TGP #52 The Public Speaker’s Public Speaker With Richard Mulholland

The path of the public speaker is a difficult but rewarding path to walk. What do you need to do if you want to make your presentation a memorable event? We answer this question and more as Aaron Civitarese sits down for a conversation with entrepreneur and the founder of Missing Link, Richard Mulholland. Richard looks back at his days as a rock and roll roadie and what it taught him about creating impactful and authentic presentations. He also shares tips and tricks that you need to keep in mind if you want to become an effective public speaker. Hungry for more? Then tune in and learn from one of the best in the business.

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The Public Speaker’s Public Speaker With Richard Mulholland

I’m here with my guest, Rich Mulholland. He is an expert in the speaker world. He has been building speaking brands and companies for a long time. I’m super excited to talk about this because people are interested in it who want to get in it. Some people are intimidated by it and I want to hear from a professional all about it. He has a company called Missing Link. Rich, welcome to the show. It’s a pleasure to have you here.

It’s so great to be chatting with you.

Let’s jump right into a little bit of background about you. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where did you come from and a little bit of backstory if you don’t mind?

I was born in Glasgow, Scotland but I moved to Johannesburg when I was nine years old. For the last several years, I have been living in Cape Town. Where I came from a business point of view is I used to tour with bands. We didn’t have work in winter, so I did conference work but conference work kills your soul because apparently, people don’t care to put in the effort to present better.

When I was 22, I was like, “This is rubbish. It doesn’t matter how much lighting, sound, and AV I give you. If you are bad at presenting, it’s going to be a crappy event.” I started a presentation company not because I love presentations but because I wanted to save poor AV technicians like me from listening to crap that other people deliver.

You are traveling with bands doing the AV, setup, and all that stuff and then you transitioned. I’m curious to understand why people don’t care and I’m sure we are going to get into that. It has a lot to do with the mundane aspect of the surroundings, I would assume but you probably understand how to brighten that up. Before we get into that, let’s talk about the bands. Everyone loves music. I want to hear some stories. What’s going on with the bands?

I was very lucky to tour with some significant ones. I programmed the moving lights for an Iron Maiden world tour, which was nice. I was a lighting operator. I became a lighting designer. I toured with Def Leppard, Brian Adams, a bunch of cool bands, Midnight Oil. It was a whole cool group. It’s funny because I’m a punk rocker. I’m punk rock to the core. When I started, the band Depeche Mode came to South Africa and I had gone to my dad who had contacts in the industry. I said to him, “I will lick the stage and clean it for free. You find me a job.”

He took me in and got me a job as a stagehand and he said, “Do you want to do the sound?” My sister was an audio engineer and I was like, “I want to do something different.” He said, “What about lighting?” I said, “Let me try that.” I went in and I loved it. I still think being a lighting designer is probably the thing that I was the best that’s of anything I have ever tried. I loved it. It was so fun for me. It was one of the most amazing expressions.

Lighting control is so much of the mood you can get in a rupture. I’ve got a pretty cool story about that, we get to it later. It was an amazing experience but I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do. In the next level, you have to decide that you want to be traveling a living man’s side of the year. I said, “I don’t want that to be my life.” I quit. I started a presentation company. The irony is in 2021, I was at home 7 days a week, twice in 365 days. I failed.

You were traveling your ass off with legendary rock star bands. I don’t know if I want to talk all day about the band parties or if we should go into the work. We will save that for another day. That’s awesome. You must have had so many cool experiences. You saw a gap. A lot of times when we are in marketing and things, we talk about the blue ocean, red ocean and these things. It sounds to me like you almost created your own blue ocean.

It was boring, drab and presentations putting people to sleep, yawning. You are over here with Iron Maiden, slamming shows with lasers, smoke, and shit going off and you were like, “I could probably make this a little bit more entertaining.” How did that moment go in your mind, if you can take us back? What was the click that made you think like, “That’s it, this is what I’m going to do?”

I realized quite early on the presentation was everything. There were bands that I loved that came across assholey that I ended up not liking the music afterward. It was a band I liked going in. I toured with it and I was like, “I don’t like these guys. They don’t come across. They are not nice and I couldn’t like the music.” My favorite example of this and it’s the one that always comes to mind is Chris Isaak’s. Chris Isaak is so far removed from music that I can get behind. It’s not the thing that I would typically like. When I landed the gig, everyone was laughing because it was another cool tour going on.

I can’t remember what it was but I’ve got the Chris Isaak’s gig because I operated those lights. I went and did it. He was so amazing. It was two gigs I did. This guy’s presentation has authenticity, came across so well on stage. To this day, I still think he’s one of the coolest artists I have ever seen perform. His presentation was everything. You didn’t have to like the music before. You like this presentation so much that I ended up liking the music as a byproduct. I thought, “There is something to this.”

I remember the second night he was performing in Sun City and the second night of his gig and this is how I know he was authentic because it didn’t happen in the first gig. I was operating in a lighting system called color mags, so color changes. I was standing next to the LD that was touring with Chris, who’s a lighting designer. All of a sudden, Chris was looking at the audience and it was a seated gig, so all people sitting and watching him. He was like, “This sucks.”

He turned around and he walked back to the band and I could hear on comms, the lights man, he said, “I don’t know what he’s going to do here, boys. I don’t know what’s going on. Just roll with it.” All of a sudden, he came back and said, “This is a terrible gig. You are a horrific audience. This is not fun. You are supposed to pay money. You are supposed to have fun. We are going to change this up a little bit.” He started playing the opening riff of, Enter Sandman by Metallica. I thought, “This is going to go for five seconds.”

They played the entire song. Chris Isaak’s audience went off to Metallica and the whole gig changed. I was like, “This is a masterclass in how to change an audience dynamic in real-time. There is a better way.” The next week I’m doing a corporate gig and some guy is standing on the stage being terrible. He gets off the stage and this other person comes on, doesn’t have lighting sound AV. The speakers open their mouths. They grab you by the throat and drag you to the end of the gig. You are like, “That guy works. I can get behind this. This is intellectually exciting for me.”

