Learning in the Open

Richard Lowe: Hello, this is Richard Lowe with Leaders and Their Stories Podcast. I’m here with Matt Hawksley. I think I pronounced that right. You’ll tell me if I didn’t.

Matt Hawksley: That is correct.

Richard Lowe: And we’re going to have a great discussion today. So Matt, why don’t you take it away and tell us about yourself?

Matt Hawksley: Great to be here. Thanks so much, Richard, for having me on. I guess a little bit about me, that million-dollar question. Well, I’m the founder of Leadogo, which is a reinvention consulting and coaching firm. And let me just tell you a little bit about how I got there and a little bit of background about me. So I spent about 20 years in supply chain logistics, came out of the university world and wanted a few things, wanted to, one, work my way up to the top of the corporate ladder, kind of that executive level. Two, I wanted to live abroad, gain a lot of international experience.

And three, I wanted to start something from the ground up, something of my own. So in the first 20 years, I was able to do that with a company called BDP International. So I was in that logistics realm, like I said, and essentially was able to work up that corporate ladder, kind of going through rung after rung. I was able to actually live abroad, spend some time some years in Antwerp, Belgium. I got to travel around globally. Through Asia and Europe, and it was just honestly one of the most amazing experiences that gained so much perspective.

And as I continued to grow and see more and more things. That third part, that third goal that I wanted to build something of my own started to creep up, almost like an accounting scenario where like the law of compounding interest, it was just building and building inside of me. I love the company, I love the people that I was with, but there were some things that I just wanted to actually embark upon in my own journey after a certain point.

So about six, seven years ago, I started to break away from that path, that ladder, that structure that was there and and kind of went into a terrain that was a little bit more unexplored, at least for me. And I traveled around first about 40 days, almost like a little bit of a biblical journey across the US, Canada, met a ton of different people that were entrepreneurs and coaches. Some of the things that were in that third realm that I was really about to embark upon.

And then I moved to Canada from Chicago area and moved to Kingston, Ontario, did a master’s program in innovation and entrepreneurship. And that was kind of my runway into that third foray, which I started with coaching. I built it up. I started to engage a little bit more with some of the technology and with AI. And now I’m really working in helping individuals and organizations really embrace that next era, this acceleration age, and helping them go through from kind of that old playbook into a new playbook. And it’s been really an amazing kind of journey for me to get into.

Richard Lowe: Sounds fascinating. You said you traveled all around for a while.

Matt Hawksley: Yeah, yeah. So through work, I did that. And then honestly, it was more of an intentional kind of journey, like I said, that I call it the corporate Kerouac trip. So if anyone was familiar with Jack Kerouac and on the road, I wasn’t necessarily the guy that was just driving from one coast to another and getting into some mischief and doing a few different things. It was more of that, let’s say, professionalized version.

I had my agenda, but in each of the different spots and around the 11, 12 cities that I had kind of earmarked and mapped and engaged within just the culture, I didn’t have a plan every single time. I just met people and kind of just embraced kind of learning in the open is what I call it. I was just kind of letting some of these experiences help me. It built up proximity and made a lot of new contacts. I engage in a lot of new programs and some things that honestly were all as a result of the people that I met along that journey.

Richard Lowe: Interesting. Yeah, when my wife passed away 21 years ago, I got in a car and drove to Joshua Tree National Park, got on Skull Rock, made a bunch of decisions. And then in the coming months, I got in the car and I drove, I must have driven 20,000 miles in two months. I mean, I drove all over the West Coast up to about Northern California. And I lived in California at the time. And in Arizona and Nevada and Bryce Canyon, of course, and so forth, took a train to the Grand Canyon, all kinds of fun stuff.

And it did what you said it did, it kind of pulled me out of myself. I was able to see the world in a different way and meeting people and doing things. And then I got into Renaissance fairs and stuff. That was a different that’s a different story.

Matt Hawksley: That’s that’s part two of the episode right there.

