Lisa. And I will tell you the story in the book, almost brings you to tears Kevin, I’ll be honest with you, and I’m not that emotional guy. But I’m reading this and I’m putting myself in your shoes, my wife in Lisa’s shoes, and I’m going wow, what a challenge. Hey, bring us up to speed here on what happened. Tell me a little bit about my newest hero, Josh Brown.
KB: Josh Brown, and you’re right, it is Josh Brown. He thinks it’s hyphenated, all one word. When we, when Josh was five years old. We sat in a school conference room. Big mahogany table, and we were young parents. We were scared. We knew we were gonna get some news that we really didn’t want to hear. And I’ll never forget a doctor spoke first. Doctor said, “Mr. and Mrs. Brown your son has autism. You need to ready yourself for the road ahead. It’s going to be a steep climb. You need to understand some things about your son. He’s uneducable in many ways, he’s not going to learn like the other kids. Most likely will not graduate high school. If he does he’ll get a special education diploma. You know there’ll be an asterisk by his name”. And I’ll never forget sitting there. I’m embarrassed to tell you this, but I became really angry in that moment. I became angry as a father, I’m sitting here hearing these limitations that are being placed on my son’s life. I’m thinking I’m not going to be able to live the life that I wanted to live through him. Right? He’s not going to be the star little league shortstop like his dad was, he’s not going to be the star quarterback and captain of the football team like his dad was not. And you know, I’m looking over there and I’m seeing the tears streaming down my wife’s face, and after about 30 seconds those tear drops dried up. And thank goodness God gives moms something a little bit more than dads. This woman dried those tears and she went to work. And she looked at her son and she said, ‘You cover your ears’. She said, ‘Don’t you listen to what he’s telling you, you cover, I heard what he said baby, but that’s not your destiny’. And Jimmy, she did what leaders do. She took the story line that life gave us and she started to rewrite it. I’m fascinated by how many people will get up everyday of their lives, and they will accept the story line that life gives them. And they’ll walk it out as their truth. Right? They’ll take the storyline that COVID – 19 gives them. They’ll take the storyline that the economy gives them. They’ll take the storyline that somebody else’s opinion gives them. And they’ll walk it out as though it was their truth. And they never give one single thought to the fact that the pen is in their hands. And my wife knew that we had the pen in our hands, and she stroked a new vision for that boy that day. And she said you follow, you keep your eyes on mom. We’ve got a new plan for you. And for 18 years, he’s 22 years old now, and for 18 years I’ve watched this leader with the title of mother live that vision, plant that vision, groom that vision, nurture that vision, and just walk it out with him. And what that boy has accomplished is quite remarkable.
JW: One of the key takeaways, Kevin, you just said, I’ve said many times on this podcast. Many of our listeners have heard it so much they probably say it in their sleep. Is either you run the day, or the day will run you. Don’t get up and allow the waves of the world to push you where you want to go. Set the sail, as Jim Rohn would say, of where you wish to go. I love that. So, Josh Brown, age five, we find out we got a challenge before us, but Lisa and Kevin Brown say, you know what, we’re challenge overcomers, man, we don’t take what the world hands us, we may be holding a pair of deuces now, we’re gonna hold a couple of Aces here before long, right?
KB: That’s right.
JW: So, tell me about this, we started on a plan. Let’s go into the E of HERO now. So, you’re raising Josh Brown, and he’s got a plan. You and Lisa are implementing and I think that’s important. You stay on that plan, long term. Talk about the E of HERO for a minute as we come back to Josh.
KB: Yes, so the E is for exceptional experience. Heroes create an exceptional experience they serve. The people they serve with. The people they live with. The people they love in their life. Everybody at work and at home. Heroes create an exceptional experience for the people they serve. And that’s exactly what Lisa set about doing with Josh. Was creating an environment, creating an exceptional experience where this kid could become the best version of himself. You know, Les Brown used to say, “Somebody else’s opinion does not have to become your reality”. And that’s been a focal point in what we’ve done with Josh. My dad used to say it like this, my dad used to say, “Doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, all that matters is what you believe”. Doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.
JW: Love that.
KB: Listen, listen. People are going to think what they want to think. And they’re gonna try to impose that thinking on you. But all that really matters is what you believe. And so, as I watched this process unfold. That exceptional experience that Lisa created for Josh let us, you know, kids with autism tend to obsess about things. Man, when they get hooked on something, they get hooked on something. And this boy has been passionate about this little place called Walt Disney World since he was about 7 years old. When he was 7 years old he discovered Walt Disney World and if you want to talk about a place that has mastered the art of the exceptional experience, it’s Walt Disney World. And this kid obsessed about Disney, and his life’s goal was to go to Walt Disney World. At 7 years old that’s 24/7/365, that’s all he thought about and all he talked about. So we used that as leverage. We used that as a reward to keep a vision out in front of him. Something to keep him moving toward for the accomplishment of the interim steps to get there.