I would start going to other gigs I was working on and they would do the rehearsal and I will be like, “This is terrible.” I started consulting, offering tips and ideas. I was 22. I had no idea what I was doing but luckily, they had even less idea. They were a 1 out of 10. I was a 2 out of 10. I was their king. I always talk about this idea called Stopforth’s Law. Stopforth’s Law is named after Mike Stopforth. In any area that lacks an expert, whoever puts up their hand first becomes it.

Nobody wanted to own presentations because it was such a crappy, boring sphere that like this 22-year-old punk rock kid that was touring with bands could put up a hand and say, “I will help you set place in public.” Everyone is like, “Why not?” I started my business and that was it. We were working with the CEO from the biggest bank in the country within a year.

Stopforth’s law says that in any area that lacks an expert, whoever puts up their hand first becomes it.

That’s such an entrepreneurial spirit. You see a gap. You have an experience with something and you innovate from one industry over into another. You see the vision clearly and execute on that. That’s awesome. I love that. I came up in corporate out of college. I wanted to fall asleep. I’m not that guy at all. You and I are very similar in energy. I like to have fun, get loud and be rowdy and stuff. I can’t sit and listen to this person talk in monotone for four hours with spreadsheets on the damn projector. I’m going to die.

I see what you are saying and that’s cool. You were 22, you put your hand up. You were the expert in the field. Everyone around you saw your value. You had a ton of energy and experience. You have traveled with the top dogs. You were like, “I can have fun and I will show you how to do it and make it fun and pop.” You are a state-changing magician. You can change people’s state very well. You understand how to do that and you are laying it out in a different industry.

I ask you then, while you were going through this transition and working with the bank CEOs in your first year and things, it was a whole different world for you as far as who you are dealing with. It’s different to hang with Iron Maiden’s sound tech than it is with CIBC’s CEO. I’m sure it’s a different conversation. What type of challenges did you have in that transitional time?

At 22, 23, when I started my business, I was a complete asshole. I mean that in the nicest way. I was so confident. It’s one of the things that I miss the most but I mentor a lot of speakers. Almost every speaker suffers from Imposter syndrome. Do you know who doesn’t have Imposter syndrome? A single 22-year-old. When you are 22, you have DSP, Delusional Self-Belief. You believe that you are everything. That carried me so far in the beginning. This is a complete deviation but we are extending the amount that we are asking young people to study.

What we are doing is we are making them serve the most competent years of their life. The year where they will walk up to strangers and nightclubs, the year where they will try stupid things, do those idiotic crazy things that you wouldn’t do and we are making them spend the university instead of making them start businesses or build their careers. My dad was born in 1947. He studied for four years when he finished school. That career took him up to when he was 60. People are reinventing their careers over and over again and yet, they are studying for ten years at the beginning of their career.

It makes no sense. To answer your question, I had this delusional self-belief. I understood that. That was the first thing. The second thing was I realized very early on that people didn’t hire us because they had a presentation problem. They were paying us to do one presentation for them more than they were paying their PA or their assistant who could do six presentations in a month for them. I realized, “What was it?” The name of my book here throws back to that original thing. It was called Boredom Slayer was because they weren’t hiring us because they wanted to have a good presentation.

They were hiring us because their ego didn’t want to allow them to be boring. They didn’t want to get up in front of people who respected them and be boring and embarrassing. When I started my business, I wore a suit. I had this pure wool-knitted suit. It was expensive. One full month center. We went to buying the suit that I was paying it off for ages. I want it to be sick. I walk into the CEO’s office of Standard Merchant Bank. I’m presenting in a suit. The guy’s name was Myles Ruck. We still got a relationship. I ended up being the officiant to this kid’s wedding in 2021.

I walked into his office when I’m 22, 23 years old in a suit and tie. He places me as an intern because that’s what 23-year-olds in banks wear. Until I was 30, I didn’t wear long pants. I wear shorts and a T-shirt. That was my thing. When I walked into his office as a young, confident business-earning 23, 24, they didn’t know how old I was, I walked into their office in a pair of shorts to the CEO of a bank to talk about their conference and conference strategy. I had to know what I was talking about in their mind. Again, they were thinking, “We don’t want to be boring. This person certainly isn’t boring.”

You have to know which dragon you are trying to slay if I always trying to sell PowerPoints over one with a suit and a tie but I wasn’t. I was trying to make their conferences, and then appear exciting and interesting to their team. What do you want to buy? Do you want to buy a guy in a suit or do you want to buy a rock star X roadie who understands the dynamics of getting audiences to cheer? That’s what they went with. I’m a bit old and conservative, it’s difficult because I’m the old gray-haired guy. It was easier when I was younger. Now I’m full of doubt.

It’s true. When you are young, you are full of it. You know everything. You’ve got all the confidence in the world. It’s so true that you say, kids. You and I were in the same age realm. Through that college years, those are the years when you are on fire and when you have no fear to go out and chase your dreams down. Interestingly, you mentioned that. It instantly made me think of celebrities and rock stars. You look at a celebrity or a rock star. You look at these people that are walking around Hollywood chasing their dreams and are extremely authentic with themselves the ones that I’m thinking of in my mind. Post Malone is a great example.

He is completely authentic. He is tatted up. He is living his best life. He is enjoying himself but he is grounded and he is on fire with himself. He is not pleasing people. He doesn’t give a fuck what people think. He is being himself. That’s why people are attracted to him so magnetically. He has that about him. If he was put in a box and made to go to school because he didn’t make it in music, in the school space, I would guess he would be hating it, down, and losing his motivation for life.