Richard Lowe: Part two. Yeah. But I understand how travel can help a lot. I tend to be a hermit and an introvert, so I stay at home a lot and I get out now visiting the local events, libraries, bookstores. There’s all, you know, botanical gardens, stuff like that. I photograph them for my website. It’s my kind of tour of the Florida area. And it’s a lot of fun. It’s interesting. I get to meet people. I usually interview the librarian or the bookstore owner. Just put a tablet down and say, okay, let’s have an interview. They say fine, almost always. Sometimes they don’t.

Matt Hawksley: Most of the time, I like it.

Richard Lowe: They’re fine and just have a good time. But yeah, that was some wild traveling.

Matt Hawksley: Yeah, no, you know, I think that that’s the most, one of the most important things is really continuing to get perspective. And I think, like you said, you kind of just really not only just went on that big trip and a journey, but you kind of opened your mind. You’re just kind of almost letting some things kind of come in and yourself as an introvert, like not everyone either will actually take that step and kind of go out and do that.

But something that’s interesting too with technology a decade ago, Zoom, the way we’re kind of communicating right now was in its infancy type of stages. And it started to just become more for a few conference calls for work. And then when the pandemic hit, it became honestly one of the most critical pieces to communication for organizations and individuals. And I think too, from a networking standpoint and that really that perspective part, it opened the doors to a whole new frontier where I like to call it like virtual hitchhiking.

So in a way, when you’re trying to learn and engage and embrace new knowledge, just something like this, taking a couple things away from an engagement and communication or a conversation with even like yourself, I’m able to then learn and then apply immediately. And it’s just such a really, we’re in a cool time, I think, as much as it is a little bit daunting. I think there are a lot of tools that were probably unimaginable a century ago and it’s just really kind of trying to be on top of that wave as it starts to crest.

Richard Lowe: I grew up at a time when the calculator was a new thing and cell phones didn’t exist and the computer with no power at all was the size of a room. And I managed one of those for a while as a student. So I know about all of the technology changes and things. People complain now that the world is chaotic and it’s going to hell and blah, blah, blah. The main difference between 60 years ago and now is the speed of communication and the mass communication. It’s not that the world’s more turbulent.

Although it is getting a little more turbulent because we’re going from a two-pole world to a multipolar world, where there are many powers instead of two, Russia and America. And that’s a big change. But back then, I mean, we had riots, we had shootings on college campuses. Kent State, if you’re familiar with Kent State, that was a nasty one. And a little bit before I was born, the government put tanks on the street for race riots and things, literal tanks.

And it was, I mean, it’s getting, if you can compare then to now, it actually is better, except for the mass hypnosis caused by social media and the smartphones. Yeah. That’s what’s changed on a social level. That’s the big change. And it is hypnosis. And I see people on their smartphones while they’re driving.

Matt Hawksley: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: Come on. You know, you’re driving. You hit a little kid or something?

Matt Hawksley: Yeah. Well, even when they’re walking, right? Walking into a wall or some other things. And one of the, I think I was at a doctor or the dentist’s office not too long ago, and just kind of picked my head up, sat down in the waiting room, and then you just kind of scan the area and look around at the other people waiting. But literally everybody was on their phone. Nobody was talking to each other. It used to be even like maybe reading a magazine, but now it’s just everybody’s got their phone very directly into that.

Was a lot of times where you met interesting people or, hey, let’s go grab a coffee sometime. Or, oh, I didn’t know, Richard, that you run a podcast. Hey, I would love to be on that. But we’re so kind of closed off. And I think what you said too with the hypnosis, obviously the algorithms are certainly playing with our brains and our minds and feeding us certain things that are going to either rile us up or, make us feel a certain way or act, based on that. And, that’s kind of that danger.