JW: Oh, I love that.
KB: And I watched as Lisa just poured into this kid. And she didn’t worry about, it wasn’t about helping him have what he didn’t have naturally. It was about helping him become more of who he was intended to be in the first place.
JW: That’s incredible. So, I’m gonna dive into the story. I don’t want to take too much of the story, and take away from the book. I want people to read the books, it’s got a lot more context then what Kevin can cover in the very short time we have today. But I’m going to mention the name of a hero identified by my new hero, Josh Brown, he saw something in someone because of just that exceptional service and experience. Her name, I believe, Josh Brown calls her Aunt Bea. Talk to me about Aunt Bea. What did she do that’s so great to Josh Brown?
KB: Listen, Aunt Bea, Aunt Bea took this kid and literally the very first day of our trip, and I won’t give it all away either. I’ll leave some of this to the book, but this hero showed up. Aunt Bea is an executive chef at Walt Disney World. Josh is on a very special diet. Lots he can have, lots that he can’t have. And from the very first moment she laid eyes on Josh Brown, you know, we went down to the restaurant on day one, and Lisa explained to the team that, look, there’s a lot he can have, there’s a lot he can’t have. The next thing we know from the kitchen emerges this executive chef, her name is Bea, B-E-A. And she looked at Josh Brown, and she said, ‘Good morning sunshine, how are you?’, and of course Josh is super shy, he lowered his head and he said ‘Good morning’. And Bea said, ‘I understand somebody’s on a special diet, how can I help?’ She pulls out a notebook, she starts writing down everything that my wife says Josh can have, and everything that he can’t, next thing she says, she asks Josh what he wants. He names his favorite food, I’m going to leave that as a surprise in the book, because what he ordered is something I believe can change the world today. If everybody would learn how to make this one thing, I believe that it could change the world in remarkable ways. And he ordered it, and she didn’t have the ingredients to make it, and long story short, he was ok with the substitution. He was ok with the second place prize on this particular day. The next day we got up, and I said, ‘Buddy, where are we going to eat breakfast today?’ And he said, ‘Dad, I want to go see Aunt Bea’, and that’s where the name Aunt Bea came from. And I looked at him, and was confused, I didn’t know who he was talking about, and Lisa said the chef’s name was Bea, B-E-A. And I said, ‘Brother, there’s all kinds of places we got to go’, and he said, ‘Dad, I want to go see Aunt Bea’ and I’ll tell you that one moment in time, she made an impression on this kid. Right? We always, something always lingers after we leave. Something always lingers when we interact with somebody. And she dripped positivity on him, she smiled at him, she engaged with him. She got millions of guests to take care of all week long, and she singled this boy out. And we got down to Aunt Bea’s place, and he ordered his favorite thing again, and she said, ‘You betcha honey, coming right up’. And you know, I said, ‘Hold on there Aunt Bea,’ I said ‘Do you remember us from yesterday?’ She said, ‘Yep’. I said, ‘Yesterday you didn’t have the stuff’. She said, ‘Nope’. I said, ‘So today you have it?’ She said, ‘Yep. I’ve got everything I need.’ I was stunned. I was blown away. That, and I asked her, ‘Where did you get it?’ She said, ‘I went to the store last night on my way home from work.’
JW: Man.
KB: This hero, this hero, listened to this little boy, this little 9 year old boy at the time, and she took it upon herself to go that extra mile. That one more step and she went and got the stuff, and she made this boy his favorite breakfast, and from that on we ate there every single day for 8 days.
JW: And I’m betting my friend, Josh Brown, ordered his favorite breakfast.
KB: Every single day, and Jimmy, to this day they are still friends.
JW: I love it. I love it.
KB: At 22 years old, Josh Brown and Aunt Bea are still connected.
JW: You know, what you’re saying, Kevin, and I hope you’re listening, guys, cause I’m gonna tell you what he just said was, it takes one instance to change a life. You have that time available to you everyday, if you’re aware as Kevin said earlier in the interview. If you’re aware of it, look and listen. You have opportunities to serve and others serve you. And I got to tell you, so Josh Brown, got his friend now, Aunt Bea. But I want to talk about something else that goes along with exceptional service in the book. I don’t want to give it too much away, but there’s a certain lady I’m looking forward to getting a haircut from someday. And I’m not going to say her name, I’m just saying this lady apparently has tamed something. Because you and I have something in common, Kevin, I have a hairstylist, that’s really not a hairstylist. She’s more of an outdoor shrub trimmer. I’ve got these cowlicks all over and she has to do something to lay them down. So you’ve got the same experience with your hair. Tell me a little bit about this lady’s service. Don’t give too much away, but tell me how she did what she did?