Cut to twenty years later, he be a dude working at a grocery store. The reason isn’t that he is not talented, it’s because he didn’t get to chase his dream at that moment when they were on fire. He is in the fire and chasing it and he’s allowed to chase it, which is what you are saying. What do you think society should do about that? What do you think the answer is?

I have never heard it framed that way but I love every second of it. Being in the fire. When you were standing in the middle of the fire, parents do what they think they are doing is the right thing. They grab the fire extinguisher and try and smother it out of you. I’m going to answer this and I want to bring it to March 2020 when lockdown happened because that was a fire. We go through life trying to smother the very things that are fueling us and we miss these opportunities. When there is that moment that you feel that fire burning inside of you, you have to go with it.

When you are 22 years old, you think that feeling is going to last forever but it doesn’t. I hate sounding like the old dude but it doesn’t because life catches up and you have to be mature. You get a mortgage and you have kids and things like this. The other thing is you get comfortable. Never let your comfort get in the way of your potential. Essentially, the house is my house. I’m an obsessed board game player. I’m living my best life. Everything is amazing. My business took a massive knock because I was comfortable.

You are both delusional and uncomfortable when you are 22, 23 years old. That is the best fuel. You’ve got to find other areas where that comes out again. I’m working with a speaker named Kirsty Bisset. She talks about this idea of getting in comfortable. You have to chase your discomfort. Every great moment in your life happens when you are uncomfortable and when you feel that. She is so spot on because that’s what happened in March 2020. That fire that could have been destructive, it either is, “My house is on fire.” That’s what happened. Her business went to revenue zero.

Every event we were working on was canceled. September 2021 was the best year in our company’s history by far. I decided, “I’m going to run, hike and try to put out the flames or I’m going to be fueled by those flames and think this dumpster fire has cleaned out all the crap in my business and there is an opportunity.” Any time there is anything unknown, disaster can be weaponized and it should be weaponized. That’s what we did. We built a better business. I have not felt this young and invigorated in years. 2020, if everybody hates it, they can carry their hate to the grave. This has been the best year in my working career because I was under attack and I needed it.

With podcasting, for example, I talked to so many people as you can imagine. Everyone I talked to is in growth mode. They are on fire. They are doing something amazing. They are following their passions. They are going up and down the ebbs and flows of entrepreneurship. “It’s a shit show. It’s awesome. I’m going to die. It’s amazing. I’m crushing it.” It’s always like this but the beautiful thing is everybody sees 2020 as it’s time to go for it extra hard. There are only two responses in 2020. There are only two things you can do. You can use it as an excuse and say, “2020 is a write-off, I’m going to curl up on the couch, chill, remain stuck, and don’t move at all.” It’s a perfect excuse.

You can watch the election on TV. There is so much stuff to talk about. It’s an excuse all day. It’s very easy to slide into that. Our subconscious wants us to. If that’s you and you are reading, it’s not a knock on you. It’s just letting you know that your reptile brain is winning and you need bitch slap it. The only way you can grow is by bitch slapping that lower self. There are people that are hungry and going for it like yourself and your clients and the people that I have the pleasure of chatting with here. They tell me the same thing. They say, “2020 has been on fire.” Personally, it has been my best year ever.

You have to chase your discomfort. Every great moment in your life happens when you are uncomfortable.

Financially, with my wife, our relationship, traveling, moving countries, got a new place, on fire with a bunch of different things, best year ever. You can’t grow if you are comfortable. I say it all the time, rock bottom with your back against the wall, it’s the best possible place you can be, in my opinion. If you have never hit rock bottom before, I almost hope you do because if you haven’t been there before, number one, know that it’s coming. Number two, when you hit it, that’s the launchpad for the rest of your life. When you are in that position of hunger and you have to make it happen, that’s where I was years ago. I had to make it happen. No choice. I lost it all.

That’s the feeling when you are like, “I’m going to do what I’ve got to do and I’m doing it.” You make that shit happen. 2020 gave a taste of that to the entire world. What people did with it was up to them. Some people came out of 2020 with 2 or 3 new businesses and a bunch of new revenue streams, new clients, new whatever. Other people are leaving more in debt, more broken, depressed and pissed off. It’s a matter of choice. It’s up to you.

Can I jump in three points you raised there? It’s so good. The first thing is an earmark as somebody I want to introduce you to, my business coach would have a post. He had a mango chutney business years ago, a massive business in South Africa. If you went to any African person inside Africa, they knew his brand. Biggest, by far, the market leader. Two mango seasons where the cost of mangoes, the cost of the base material ingredient was more expensive than what he sold it for. His business went under, 100 employees, fleets of trucks, everything. He wrote a post about it. He wasn’t being ironic.

He wasn’t being nice. He hated that job. He loves this job. The best thing that ever happened to him. It would be a growth trajectory. He would be an amazing guest for the show but I want to send you that post. The second thing is you were very nice to people. You let them off the hook. You said, “You are not doing a judgment call to them.” Bullshit. Fuck you. Get off your ass and get off the couch. Future you is going to hold current you accountable for how you behave.

You are going to have to look back when a whole bunch of people, when the dust settles, and a whole bunch of success stories and people grow out of the dust. The phoenix has risen from the ashes of 2020. You are going to have to sit back and say, “I did learn the dance to Jerusalem.” You can do better than that. The third thing is you mentioned excuses. We all do have an excuse but what a gift. If you are an entrepreneur, for the first time in your company’s history, you have somebody else to blame if you fail. If you failed in 2020, you can be like, “COVID.” What a gift.

For my entire career, if I failed and people would look at me and think, “There is a failed entrepreneur.” In 2020, that changed. I could try anything. We tried a new program. We started outsourcing all of our production. We started dramatically appealing to work with speakers all over the world. We tried a whole bunch of things because if I broke my business, I could be like, “This COVID destroyed life, bitch. That sucks.” It didn’t matter anyway because even if I went out of business, I still had a reputation and people still had my email address.