Obviously, we see now some of the different regulations coming through with some countries that are limiting the age, even, for when social media is going to be available for like teenagers, let’s say, and things. But too, we just need to take that step back, understand where that is, how far the progress has been made, and look with a lot of these things, it’s not, it doesn’t have to be so polarizing. I mean, remember 20 something years ago, turn of the century, Y2K, everything was going to break down. You were in the tech space, you kind of remember this stuff.

Oh, I had to worry about it. Billions of dollars were going into this, and things were going to fall out of the sky, right?

Richard Lowe: It was actually over a trillion dollars was spent.

Matt Hawksley: Yeah, so I mean, yeah, I undercut it by a lot, but like a trillion dollars, let’s say, was spent into Y2K, and obviously there were some updates and things that needed to happen. Boy, it was on the cover of Time magazine and every magazine where it was just like, is this it? Is this it? Are all these things going to crash or what’s going to happen? And then we kind of all got up the next day and well, all right, I’m still here. This is still here. My computer still turns on. It’s still the same information, still the same thing.

And I think with AI now too, or super intelligence or whatever we’re going to call it, I think that there’s obviously going to be a big change in how we’re doing things. It’s going to look a lot different and there will be some job displacements and there’s going to be shifts. But I think we will continue to persevere over this, make hopefully the right decisions, the right calls to kind of regulate and create the guardrails. But it will change the fabric of how we communicate, how we live, how we work, all of these different things.

At the beginning of the last century, we were riding around on horses and carriages and things. And then a short time later, you look at that same picture of the urban downtown of a city, it’s all full of Model Ts, right? And, life went on. We created a whole new infrastructure. That’s when roads were truly developed and built out and changed. So we’ll continue to evolve, we’ll continue to change.

And I think just, you’re right, kind of understanding that, that line of what social media, the danger of it, let’s just say, to living in fear versus kind of living on top of that wave, and just kind of seeing everything as it kind of develops.

Richard Lowe: Well, I think what’s one of the things that’s happened is people are interested in getting likes and views on things like Facebook and, and whatever media they’re using, and comments and so forth. It’s even to the point where if, you know, a lady, a girlfriend says, has a photo out there and her husband or boyfriend doesn’t like it right away. It’s an immediate fight. And it’s like, it’s a like, who cares? Who cares? Yeah, exactly. It’s vanity. It’s a vanity thing. And that’s become very important.

Matt Hawksley: Yeah, and I think that’s where the judgment comes in. If you just all of a sudden disagreed with what I thought, and you thought something different, I was now the enemy and I was the problem. And it’s like, well, wait a second, time out. I think right now with social media and all these other things, it’s become so divisive where if you take a different stance, you’re the enemy. It used to be, okay, let’s debate this. You and I can go share, let’s go get a beer and talk about this. You could be on one side of the spectrum, I could be on the other.

But we both have a common goal, but we maybe have a different roadmap on how to get there. And I think we just need really in today’s society, especially to remember that part of it, to harken back to the point where it’s like, you know what, you might have a different roadmap on how to get there, but also we both have a common goal. We’re both citizens of this country. It’s like just because we have difference of opinion does not make one right or one wrong or one better.

So I think really hearkening back into that, I think we’re more empathetic people than we were, you know, centuries ago. But at the same time right now with like, you’re right, some of the technology and advances from social media and just that simple example about like the likes and the, let’s say, the wrong metrics for things. I think looking at that, we would need to understand truly what are the best type of analytics metrics as we move forward for our own individual life, but even for business and what we’re trying to build or grow.

Richard Lowe: I hired a lead generation service a while ago, and what I realized is their metric was how many leads did they give me? So they gave me 20 leads, it was $200 a lead. And that was their metric. Well, none of those leads converted. Most of them didn’t even schedule a time to talk. So it was a vanity thing. I said, look, I don’t want leads, I want conversions. Or at the very least, I want you to pay you based on how many people I actually have an interview with. And it’s a good interview. I want a judgment in there.