KB: I do. I’ve had bad hair my whole life, Jimmy. It’s described as somewhere between barbed wire, and barbs of iron or something. I don’t know, there’s stuff in there. You can put anything in it, it doesn’t lay down. It’ll put an eye out if you get too close. And so, yea, my wife, she got tired of listening to me complain. Cause I went through a bad patch. I was like on bad hair cut after bad hair cut after bad hair cut for about a year. And after a year my wife had had all that she could handle. And she’s the most positive person that I know. And she looked at me and said, ‘Babe, I can’t listen to this anymore’. She said, ‘You’re gonna have to get a hat, or we’re gonna have to fix this’. And so she called somebody, and she tracked down a hairstylist for me and I’m with you. She should be in landscaping as well as cutting hair. Because she was able to tame this mess. But really, the haircut is now secondary to the relationship. Because what this young lady did was, the minute I walked into the salon, Jimmy, she drew me in. She stopped what she was doing. She made her way to the front of the salon, halfway there the hand comes out, and she gets to me and she says, ‘My name’s Rebecca, you must be Kevin’. Shook my hand, looked me right in the eye, and I said, ‘I am Kevin, how did you know?’ And she said, ‘Your wife described the haircut, I recognized you from that’.
JW: Oh, no.
KB: From that point on, the experience that she gave me in that moment. She, everybody else in the salon, Jimmy, disappeared. It was like everybody just fell away. There were people in the waiting area, there were people in the other chairs. I felt like I was the only person in the room. And I’ll never forget the smile drew me in. But the intention, that experience that she gave me, making me feel like I was the only person in the room. You know, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach says, “You are no hero if the people who mean the most to you think the least of you”. And we go through life thinking that we are making people feel good. That we are engaging with people. But the truth is, we go through life extraordinarily distracted. We go through life with our head down, looking at our devices, our thumbs moving. And we’re distracted by what happened yesterday, worried about what might happen tomorrow. And we miss the only thing we own in the first place and that’s this moment. And this young lady, at the time, was 22 years old and she never looked at her phone. She never talked to anybody to her left, to her right. She never left this moment. Now, listen. She didn’t text, tweet or post anything. 22 years old. I know 50 year olds that can’t do that.
JW: Oh, yea.
KB: And she drew me in, made me feel like the only person in the room. And not only did she become my hairstylist forever, she became like an adopted daughter to us. She became part of our life. Part of her family. Her and her husband are like our own kids. Their babies are like our grand-babies. One moment in time can change everything. When you start doing business with family, it changes everything. This young lady, you know the condition, Jimmy, that our contract was that I’ll pay you money, you’ll cut my hair.
JW: Right.
KB: This young lady transcended the condition and made a connection. When you make a connection, ballgame. She’s an amazing, amazing young lady. And I’ll leave the rest of that story to the book.
JW: Oh, I gotta tell you folks. You want to read this story. Since he gave you the name, Rebecca’s the lady’s name, young lady, and I gotta tell ya, you can take what she’s doing in her hairstyling business and apply the same approach to any other service or product out there that you need to get in the hands of those that need it. You know I’m the kind of guy who believes, and this sounds crazy, but I believe everyone wants to do business with me, Kevin. And that’s just my lifestyle, man. So, let’s talk a little bit. So you’ve got me helping others without expecting anything. You’ve got the E which is exceptional service. Talk about the R, what does the R mean in the HERO effect?
KB: The R is for responsibility. And this is one where people always agree with it. Everybody agrees with accountability. They think everybody else should practice it. But accountability, as my friend John Miller, author of QBQ! would say, ‘Look, accountability always starts with me’. It’s about personal accountability. It’s taking responsibility for your attitude, your actions, your results. You know, a lot of times in life, especially if you’re in sales, and we’re all in sales. I don’t care what you do for a living, I don’t care what your title is, what’s on your business card. We’re all in sales. Nothing happens until somebody serves somebody and moves product, right?
JW: Right.