When the dust would settle, they would contact me. I have a business with no expenses and I can build it up from the ground up. It was a win-win situation. We did it. Few of our staff are no longer with us but we have been hiring new staff. You can say, “I’ve got to try and keep this everything safe for the jobs that we have.” You don’t. You’ve got to keep your company safe for the people you will employ over the next 30 years. It’s not about the three people. They are going to leave when they get a better job. Anyway, that was a bit of a rant but you don’t have permission to stay on the couch. Get off the bloody couch.

You don’t have permission to stay on the couch. Thanks for calling that out. I appreciate it. There is a version of you in the future calling you and knows what your potential is. This is when inner work and meditation, and these types of things come in because when you start imagining the life that you want, love, and create, some people are like, “I wish.” That’s not a wish. That’s something that you are supposed to be doing. Your conscious mind is creating that and telling you, “That’s what you could be doing. Go do that shit.” When you are 22, you do. That’s the difference.

That’s what we are getting at here but throughout your whole life, anytime my mind speaks up and gives me some download from the collective consciousness telling me to do something or to move in a certain direction, I follow that shit and I don’t question it. It served me quite well. There is a saying that I heard a long time ago and it goes quite well with this whole ranting topic we are on here about being the best version of ourselves and not having excuses. It was something like, “The definition of hell is dying and meeting the version of yourself that you could have been.”

That is brutal. I’m not a religious person. That’s horrific. I’m going to tell my wife afterward. She is an artist. She has been pushing herself and creating. Again, this would haunt her as well. There is a guy called Warren Rustand. He is a giant. He played in the NBA. He served three US presidents. He has been the CEO of three Fortune 20 businesses. He is a machine. He is the most humble and amazing human being you have ever met. He said this line to me once, “I rarely cry. I had to do this talk and I had to stand up in front of these guys and do this talk. I started crying when I was in the middle. That stupid Dawson’s Creek style cry.”

The line he had said leading up to it because he dances about like, “Were we successful? Did we fill these and that?” He dropped his bomb. He said, “Remember, your success is only important when measured against your potential. You’ve got to hold yourself accountable to your potential.” I was like, “No.” When I started speaking, I said to him, “I had lied to myself for years and said that I’m successful and I’ve got enough and I don’t need more and things like this but I know it was a safe lie because of the risk. Risking the status quo to push myself further would have been huge. This line of you is the definition of hell is dying and meeting the version of you that you could have become.” That is that exact saying.

I heard that years ago and it’s burned in my brain for eternity.

You can’t unsee this.

I do a lot of inner work and I meditate a few times a day. It’s always that. I do quantum timeline jumping and things where I’m going down the steps in my future, going back, talking to myself and I’m jumping all over the timeline. Each time I do it, I’m like, “That’s that version of me right there. There is that dude. He is awesome. That guy is killing it. You are cool.” I always have that frame and I’m like, “Get your ass out for a run, come back and hop on and get to work.” You are always battling yourself. It’s an inner game. Nobody is coming to save you.

Nobody is here to motivate you and get you out of bed in the morning. It’s not happening. It’s all on you. If you realize that you are going to die, that’s another one. I truly believe that we live two lives. The first life is when we are alive for a while, living our life, going about every day. Our second life begins the day that we realize we are going to die. I didn’t live my second life until my early 30s. I thought I was invincible. It never came up in my mindset. I never thought about eternity or death. In my early 30s, one day, it hit me.

I was like, “I’m 1/3 of the way there. I’m going to die. I’ve got to get my shit together. I better speed this train up.” I feel like we all live two lives because as soon as you have that scarcity that you know it’s ticking down, it’s a finite resource. As soon as you realize it’s finite, it changes everything. It’s like gold. The shit is finite. You can’t get more of it when it’s gone. It’s not like fiat where they can print a bunch of it. When I came to that realization, I was like, “That’s true, too.” Both of those things all hit me around the same year just so it happened to be when I started going deep on inner work.

This two-life idea is true. There are two examples I want to talk about. The first one is my dad had a transient stroke years ago. He was walking from the shops to his car and all of a sudden, he felt like he was drunk. I don’t drink but my dad is very traditionally Scottish. He felt like he was pissed for a second, which is normally a good day at the office, except he wasn’t drunk. Thirty seconds later, he was fine. It turns out that a transient stroke when we went to the doctor, it’s an early warning signal for an actual stroke that could be fatal.

The doctor said usually within 6 months to 1 year, you are going to have a full stroke. I went around to my parents’ house for dinner that night. They live around the corner. I said to my mum and my dad, “How is that fitting? Is he scared?” She said, “He is affected but I wouldn’t say he’s scared. We are not scared of dying. We realized that there is so much left that we want to do.” It wasn’t a fear of death. It was a realization. They started living their second life then. This COVID thing for them is frustrating because they had a cruise they were booked on. They were going to be traveling.

Your success is only important when measured against your potential. You have to hold yourself accountable for your potential.

They were going to Montenegro. They were traveling all around. They were doing the US, getting a cruise across, doing a whole big thing. They have been doing that every year and it was cutting it short and they were like, “We’ve got this stuff we want to do.” The second example is maybe a bit more of an extreme case. It was this dude called Alfred. He went to Paris one day and he started this business-building dynamite. He was the inventor of dynamite because he was trying to build better mines. It was all for the purpose of mining and he invented this thing. They realized they could do more than that and went into battles.

The idea was it was supposed to use this to end the same way that nuclear wars are supposed to be a preventative measure but everyone started bombing each other. It turns out it wasn’t preventative. Everyone was dying and blowing up. He was sitting in Paris one day and a newspaper accidentally thought he had died. They wrote his obituary. Imagine you are sitting there. You open the paper and read your obituary. I can’t remember the phrase they used. It was like, “The merchant of death has died.” It was the headline or something like that.