You know, you send me somebody who’s a flake. I don’t want it. That shouldn’t be something I paid $200 for. They did. They could not understand that. They simply couldn’t understand that I wanted to get valid leads that actually could convert. I’d even backtrack a little bit and say, at least send me people who talk to me and are qualified. Nope, they couldn’t do it. So now I’m on my own and do my own leads. I fired all my lead generation companies because they simply want to charge based on some vanity metric. How many impressions did we get? I don’t care.

How many comments do we get? I don’t care. One of them charges you per comment. And I was like, no, that’s just silly. You could have robots do that.

Matt Hawksley: Right. Yeah, you don’t need a million followers. I mean, if nothing converts, right? If you have 100 followers, but they’re, 10 to 20% of that population is the one that is buying what you’re offering, it’s much better than having a million followers and you’re not getting but one person that’s converting, right? So I think you’re right.

It needs to be aligned with what’s that core purpose and kind of lose sight of these other things that society might try to, you know, push in our direction, kind of having that wall where going back to the, Simon Sinek always talks about the why, but even looking at that with the analytics and things too, you can get a million leads, but if they’re all crap, like you said, what’s the point?

And for a business that’s offering that type of thing, if they’re not willing to stand by the product that they’re giving to you, just like when you came back and said, hey, you’re not giving me anything that’s actually working. It says a lot about them if they just all of a sudden walk back. It’s like the old days when you scalp the ticket in a football game or something like that too. A good scalper would actually walk you through to the gate because it gives you a little bit of that peace of mind and you know it’s coming through and okay, now you’re in.

Somebody else would just sell it and then run off and then yeah, you’re kind of stuck left hanging.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, I never went to a scalper. I did go to several WWE events that were live at Staples Center. I got front row seats, so they were rather expensive, but they weren’t anywhere near as expensive as nowadays. We’re talking a few hundred dollars as opposed to a few thousand. And what was cool about those events is in the first couple of rows, you got to keep the chairs. So they had these folding chairs with the Undertaker on them. I got one. And that was the day that I decided to take the bus to Staples Center, because, you know, why bring the car with the traffic?

Silly me. I didn’t know that I had to be carrying a stupid chair on my back all the way home. I’ve got quite a few amusing stories. Somebody offered me like 400 bucks for it. I should have taken it because it’s only worth like 100 right now on eBay. But carried the whole damn thing home, got the Undertaker on it, you know? Got to meet the Undertaker for about three seconds.

Matt Hawksley: Okay.

Richard Lowe: He’s 7 foot tall. He’s like, wow, you know?

Matt Hawksley: I was going to say, did he unfortunately land on you or is it kind of a nice little meet and greeter?

Richard Lowe: Well, I was photographing. So I got a picture of him jumping off the rails onto somebody. It’s a pretty good picture. And big guy. He’s supposed to be a sweetheart in real life, from what I understand. And then my pandemic story is quite amusing. So before the pandemic was coming, I bought a VIP ticket to see a guy named Mick Foley. He wrestled as Mankind, and he played an insane guy and stuff. And I wanted to meet him because he became a best selling author several times over. I mean, real best selling. And he’s now a comedian also. Really good guy. Really nice guy.

So I bought VIP tickets, front row center seat for April 1st, 2020. Oh, yes. What happened in April of 2020? The whole thing was canceled. And he hasn’t come back to Florida. And I was so frustrated. It’s like, front row seats, you know, 75 bucks. Not bad, you know, to meet this guy. Yeah. And I would have got to shake hands with him, would have been a meet and greet because he’s going to come right to me. I don’t know if he’d be sitting at my table, but at least he’d come by because it paid the extra money. Yeah, I didn’t meet him.

One of those guys I wanted to meet, but I did meet Lucy Lawless. She’s a nice lady and a few others. I went to a Xena convention. That was fun.

Matt Hawksley: I bet. Yeah.

Richard Lowe: I used to go on all those things, all those kind of things that I could go to. I photographed Comic Con in San Diego, the big one. They gave me tickets to photograph. And that’s great. There’s one called the Labyrinth of Jareth, which is a masquerade ball. I dressed up and had fun. And 3,000 actors and actresses and things. It’s in middle of Hollywood, so you can imagine.