KB: And if you can serve others, make a sale in the process, that’s the best way to go. Cause it’s not always time to sell, but it’s always time to serve. Especially right now. In the midst of a pandemic, man, the more we serve it’s amazing how much the business follows when we serve others well. Responsibility is all about what can I do with what I have to create a better outcome for the people I serve. What can I do with what I have? You see, we always think we need something that we don’t have. I have a great friend of mine. He’s a Superbowl champion, he is an accomplished singer. He caught passes from Payton Manning, won the Superbowl being coached by Tony Dungy, this dude is the real deal. And I’ll never forget what he said me. He’s also a speaker. And he said to me, his name is Ben Utecht, and he said to me, he said, ‘Kevin’ he said, ‘you know what?’, he said ‘I think if I just had the same business experience that you had I could be a great speaker’. And I said, ‘Ben, that’s hilarious because I was just thinking if I had a Superbowl ring, was 6 foot 7, and caught passes from Payton Manning I could be a better speaker’. Isn’t it amazing we always think we need something. As somebody else has, when the truth is we already have everything we need to achieve our greatest dreams. Right? We just need people around us that will help draw it out. We need people around us that will help us recognize and nurture. We need people who will be around us and be our support team and pick us up when we fall. Love us when we’re unlovable. And so responsibility is really about accepting 100% of the, as Zig used to say, “It’s going to be it’s up to me”.
JW: Absolutely.
KB: Right? If it’s gonna get done, I’m gonna do it. There’s a line from Batman Begins that I absolutely love. It’s “it doesn’t matter who you are underneath, it’s what you do that defines you”.
JW: I love that.
KB: Right? We can run through life talking about what a good heart we have, and what a good person we are, but the truth of the matter is, we are defined by what we do. How we show up and serve others. How we show up and help people. How we show up and impact our community. How we show up and help the people on the inside of the business as well as the people on the outside of our business. Heroes take responsibility, 100%, for every outcome. Good, bad, or ugly.
JW: Oh, I love that. I will tell you, that’s one thing our country needs right now as well. We’re sitting here blaming the pandemic on every one under the sun, for our issues, our challenges, our outcomes, at the end of the day, to be honest with you, I’m responsible for Jimmy, you’re responsible for Kevin, and at the end of the day we need to do what’s best for those around us by taking care of ourself first, being accountable, getting our actions where they need to be. I gotta tell you a quick saying I love is, you said surrounding yourself by the people that can bring out the hero within you, cause it’s there. I will tell you, I have a saying though, I love to surround myself by engines, I don’t have too many anchors in my life. And those are the people that just drag you down. Right? You have those people that build you up, shoot you the next level. That’s what I do and that’s what I surround myself with as well. So, let’s say, you use the R word, I try not to use profane words on here, but you used that R word, ‘responsible’ and you know, to be very honest with you, you cannot be a hero without taking responsibility first for your actions contributing to the good. You see what I’m saying?
KB: Absolutely.
JW: You as a person has to contribute to the good of those around you, or you’re not really taking responsibility, in my opinion. What’s your thoughts?
KB: Yea, I mean Superman never showed up on the scene and said, oh, this isn’t for me. This is Batman’s responsibility to do this, right?
JW: Yeah.
KB: Heroes show up on the scene and they’re ready to go to work. Heroes, and here’s the thing. You know, you mentioned the pandemic, and we’ve obviously it’s forefront. It’s unprecedented. But, heroes when they show up on the scene, they don’t know all the answers, but they’re willing to take the next step. And then they’ll figure out the next step, and then the next step, so many people go through life paralyzed because they think they need to know all the steps. Have the whole plan. Know that everything, you know, how it’s all going to happen. And the truth is we never know what’s going to happen. Think about every single business plan that people were implementing of the first quarter of this year. We’re off like a rocket ship. The economy is soaring, everything’s great, then all of a sudden, early March everything starts to shut down. Right? So guess what? Those strategic plans just went out the window.
JW: Right.
KB: So now we’ve gotta pull ourselves up by the boot straps and say, ok, what am I going to do? What am I going to do to retool my business? Heroes aren’t made in crisis. Heroes are revealed in crisis.
JW: Right.
KB: Right? When the yogurt hits the fan, when things go sideways, that’s when heroes are revealed, and the truth of the matter is, when we look at this there are going to be people who emerge out of this pandemic stronger than they were going in. What, and there’s going to be people that emerge from this pandemic weaker than when they went in. And there’s going to be people who lose everything, and there’s going to be people who gain much. And the only difference is going to be how they responded to what happened around them. I heard John Maxwell the other day, he said, “Listen, I can’t control what happens around me, but I can control what happens in me”.
JW: Right.