The guy was sitting there reading and he was like, “This cannot be who I become. This cannot be my story in life.” He realized that he wanted to be remembered for something else. His surname is Nobel. What he’s remembered for is, he changed his entire life. He decided, “I’m going to be a force for good.” He created the Nobel Prize and he went on to build this whole thing up. A very few people think of Nobel the inventor of dynamite and the angel of death. They think of him as a person who’s trying to drive humanity forward. He got his second life moment when he read his obituary. The problem is most of us aren’t going through it. We need to think about that.

It’s why the Stoics are so great because there’s that whole thing about a droid. Memento mori, “Remember you will die.” The Stoics thought about it all the time. They remind you, you are going to die. This is a finite journey. They talk to you about it a lot. It helps you transition into the second life that you talk about, which is another concept that I’m going to remember forever. The one I’m going to hang up is you’ve got to explain this quantum timeline jumping to me a little bit more because it’s genius.

Essentially, you are going into meditation and you are retracing the steps that you have been on your journey. You are physically going there. You are growing yourself younger and going back through your life into pivotal moments. It’s all about creation. It’s not about fixing yourself, finding pain, and digging into it. It’s about observing, taking the wisdom, and moving down the timeline. You go back. You go to these pivotal moments and grow yourself younger. You are finding the moments that you are grateful for that you went through. Typically, it could be something amazing.

You were on fire and you were like, “I went off my dream that day. I was 22. I gave zero fucks that day. I went for it and crushed it. I’m super grateful that I went for it and did that because it got me to the next point.” The next point was, “I had this breakdown and this thing happened that was bad but this is what I learned.” You do this process back into history from where you are. You are looking at your present state. You have to be completely satisfied with what you have because if you are not satisfied, you will never be satisfied in the future. Future doesn’t even exist. We are in it.

If you are not satisfied, what makes you think you are going to be satisfied then? You are an unsatisfiable human. You have to be completely satisfied with where you are. You are picking up all the wisdom from before and you are getting gratitude, deposits along the way. Where you are, you are satisfied with it. You look around and you are like, “I’m super satisfied with everything. I want more of this of what I’ve got going on here. I want to add more volume to this awesome stuff. Maybe add some more of the things because I’m very creative and I like to create things, expand, grow and meet people, so I’m going to do more of it. I’m going to create more.” Satisfied.

Moving forward, it’s what you want to create, what you are creating, which you are on the path to be your best self. You start working your way and you go all the way to the end. You say from here, where is the next milestone you want to be at? For me, we are living in Italy. I won’t get into the timeline but I will start looking at investments, where we are living or things that I’m doing professionally. “Is my book out yet? Yes or no. Am I doing this yet? Yes or no.” I pick these little moments in time and I see myself in that. You are seeing it through your eyes. You are not observing it like an eagle.

You are seeing it as your own self out from your eyeballs. First-person, you are working your way through these steps. Where do you see yourself in the next step? Where do you see yourself one step from there? Where does that lead one step from there? We are always only one step away in life. To get to the fourth step, you have to take this first step, so you are only one step away from the next thing is the only thing that you can think about. You find yourself on that step, the next step and you say, “Where do I want to be on the next step?”

You have reached the ultimate goal, so you are thinking in yourself, “I have this amazing XYZ and I have ABC in my life, and this is going on and this everything is booming.” You are living your best life ever. “I’m flying around in helicopters, getting dropped off at my house. I’ve got the charity work going on. We have properties all around the world. Giving back and serving thousands of people. All this awesome shit is going on. This is the best. There is more for me. What’s next?” You go up a level again. You work your way all the way until almost death.

At the very end, I usually find myself on a rocking chair with a doobie being like, “That was an awesome ride.” That’s the end of my rope somewhere there. What you do is that moment is the present moment. You need to calibrate your brain to say, “I’m in this rocking chair. I’m at this end point. This is real life.” Keep in mind, you are 30, 45 minutes into meditation. You are in a different world. You are living in that space. It’s super visual. It’s vivid and colorful. You can hear things and see things because when you do this a lot. You can become visual in there. You live that life. People are like, “You can’t time travel.” It’s like, “You can. I do it every day.”

You are that future version but in your mind, it’s current. You do the same process that I explained but you work it backward from the future. Instead of working it from 2020, you are working it from 2080 or whatever. That’s current, so you are working all the way back and you are looking at all the steps that got you to that point. You are being grateful for each step. You are thanking yourself for having the courage, tenacity, and balls of steel to do the things you wanted to do to get yourself to the next step that ultimately got you to your best life. You work your way back through the timeline and you hop it.

This is timeline hopping. You spend 5 or 10 seconds on each spot. By this time, there are 15 or 20 spots and you work your way back. For me, I go as young as about fifteen or so. All the way back up to the current time, which is your older self and you do that timeline back and forth as many times as you want. You bring yourself back to where you are. Right before you open your eyes, you ask yourself, “What is the next logical step that I need to do to get me to my first step?” Open your eyes. Journal it and that’s your goal for the day or week. That’s timeline jumping.

Let me ask you 1 or 2 questions about it. One question is, when you do it on consecutive weeks and months, how different is the end story? Have you been in five different versions of yourself at the end? Is that avatar of 2080 you always that person? You’ve got so dialed in that the movie feels like you know the words and way and it makes it easier to get into that state.

I know the movie and words.

The second question that sometimes I worry about because I do see this. It’s about understanding what you want the movie to look like because I do believe that everybody I meet, that person is the star of their film. We are all trying to create these better films. I see a lot of other entrepreneurs and they are only measuring their criteria on that one thing. They have never met there enough in business, they see their personal growth is, keep on growing and adding more in business. I worry about that. I don’t need a bigger house. We love our home. It’s amazing. I have now reached the end of that.

There is no amount of effort to buy a bigger house. Any amount of effort to buy a bigger house would be a waste of effort. It has to be something else. How do you plot your enough into this thinking so that you don’t get to do one line? How do you make it so multifaceted or does that come with experience with time? When you start doing it in the beginning, do they explore different paths? What if I decide to become Bryce Courtenay? He was one of the world’s leading ad guys. He became one of the world’s best-selling authors when he retired. None of us are plotting those stories. Do you allow yourself to become different things?