Matt Hawksley: Yeah, I’m sure that’s quite the experience.

Richard Lowe: They’re all relatively low level, you know, makeup artists and things. They weren’t the big name actors, but still it was fun. And oh, yeah, I got the photograph, had people complain that I was in their face. I was like, okay, whatever, and continued being a paparazzi. It was quite fun. But like you said, traveling.

Matt Hawksley: It’s experience. You know, you kind of create these experiences and out of that, like you just said, one of some random thing that you might have just been like, okay, I’m just going to go to Comic Con or I’m going to go to this other type of ball. Who do you meet? What kind of things did you do? Like, what kind of stories does that emote? And really, it leads you into the next thing. It’s, I guess, what I was like learning in the open. It creates so many new things because even for me, you take a couple chances.

I was traveling around, I was in Denver, and through Airbnb I booked a hike in Boulder. We did a mountain hike, and the guy leading it and I totally hit it off. And then I essentially he was talking about some leadership conference he attended and he was actually loosely connected to the now wife of Alex Honnold, who was the one that scaled El Capitan and was a free solo person. So he was actually like kind of knows him, was friends with him. So I just did this other leadership retreat and conference, more or less because he mentioned it.

I flew out to LA, did that, I met and connected with so many different people that were driving all kinds of positive change. And then that spurred more connections and different things, some partnerships that were like even like workshops that I’ve done with other people. And it’s just, okay, how does that happen? It’s just the power of people. It’s the power of taking that chance. And that same thing in Denver, I was there and texted a friend, I was having like breakfast just outside in the square and I was like, you know what am I going to do today?

I decided to do a craft brew tour, and I texted a friend I’d met once about five years before, just to see if he was still in Denver. He and his wife couldn’t make the beer crawl, but next thing you know he’s like, we’ll meet you at the last spot. On the craft brew tour I met a lot of people. It was a lot of fun, had some drinks. And this one guy was just literally filling time before he had to go to a wedding. And he was just, you know, talking about different things.

He was an imagineer at Disney, but was looking for more of some other types of project management roles and some different things. And so we’re just getting chatted. And we’re at that last spot. The guy and his wife come and we’re all just talking. I’m making introductions and I introduce the guy, Darryl, who was my friend’s friend. He’s like, well, I, you know, VP at a project management company, you know, just here, you know, if you have a resume, he’s like, I’ll send it to you. They connected on LinkedIn, did that.

Next thing I’m traveling around, I’m in Kansas City, and I get this text from Darryl, and it’s that picture we all took, but he’s also like, hey, just want to let you know Cameron interviewed, and he’s now got the job working for his company, and he’s moving out to Denver. So it’s like these little things, and just like our earlier part of the conversation, if we’re too busy looking at our phone buried in that, we’re not enabling all these other potential opportunities that could come our way.

People, the ecosystem that we build is still the biggest part of our infrastructure, the number one part of all the different things and connections and how we can really move. But sometimes it’s overlooked because the convenience and the cool stuff that we see on our phones. So sometimes you got to take that step back. A friend of mine’s like, you know, he puts his phone down right as he gets in his front door instead of like the old school days where the phone was on the wall and that was it. He’s like, You know what? I’m cutting it off. I’m embracing what’s happening.

If we do more of that, I think there’s more of these types of stories that continue to unfold.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, my story on that similar is I had left a ghostwriting company because I was getting paid nothing to do books. But I took it because it was a start. So even though I was only making $1,000 a book, which was nothing, I wrote three books and then I said, okay, I’m going to start my own. And then I was thinking, okay, how do I find clients? How do I find clients? So I go to church and I sit down and I’m kind of mopey about it. And this guy next to me says, so what do you do? And I said, well, I’m a ghostwriter.