KB: I can take absolute control for what I do, and that’s what heroes do. Heroes don’t play the blame game. They don’t play victim. They don’t push integrity outside of themselves and look for somewhere else to park the reason for the circumstance. They just say what can I do with what I have to create the best possible outcome. And when I look at this, I’ll just tell you straight up for me, what the pandemic has revealed for me, is everything that I should have been doing during the good times to prepare for the bad times. Right? I think it exposes our weaknesses. I should have diversified my book of business. I should have had things that it wasn’t so dependent on one thing in my business. Right? I’m a keynote speaker. On March 12th my keynote speaking ended. I had to learn new technology. I had to get really fluid with Zoom, and other platforms, because my dream hasn’t changed. My path has changed. My goal is still to impact people, my goal is still to share this message, my goal is to light a fire under people to find a hero that’s in them, you know, you can see this. Our listeners can’t see it, but you can see it on my shirt, what does it say? The world needs your hero.
JW: Love it.
KB: And I absolutely believe that, Jimmy. And I think that’s being responsible. Not looking for someone else to save you, saying what can I do to serve the people around me. How can I be their hero today?
JW: Oh man, that is powerful stuff. And I will tell you, the same thing happened. I mentioned to a friend, I call her a friend now, acquaintance of mine, a friend of yours that works with you. And I told her, I said, you know about March the 15th or 18th, I had contracts to go speak all across this country for all of the fall. You could just see the calls and the emails coming in, and I’m sitting there looking at, you know, ok, well that possibility went down, before you know it I’m down to only one speaking item, if November doesn’t cause problems. And the other 21 of them are all postponed until 2021. Which I thought that was unique, 2021 I’m having 21 already booked, but that’s ok. Anyway, so my point I’m making though is you’re absolutely right. So what you did is you said I’m going to pivot, and what I should have been preparing for, kinda like Jim Rohn said, you know, “Winter always follows Fall”. It’s coming, right? So you and I know, we’ve been around the block enough, he’s much younger than me guys, but you know I’m being 55 years of age, he’s like 30 or so. Kevin’s a young man. He looks it anyway. It’s thanks to that hairstylist you have, brother, that’s what it is.
KB: That’s it.
JW: But my point is what you’re doing is absolutely right, so you didn’t sit down very long and go, whoa as me, you set down for a little while and said ok my action plan may have been really blown apart for the year, but now I’m working on what’s called the next action, and that’s all that I’m doing. I’m doing one day at a time. You know, I’m a planner. My basic career is I’m a wealth manager and a planner for wealthy families, and I got to be honest with you they’re calling me, going ‘oh my gosh, our plans for this, this, and this are all blowing up’. I said, ‘Nope, they’re not, but here’s the next action plan’. So our timeline just went from longer to very, very short and immediate. So responsibility’s a key here. So I’m helping others, I’m giving exceptional service where it wasn’t, to be honest with you I don’t expect exceptional service anymore. You can fly first class on airplanes, man, and they still don’t get it. So, I’m not knocking the airlines, they’re just all strained trying to make a buck, right? But at the end of the day responsibility is on me, but now let’s talk about the key ingredient here, let’s talk about that letter O. What’s it mean?
KB: Optimism, man. Optimism. Jimmy, I tell ya, I’m just going be, I don’t tell a lot of people this, so, I’m going to tell you and your listeners, and that’s a lot of people. I’m not a positive person by nature. Right? My wife is, and my wife works on me. I just didn’t, I’m not wired that way. I’m not wired to naturally be positive. I tend to see the pessimistic side of the world. I’ve had to train myself to see the world differently. And my wife has worked with me. My wife tells me all the time, “Baby, you need to be more positive”. And I will always tell her, “I am positive things aren’t going to work out for me”. And she just usually just rolls her eyes and leaves the room, but here’s the thing. I have become an optimist. One of my very first mentors in business was a guy named David. And David got a hold of me after my life had spiraled out of control. I was in my early 20s, I’d burned a lot of bridges. Lots of failed opportunities, and literally was just at the end of my rope. Didn’t really know what I was going to do for that next step in my life, and quite frankly I didn’t want to take the next step in my life. And there were times when I just wanted to check out and not be here anymore. And this guy got a hold of me at that point in my life and he’s one of the people that helped me dig my life out of the ditch. A true hero that helped me turn my life around. Took the storyline that life had given me as a teenager and started to help me rewrite it as a young adult. And what he taught me more than anything else was the ability to see through this lens of optimism. And he taught me that being positive and being optimistic are two very different things. You know, positive thinkers tend to deny reality a little bit, right? Optimists, they don’t deny reality, they just deny the finality of whatever the situation is, right? See, optimism is being positive with a plan. Optimism is a skill set, it’s a muscle that we can develop. That we can bring forth, but we have to exercise it. And so everyday I work on seeing life through that lens of optimism, because when you see life through that lens of optimism, it gives us supernatural vision, right? We see people not as we are, but as we can be. We see life not as it is, but as it should be. When we were at Disney, I’ll tell you a quick story, when we were at Disney, we went to see a movie called A Bug’s Life, and it’s a 3D movie and it was an amazing experience. And we went, it was the middle of the day Jimmy, there wasn’t a lot going on, but when we got there there was this other family there. And we got situated, and this other family, mom and dad, three kids, and mom and dad were having an argument. It was obvious that they were having an argument just by their body language, their expressions, and we couldn’t hear what they were saying, so we moved a little bit closer, and the…
JW: We’re only here to help.