To go back to your first question, “Do I know the steps and the music?” Yes, but it can vary and it does vary. The final avatar is a very basic avatar. It’s me, I’m old. I’m with my wife. We are on rocking chairs at a lake house with doobies and I’m like, “This is awesome.” All of the pieces to get there, the inner parts, that change. The generic blocks that I’m going for are goals that I have written out in my 6-month goals, 1-year goals, 5-year goals, things that I want to accomplish as a human. These are things that I want. I want X amount of real estate. I want X amount of people that I’m serving in my business.

What most people confuse is moving forward with moving towards. You should always be moving towards. Forward is a misnomer.

I want to have amazing relationships with my friends and family. I want to be healthier as I get older. I want to be more flexible this year than I was last year. I want to make sure I go to X amount of yoga retreats with my wife. All of these sorts of goals are the things that remain the same because these are my goals and those won’t change. How I get to the goal, I’m not worried about how. The what remained the same generally. The how that can change any moment and it does. I could have never told you in 2020, I would be on a podcast. That’s for sure.

Years ago, I could have never told you I would be in high ticket sales. I never even thought about that before, now I do it full-time. I love it and it’s great. If you would have asked me years ago about meditation and reading books, I would be like, “What are you talking about?” You don’t have to concern yourself with the how but the general stepping stones, the goals that I have, I know those. Could they change? Yes. I’m 100% flexible on those but these are things that I am creating that I’m working towards.

This notion of towards is something we push hard. One of the things that we help people with is victory conditions design. If I wanted to teach you to play any game, the best games have multiple paths to victory. You might decide to go a military way or commerce. There are all different ways depending on the game you are playing. They all have the same condition of victory. If you understand your victory condition, your path to victory is almost unimportant and can change in a heartbeat because the situation changes. Our victory condition is a business to be the world’s leading authority in presentation. That’s all we care about as a business.

It’s not about wealth and things. It’s about to be the world’s leading authority. 2020 happened and we were no longer able to run events the way that we traditionally ran them. When all we had to look for is, “What are we trying to achieve? We are trying to be the world’s leading authority in presentation,” all of a sudden, we have access to more stages around the world than any other time before, so it was very easy for us to navigate. What most people confuse is moving forward with moving towards. You should always be moving towards. Forward is a misnomer.

Forward is a fake sense of the progress of letting momentum carry you from year to year. To me, your success should be measured against your intent. That’s what you do. It’s quite beautiful because you’ve got this vision in your head that allows you. There are certain priorities that you have to keep in mind. You have to keep your health because you want to live to 120. You’ve got to keep your sense of humor because you still want to be enjoying a good doobie. You’ve got to make sure that you are not a shitty husband because you want to keep your wife.

We’ve already got a couple of little criteria that are relatively important for you. You’ve got to keep some degree of finance going because you want to buy a lake house. Other than that, you’ve got freedom within the framework to move towards that in any number of ways. You are flexible with the approach. That could change but that is what you are heading towards. Most people haven’t bothered defining their towards. Most people think, “Success is being better at the main thing I do every day than I was last year.” I don’t think that’s good enough or having more money.

If you have not defined your enough, you don’t know when to stop. As a case in point, one of my challenges in 2021 was to land 100 double unders in a jump rope and I did it. I was talking about this in the talk I was doing called Intention Seeker. This dude comes up to me after the talk. He says, “What are you trying to do now? You are trying to do 200?” I was like, “What do I want to do 200 for?” There is nothing more for me to gain in doing double unders for longer. I don’t want to be a double under champion. I thought 100 was the number to make me feel like I’ve got those dialed in.

If I can do 100, I’m off to good chips. I’m trying to do pull-ups and I want to be able to do three muscle-ups. That’s the thing that I’m working towards. If you have not defined you enough, where do you stop? You are this poor arsehole doing your 300 consecutive double under. It feels crappy because it’s the same it’s. People have to define what they want to move towards and know when to stop when they get there. Otherwise, you move past your own victory condition. What’s the point of that? Stop and enjoy it.

People talk a lot about manifestation, the Law of Attraction, all of these things. A lot of people bat their eyes at it and think it’s woo-woo. A lot of other people look at it and take it. I believe that the personal development space is badly broken. We don’t need to get into it too deeply but there are too many of these guru people that are telling people that they need to fix themselves, “Let’s dig into your pain. Let’s go to your trauma. Let’s go find that space and work on it. Let’s work on ourselves.” You go to these self-help events, which I love.

You will see the same people jumping up and down every year. If you go talk to them, I say, “Have you created what you wanted since last year?” Most of them will say no. I will say, “Why not? What’s stopping you from creating the life that you love? Why aren’t you moving towards the thing you want to create?” They say, “I have an Imposter syndrome or I have family entanglements or I have this deep-rooted trauma. I have been working with my therapist on it and we have been going deep into my family entanglements and things like this. I’m studying epigenetics and I’m getting into trying to blah.”

You are like, “Let me understand this correctly. You come here for a weekend and get pumped up. You spend the year trying to fix yourself. You come back and get pumped up. Am I right?” “Yes.” I said, “Do you think it would serve you better if you said, ‘I want to decide what I want to create?’” What is it you want to choose? What do you want to create? I don’t mean a business. What’s the feeling that you want, joy, love, happiness or fulfillment? What is the feeling that you want to create and why can’t you feel that now? You can feel it now. You don’t need to go fix yourself.

I buy that but the problem is they are looking for the fix and they are confusing excuses with reasons. This is problematic. Part of the problem with that is the gurus want them back. They sell it like a drug and it is a drug. You feel amazing. You come off a great talk. It’s like a sugar rush. There’s got to be some almost criteria that you can’t come back, so you do certain things. You’ve got to have made progress.