And he says, oh, that’s interesting. I need somebody to work on my book. And I said, oh, okay. Who are you again? Turns out he was a CEO of a major, major company, and I got a contract for $10,000 to fix his book. And I was thinking, I just went from a thousand to $10,000 right away, just because I sat next to somebody. And I rewrote his book. And then I wrote it again in a few years, fixed it up and more, even more. And then the next day I get an e-mail from another person who says, I want you to write my book.

I said, okay, fine. And he offered me 15,000. I said, okey dokey. I had no idea how to price it then because I’d just gone from, you know, super cheap to like, yeah, I think I can make a living at this. You know, and that’s how I got started in ghostwriting. So then I learned that I could make a living at ghostwriting and not just be like a hobby or something like that. And that was my first two real significant ghostwriting contracts. Both of them were major corporate players, CEO and COO kind of things.

And both of them had money and both of them paid not through their company. And I learned that that was important because when you buy it through a big company, not a little one, they could put you on 60, 90, 120, 180 day payment plans. And that doesn’t work for a solopreneur.

Matt Hawksley: Yes, cash is king, as they say, especially for certain ones like that.

Richard Lowe: I mean, you know, a delay of 30 days is acceptable, but when you get beyond that, it’s like, come on, people. So enough about me. What kind of adventures have you had?

Matt Hawksley: Well, life is an adventure, isn’t it, Richard? It’s one big assembly of many things. So as we just kind of chatted to, I’m now up in Canada. So I’m up in Kingston, Ontario. So I travel around quite a bit, lived in a few different places, a few different countries outside of the US where I grew up up in the Philadelphia suburbs and originally from St. Louis in the Midwest. But you know, kind of embracing a whole new country and a lot of things. It’s Canada’s not all that different, but there’s always different guardrails, different things.

And so my adventure is that I just recently got married, not quite a year ago. So yeah, so got remarried. So now kind of embarking on that journey as well. And Just building up the business itself and right now with the seismic amount of change that’s happening, I think right now, not only am I reinventing myself and have reinvented from that corporate kind of mindset, the workflow and everything to more of that entrepreneurial type of mind and really just starting to create my own path. It’s like choose your own adventure, like you mentioned in the beginning, what’s your adventure?

So I think every day is an adventure trying to continue to find new clients, continuing to navigate some of the changes that are going.

And one of the fun things is with AI, as much as it can be daunting, I’ve got really into building a lot of different apps and some even like mini platforms and different things that help through some of my either clientele or also one of the things that I find the most joy in is I run a program with a nonprofit in Ghana and the innovation center at Queen’s University up here in Kingston, where we essentially train and mentor entrepreneurs in Ghana and helping them start up their business and really drive growth.

So it started to really address poverty and youth unemployment, and it’s continued to evolve. So we just finished our fifth cohort, roughly touching about 3,500 people over the past about four years plus. And it is such a fun thing, but now leveraging some of the technology where we’re helping people then build their business model canvas, essentially the one page business model, and then taking that into then a pitch deck and then leveraging that into an analyzer of that and then picking some holes and analyzing their financials. And that was just inconceivable just a few years ago.

And just the speed with which we’re doing it and just the people that you come into contact with are just so amazing. So that’s probably one of the more enriching parts and the things that I’ve gotten to do that if I stayed on that ladder and just that same track, I would’ve never really been able to do this. So that’s kind of one of the ventures that I really, really enjoy.

Richard Lowe: Sounds like lots of fun, a lot of very enlightening and interesting. And that’s very good. It’s very good. Yeah, I did the same kind of journey, you know, left Trader Joe’s, what, 13 years ago now? 2013 and just wanted to work for myself, didn’t want to work for corporate anymore and really haven’t looked back. I mean, it was a little scary because I’d always worked for corporate before 33 years. But I figured, you know, I had some money, had a runway, and figured I might as well do something with the rest of my life. Turned out not to be a mistake.