KB: We’re only here to help people. I had to know what was going on in order to help. And here was the conversation, dad was saying, ‘look, I’m not putting on the glasses’ and mom was adamant, she was like, ‘honey, you’re putting on the glasses, we’re here for the children, you’re going to enjoy this’. He goes, ‘I don’t want to put the glasses on, they’re gonna make me look stupid’. And I’ll never forget, Lisa leaned over and she said, ‘he should have thought about that before he put the fanny pack and the mouse ears on. It’s too late’. It’s too late. And I’ll never forget. I always think about this guy when I think about optimism. Because if you sat in that movie theater, 3D and you didn’t have the glasses on, you didn’t see the movie the way it was meant to be seen. You didn’t see the movie the way the creators designed it to be enjoyed. You didn’t see the richness, and the color, and all of the potential that was in that movie if you chose not to put the glasses on. And I think that’s how life works. If we go through life and we choose not to see life through the lens of optimism we don’t see people as they are meant to be. We don’t see life as the great creator designed it to be experienced by all of us. And we have this tunnel vision, this narrow view and we miss out on so much and I think optimism is a secret weapon for the hero. I think optimists can take a situation and say, goes right back to the responsibility, what can I do with what I have to create a better outcome? When you see through that lens, you said it earlier before we got on the air, you said, ‘listen, I hit the floor at 5am, I’m wired this way. I see the world. I know everybody wants to do business with me. Listen we attract to us that which we think about the most. Earl Nightingale said, whatever you think about the most is what you draw to you. Right? We become our most dominant thought.
JW: Right.
KB: And so, that’s training. You’ve trained yourself through mentors, through books, through cds, back in the day, cassette tapes, and digital downloads today, right. And I’m only, I’m 52, I’m not far behind you brother, and so we train ourselves to be optimistic. And that’s what my mentor David did for me. He trained me, he dripped on me everyday. He wouldn’t let my vision get too far off focus, and it’s one of the greatest things anybody’s ever done for me.
JW: Oh, that’s a compelling story. I will say this too Kevin, at the end of the day for me, a lot of people are so busy they don’t step back and see the bigger picture. Because it’s hard to watch a movie when you’re in it, brother. If you’re over here directing and producing, it’s one thing, but if you’re the actor in the movie and the world’s flying around you, things are happening. So what I’ve been trying to encourage and lead our clients with during the pandemic is, step back. Take a breather, see what’s going on and then we’ll respond, not react to it, but we’ll respond to it in a way that helps us get that next action. All I’m wanting to do is go to the next action. So if I can get them to look for tomorrow, what do I need to happen today to get me to tomorrow to make sure it’s good and make sure our team’s taken care of, our clients are taken care of. Whatever that is. And so, I will say to you that you are spot on in that within us are those attributes, the problem of it is like not going to crossfit box during the pandemic. Everybody said, ‘Oh well, the crossfit box closed, guess I’m going just sit down and gain weight’. And I said, ‘Oh no, man, push ups. Sit ups. You know, squats’. You don’t need weights, you don’t need air bikes. You can just get down here at your living room and just do this. And I said, ‘if you want a challenge have one of your kids sit on your back. Do your pushups with some extra weight’. So this is just me man. So I’ve always been optimistic. And I’ll tell you where it came from. You’re gonna laugh a little bit, but your life is not too different than mine. I was brought up in a great family, we had six of us children, we only got three stations, so, and we’re not…
KB: I remember, I remember.