Progress towards creation. This is the timeline. This is why it’s so important. If you are focusing on the past, the problem, and trying to fix it, your energy is there. You are expanding that.

Have you read The Courage to Be Disliked?

No.

It’s very worth checking out. It talks about that as well. It’s the opposite of traditional Jungian and Freudian psychology. He was a psychologist at the same time. It says, “You are defined by what happened to you.” He was like, “You are not a victim. What if this was the thing that creates you out of it?” He takes a very different outlook on it. It’s quite an unnecessarily controversial book. People say victim shames and stuff. It doesn’t at all. It says that that’s not you. This thing happened to you but it was an event. Everything is dependent on how you act from now. It’s irrelevant.

You are who you are now. Your past is no longer part of you. The only thing that matters is the future you want to create. There is no point and value because you can’t do anything about what’s happened before you. Why give it one more second of your time if it was traumatic? That works, by the way, is true for success as failure. My first book was called Legacide: Why Legacy Thinking Is A Silent Killer Of Innovation. A lot of people are successful and they are successful because of something they did yesterday.

Therefore, they hold on to that and think they will be successful by doing the same thing tomorrow but you are not. You have to define by the problems I can solve that exists in the world today, how can I be successful going forward? We have to be in a forward trajectory. Too much of living in the past and looking at these things give you excuses where they are not even valid reasons.

You are who you are today. Your past is no longer part of you. The only thing that matters is the future you want to create.

What’s the name of that book again?

The Courage to Be Disliked. I would probably suggest listening to it simply because it was a translation. It’s a Japanese guy’s writing in Austrian psychologist translated back to English. They use the word one more than the word the. “One must walk in one shoe for one to see this. Only then for one, no one is in this is old oneness.” I was like, “What? Am I doing math or am I reading a book on psychology?” The whole book is a conversation with a young and an older Japanese person. If I could have read it with that voice and that accent, if I had Mr. Miyagi reading it to me, then I would be like, “I’m dialed in.” I find it quite a difficult read but a very important one.

It’s like the stock market. Do the opposite of what everyone says. Everyone is buying, you sell. Everyone is talking about fixing themselves, you go create. Let’s shift gears a little bit. The Missing Link Presentation Powerhouse. Let’s talk a little bit about presentations in a nutshell because this is something that I know a lot of people who reads this are entrepreneurs, 99%. I know for a lot of them, myself included, have dreams of creating a future where they are speaking on stage, whether that’s selling onstage, motivating, or both or neither. I’m sure a lot of people are curious about the path one goes on to become a speaker. Enlighten us.

The first thing is, if you are an entrepreneur, chances are you are already a speaker. In fact, you are probably already a professional speaker. Somebody asked you to stand up and deliver a presentation or a pitch did you be paid as a result of. We’ve got to understand that is a state that exists in some way means of form. The second thing I need you to understand is that you can’t afford not to, especially now.

There are more stages in the world. If I was doing business easily with South Africans in March 2020, I’m doing business all over the world. Our public speaking program has people from Australia to Alaska on it because we can. I believe that stage marketing is one of the most underutilized forms of marketing for speakers.

The reason is that they get too obsessed with the idea about, “How do I get paid for my talk at the beginning? I don’t have something worth getting paid for.” Neither of those is important because you cannot get paid for your talk or you can get paid from your talk. If you get paid from your talk, ideally you want to get both. You are charging a reasonable amount for your time and energy. That’s important because then people trust you. They know you. They are not being sold to. You get money from your talk. I built a six-figure speaking business. I was in 30 countries. I spoke in 26 countries in 2019 on 6 continents.

That was a six-figure speaking business but it was a seven-figure impact on my actual business because I get off stage and people are like, “How can we engage? I would love to chat with you about this. How can we engage with you or your business?” That’s what happens because a stage is high authority marketing. You should be embracing it. The question as to how do you do it? Decide to go. You’ve got to put your hand up and say, “I’m going to be the expert. I have something to say.” Find an area in which you can be an authority. If you were in marketing, you can’t just say, “I want to do a talk on business marketing for small businesses.”

I will throw a stone and hit somebody else who does that. You have to go further down the funnel until you find an area that nobody wants to earn. That’s what happened to me with presentations. When we started the business, we were called Missing Link Interactive. We did all kinds of different things as well because I wasn’t sure what the world needed. I realized everybody was ignoring presentations because it was the least sexy part of it. I was like, “Let that be my space.” Figure out the area that nobody has put their hand up, and then sell the problem in that area like it’s the most meaningful problem people have.

You’ve got to turn around and say, “Presentation is the biggest reason your business is failing to motivate and inspires people to drive sales to why you are not converting as much as because ultimately, it comes back to you are unable to communicate your value to people. That is presentation. Communicating the value that’s inside your head to other people to solve their problems.” That is the equation of presentation. You’ve got to figure that out for yourself. I could sales pitch as I would love to work with people but in your city, wherever you are in the world, there is somebody who will help you write a keynote talk. I would love you to engage with us but you don’t need us.

You can watch a YouTube video or you could do it. It doesn’t matter. Put your hand up and speak. You don’t need time. What you need is a deadline. Apply to speak at a TEDx Talk near you. Find somebody and get a gig. When you have a gig, you give a shit tank will be full very quickly. That gas will fuel you through the rest of the bets. When you are on stage because you need to bring it, and you jump off stage, people are cheering for you, coming up to you and saying, “That was amazing,” at that point, then you start to realize, “There is something to this.”

If you are a business owner or somebody in your business is not trying to lead with authority about what it is you do and the problem you solve in the world, you are missing half of the trick. You are missing an opportunity. In every single industry, somebody is putting their hand up and saying, “I’m the expert.” If it’s not you, why not? Decide to change that. In any industry, there are no boring topics or industries. Only boring people, delivering boring presentations on that topic. If that is your industry, cool. That’s an opportunity for you to do better.