JW: Yea, so you know, we didn’t have a lot of money at all, like I said, I didn’t know I was broke til I went off to undergrad school. But man we never had a lack of love, we never had a lack of food, we never had a lack of support. Optimism, my dad and mom man, woke up, it just oozed out of them for the day. Cause you know what, when you’re a family with six kids, two people and you have a four bedroom home, it’s a shotgun style home, it’s living in a rural America, you really just say, hey, you know what, I’ve got today. I’m gonna maximize my 24 hours. Whatever that is. And so that’s how I started getting up early. I took classes in undergrad school at 7 am if they offered them. 7:30, because I knew, hey, I gotta get something done the rest of the day, man, I can’t stay in class all day. And so you’ve really empowered me with this HERO effect and the optimism. When I read the book, I’m sitting there, well to be very frank with you I’ve underlined and highlighted a lot of books, so mine looks more like a workbook, but great stuff. So being a hero, I want to be a hero. I want everyone listening today to be a hero. It’s simply this, helping others, deliver exceptionalism, I don’t care if it’s your service, your smile, your handshake, whatever it takes, be responsible for your conduct. Only you can control your thoughts. You can allow others to input those, but only you control them. You have the yes and no in your brain. Turn off the negative, and O put in some optimism. Look at things a little differently. Give yourself a chance, and as Kevin said so eloquently, it is a muscle. It is a muscle. Work that optimism. Try to be around people that are optimistic. I will tell you, I surround myself by people like Kevin Brown. I gotta tell you, you can not go to one of his speaking engagements, sit there in that chair and not leave there so pumped up, I’ll be frank with you, I thought I’d grown to inches, my feet weren’t touching the ground, Kevin man, you really inspired me. I enjoyed that. So, let’s ask a few questions, so now we’ve got all our heroes lined up, tell me just a little bit about what my new hero Josh Brown is doing now. So, he graduated. I don’t want to give too much away, but he is doing some things in life. How’s he doing out in the real world? Is everything great?
KB: Yea, you know, it’s funny cause I was going to tell you this story anyway. The update on Josh Brown, Josh Brown’s 22 years old now. Josh Brown was the first in my family to go to college. Josh Brown graduated high school with honors, they told us he wouldn’t graduate high school. And it’s because of the vision that his mother placed in front of him and the belief, you know, we never let him use his “disability” we don’t even use the word, in fact, we don’t even say special needs, we say special abilities. Right? You want to talk about optimism, my wife said he didn’t have special needs, hell we all have special needs, we all, especially my wife would not let him ever say that he had special needs, that he had a disability. He has special abilities. And we believe that they were placed in him, you know, by his creator, and put here to make a difference. And this kid graduated with honors from high school, went to college, and he’s now in the process of buying a franchise. He’s buying a franchise with me and my wife, and what do you do in the middle of a pandemic? You buy a business.
JW: Absolutely. So, but what you’re telling me about, what I love the story folks, I don’t want to give too much away. I want you to read this dynamic book, man. It’s a quick read. We’re talking a weekend read, but you will gain a lifetime of benefit if you just implement some of these items in the book that give you action. But one thing about Josh Brown, folks, that I want you to understand is he’s just like you and me. He’s just like you and me in the fact that he has got everything he needed within himself, except he needed some encouragement. Some guidance. He needed some discipline. He needed what we all need to become the greatest us that we can be. I talk on the show, Kevin, about helping people be a bigger, better, bolder you. I’m telling you man, that’s Josh Brown in a hand. That’s him. Bigger, better, and bolder.
KB: Yes. He is the single reason that I even talk about heroes. He and my wife Lisa. They are the reasons I never saw this ace as a speaking career. I never saw writing a book. I never saw this message. And everything has evolved out of watching these two heroes, and you know, one thing we didn’t talk about early on, he is the epitome, he exemplifies what we believe to be true about heroes. The world will have you believe, if you ask anyone on the planet what a hero looks like, they’ll tell you a hero is an ordinary person who does something extraordinary. And we believe that heroes are extraordinary people who chose not to be ordinary. Right from our military men and women, who are the gold standard for what it means to be a hero, to healthcare workers to educators, to moms, dads, teachers, coaches. You go down the list. Heroes are extraordinary people who choose not to be ordinary. My wife and my son are two people who show up everyday and choose not to be ordinary. And here’s a kid who’s redefining his life. He’s buying a business, and he continues to, he just continues to defy what everybody else thought was possible for him because he believes and knows that the sky’s not even the limit for him.
JW: Oh, that’s awesome, man, Kevin, I don’t want to take too much more of your time. But I do have a couple of questions that I want to ask you that I think will help our listeners tremendously. And one thing here about Live a Life by Design we give tremendous value to our listeners. What is the best piece of leadership advice you’ve ever received and what would you give to those that are listening for them to move forward in their life to be bigger, better, and bolder people?
KB: The best piece of leadership advice I ever got was from my mentor David. David helped me not only learn how to sell, he taught me how to lead people. And I’ll never forget as a young leader, I walked into his office one day and I was frustrated. I was just at my wits end, and he said, ‘What is wrong with you?’ And I said, ‘I am surrounded by idiots’. And he looked at me, and this guy was from south Texas, and he looked at me and he kinda leaned over the table and he said, ‘Son, I’m gonna tell you something’. He said we reproduce what we are. He said, ‘If you’re surrounded by idiots, you need to go look in the mirror you’re gonna see chief idiot number one’.