I was checking out your website and I see develop, distribute, deliver. Are we talking about the develop stage?

You write a good talk before you design and deliver it. Most people think like, “I will speak to people,” and they will say, “We don’t need you. I’m a very good speaker.” It’s not about being a good speaker. We have all seen good speakers who we don’t remember. We have all seen traditionally bad speakers who blow your mind because the bad speaker wrote a good talk. Watch Elon Musk’s launch of that battery that was stuck on his wall. That is objectively one of the single worst examples of presentation, theoretically, you have ever seen. The guy is a terrible presenter, except for the fact of 100% of the people that I speak to want to buy the battery. There are four steps to delivering a presentation.

You give your audience a reason to care, then you give them a reason to believe. You tell them what they need to know and do. Every presentation that is good and worthwhile has some degree of those. You buy their attention about a topic like there is a dragon that needs to be slayed. You give them enough credibility on you, as a person, to make them think, “I care about this dragon. You look like the right person to listen to help me say it.” You give them the three steps they need to do to make that happen and then you call them to action. This is the most important step that everybody misses. They missed the end, too. They don’t bother to make an audience care.

They assume they care as much about your story as you do but what’s big in your world isn’t big in their world. You have to make it big in their world. You don’t call them to action. You finish and deliver the talk of your life and everyone is cheering. They ultimately have to say, “You were amazing. You were hilarious.” Do you know how many times during my speaking period, people would come up to me and say to me, “I remembered watching you. You are one of my favorite speakers I have ever seen. I don’t remember what you said to us but I remember loving it?” I was like, “This is shit.” I spent so much in being funny and enjoyable that I forgot to be valuable.

You have to perform and inform. The main reason they don’t remember what it was I did wasn’t because I was bad at telling stories. It’s because I didn’t make it important to them. I didn’t call them to action. In the four steps, the easiest step is the first one. That’s the mistake speakers make. “I want you to go out there and start doing this quantum time jumping and timelining and all of these things. The first step I need you to do is download Medito, which is a free meditation app. All you are going to do is do a body scan once for 15 minutes a day for 1 week. Once you have done that, I want you to listen to this podcast again. I want you to put an hour in your diary to listen to this podcast again. Once you’re ready, we’re going to do it.” Don’t sell them on the big thing.

They are going to try it. They are going to fail and forget it. Sell them on doing one 15-minute body scan. Something they can do immediately after this for free. That’s all we say to speakers. You’ve got to get your audience. You are not trying to get your audience to the victory condition. You are trying to get them to take the smallest possible step in the direction of that because that is an action they are making towards an output that you want them to take that they think matters to them. If you get them to take action as a result of your speaking, you have won. If you are an entrepreneur, then that means towards the place in which they need you.

I had a metaphor pop up in my head. I’m envisioning you are trying to call them to action to do something that’s quite large. It’s a massive, long bridge and it’s like, “Jump on my super long, massive bridge and walk on it until the end.” In the end, there is something amazing there for you or it’s like, “I have this small, 4-foot long bridge. It’s got some flowers and it’s a pretty nice bridge. It’s safe and everything is cool. If you guys want to take a couple of steps on it and jump over to the other side, there is something there that’s cool. You want to?” They hop over the little bridge.

There are no boring topics or industries, only boring people delivering boring presentations on that topic.

When they get there, they are like, “That was pretty cool. That was a nice bridge.” You are like, “I have this other bridge over here. It’s slightly longer but that thing at the end of the bridge this time, it’s a little bit bigger.” By the end of 4 or 5 bridges later, they have reached that destination but there is no way they were getting on that first big bridge. It wasn’t happening.

By the time you are finished, you realize, “Am I done? I didn’t think that was nearly as bad.” That’s what you want to get people to do. People try to sell the big vision. They try and sell you the end goal. “Go out there and sign up for that big race.” Go up for one small, quick junk tomorrow morning. Go for a walk. That’s where you start. Most speakers fail to do that. You’ve got those three facets. First of all, you have to understand, you’ve got to structure a good talk, you have to write a good talk, then only you worry about making your slides. A talk doesn’t start in PowerPoint.

It starts in the trailer or post-it notes. We have created a framework. It’s a free Trello Board that people can go to. The most important thing is that you structure your talk well, and then you can start making your sites, and then you can worry about your delivery. It’s the least important part of being a good speaker. The only way to get good at it is to speak more. Go do your first gig and don’t worry about it.

It’s a pleasure having you on here. You are a ball of fire. You are in the fire and I can see it in your eyes. Thanks so much for coming on. If the guys want to come to find you real quick, where they can go and check you out?

Two places. One, they can go to INeedMissingLink.com. That’s the company site. You will find everything. You will find links to a speaker mentorship program, to all of our training, all of our materials, and everything there. That would be amazing. If you want to connect with me personally, you can go to GetRich.AF. You will be able to find and connect with me there.

If you do want to go and give my wife a thumbs up on our art and Instagram, go check out JasmineJagger.com. Those three are ways to stay connected in any way. I would love to engage. Let me know, if you do connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram, please let me know that we met by Aaron and it would be amazing. Share your story about growth with me.

It has been a pleasure to have you on the show. I appreciate your time.

I’m looking forward to chatting again.

As do I.

Important Links:

• Missing Link
• Boredom Slayer
• The Courage to Be Disliked
• Legacide: Why Legacy Thinking Is A Silent Killer Of Innovation
• Medito
• GetRich.AF
• Instagram – Jasmine Jagger Art
• JasmineJagger.com
• LinkedIn – Richard Mulholland
• Twitter – Richard Mulholland
• Instagram – Rich Mulholland
• www.MsngLnk.com/story-to-stage/
• https://www.Linkedin.com/in/samantha-dean-leontsinis-2008933/

About Richard Mulholland

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