JW: Right.
KB: And I’ll never forget that moment. And the enormous responsibility that comes with leadership is that we do teach other people our system. We teach people our attitude. We teach people our belief system. We teach people our attitudes. The way we approach work. The way we approach people. We teach other people how to treat us. And from that day on I always went to work on making sure I had more to give my people then they could get anywhere else. Because we can’t give what we don’t have. So if I’m not reading, if I’m not listening, if I’m not growing, then I don’t have anything to offer people and people will ultimately leave leaders. People never leave companies, they always leave leaders. And so I’ve worked everyday of my life to get better, to have something to offer the people that come to me that expect me to have something that will edify and fuel their life.
JW: Man, that is potent advice, folks. I don’t know about you, I was making notes. There again, every time Kevin says something powerful like that, I want you to understand, he’s saying to you, you attract what you are. So you need to become what you wish to attract. At the end of the day Jim Rohn said it best, man, “You can not chase success”. Many of us have tried to go out and do things that don’t fit. The old square peg in the round hole, right? What’s he say Kevin? You attract success by becoming what you should become. Kevin, this has been an outstanding opportunity for me, just to sit down and speak with you a little bit. I do want to mention a couple of things before we give out the contact for the book. I’m going to place on our website, contact information to your speaking agent to help you if you need anything. We’re going to put the information. We’re going to put the book on our website as well. But if you are writing this down, and I hope you’re listening I want you to text the word hero, HERO, to the number 33777, that’s HERO text to 33777. That’s what we promised at the opening of this podcast, was that you will get a 20% discount code. So when you go to the website for the book at kevinbrownspeaks, that’s speaks.com/products, plural, number one. So that’s kevinbrownspeaks.com/products-1 enter this code, they’ll quickly send the book out to you, 20% off the sales price. That’s a value in any book, guys. And if you want, I’m just going to put it out there, if you’re training a team, you want a team that is exceptional, that become heroes in their own right to everyone in your organization. Order a case of the books, have some training on it. Hire Kevin to come speak. I promise you he will do it in some form, whether it’s during the pandemic on electronic means, or in person. He’d be honored to come out and meet with your organization. Kevin, one last thing about heroes before I let you go, brother. Monday, today, is a powerful day in the United States. It’s Memorial Day. This is for those heroes, again that don’t wear capes, but wore combat fatigues, and wore helmets, and fought on the ground in Europe and in Asia and in the Pacific on ships and submarines. And these are the real heroes I want to say today, Thank You. Thank You to their families for the ultimate sacrifice that they gave so that we can enjoy what I always say is the greatest country on the planet. Any comments about Memorial Day, sir, you’d like to leave us with?
KB: Absolutely. The greatest nation on planet Earth, without a doubt, and we sometimes miss the fact that we are so free. And we are so blessed that we have the opportunity to grow ourselves, grow our businesses, and grow other people. Whether we’re in the midst of a pandemic or not, we are still in the greatest nation on planet Earth, because men and women, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters go to work every single day. They put on the uniform and they go to work to protect us, to keep us free. To keep us safe and to make sure that we can continue to pursue our dreams and to live our lives for generations to come. And there is no greater gift, no greater hero in my book than the men and women of our Armed Forces.
JW: Oh, that’s outstanding. Hey, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening today to Live a Life by Design podcast. I want to say a special thanks to my good friend, Kevin Brown. Thank you Kevin for being with us today. If you’ll hang in there just a few moments we’ll get some last minute show notes from you. Ladies and gentlemen, the big, better, bolder you is simply waiting. It’s dormant within your mind, and within your heart and it is time during this time of disruption to bring out the hero within you. Start helping others, deliver exceptional service, responsibly take your own actions in consideration and not just the last, but optimism. Show the world a smile. I will tell you right now, those are in short supply in this world. Everyone is going through a time of stress. Not you. You don’t allow the world to tell you what to do. You direct the sail in the manner you wish to take your ship, your life, your purpose. Also want to say thank you to all of our listeners again. It’s incredible how much we’ve been receiving in terms of comments, your five star reviews on iTunes. Thank you so much for those. We want to bring you the greatest value possible. If you failed to write down how to receive a 20% discount on Kevin’s book, it will be in the show notes as well as we will have it on our website for you. You can click there, and it will take you to the link for Kevin’s book as well. Again, thank you for listening. Our biggest challenge to you this week is go out, make the world a better place and find the hero within you. Until next time, Live a Life by Design.