And yeah, I’m really glad I did it. Because I have a lot more freedom now. There’s no, I’m not on call 24 by seven anymore. I don’t have a boss. Don’t have to answer to a company other than my own. The only thing, only people I answer to is the IRS and the clients.

Matt Hawksley: Yep.

Richard Lowe: You know, and maybe the local government now and then. Exactly. No big deal. You know, life is good. I actually have a place that’s right in the middle of a nature preserve. And So we’ve got bobcats and alligators and snakes, coral snakes, all kinds of stuff here, and peacocks, all kinds of cool stuff that you’re not allowed to feed, and that will feed on you if you’re not careful.

Matt Hawksley: I was going to say, leading them right back to where you don’t want them to be, in your home.

Richard Lowe: Yes. I’ve been through three hurricanes out here, and big ones, Milton was a big one, hit a square on. Plus 3 earthquakes in California. Don’t know which one I like better. Earthquakes give you no notice, they just happen. And they’re scary as hell. Hurricanes give you notice, but they’re scary as hell.

Matt Hawksley: But they’re also equally scary.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, exactly. Hurricanes tend to last longer, the after effects are the same, devastated for a while. Been in a forest fire, right smack dab in the middle.

Matt Hawksley: Yeah, exactly.

Richard Lowe: Got risky. All fun stuff. That’s all in my book, Real World Survival. Yeah, yeah. I wrote a book on it, several versions now, took a CERT class because, you know, I kind of believe don’t be, you can avoid problems by being ready for problems. The more ready you are for things, the less likely you are to be damaged by them. You know, have good health insurance, have good insurance if you can. Keep your finances in order as best you can, things like that.

The more you can rein things in and make them under control, the more your life is available to do other things and be free to do those things you enjoy. The less your life is under control, the more you let your vices control your whatever, you make excuses and whatever kind of thing, the more that life is going to control you.

Matt Hawksley: And that’s having that solid foundation. Yeah, you’re right.

Richard Lowe: It’s no fun at all to have life control you. Believe me, I’ve been there. Yeah, yeah. No, that’s definitely true. Being in debt and going through the wife passing away and she passed away because she let her life go out of control. And learning from that, my parents, same thing. They just let life control them. I don’t need to do this. So getting more of myself under control. So now I can go do stuff that I like doing, which is clients and books and talking to people like you who keep hanging up on me in the middle of a podcast for some reason.

Matt Hawksley: I don’t know what’s going on. Updates with this computer.

Richard Lowe: I don’t know. Maybe I’m ugly, you know, I don’t know.

Matt Hawksley: Not at all. Not at all. Just your shirt. No, I’m just teasing.

Richard Lowe: It’s my Halloween shirt. I just got it for a day.

Matt Hawksley: I love it. I love it. But no, I think you’re absolutely right. You hit on the thing too. I think when you have that solid foundation, it helps you to weather the storm, let’s say, of the different things that are going on in your life. And that also, that solid foundation gives you that strong place to then, like you said, do the things that you want to do and not have to worry about the things that do change the dynamics a little bit. And I had written a book, we released it last year. It’s called Freshly Brewed Coaching.

So it’s about crafting a bold new you. I co-wrote it with Wayne Pratt. And really, it’s kind of that foundation where it is. It’s like you can diagnose, you prescribe and thrive your way to getting to where you want to be. And it’s kind of essentially building that solid foundation, but taking one step at a time, looking at the things that are most important, really then when you’re prescribing what are what we call the three reasons for the season. Don’t try to do a million things and don’t like to, you know, stage gated too much.

What are the things for this season that you’re really going to focus on, activate it, focus, take the small steps, and then in thrive, really build your your own personal ecosystem, your board of directors, your kind of advisor group, and then really play out the pre and post mortems to be like, okay, what did I learn? What can I do? And then have that base, that group of people that help you with accountability, but also can inspire and motivate you and continually help you get back up, be that foundation that helps you move and groove, let’s say.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, that’s all important and very necessary. I really like the book Atomic Habits. If you’ve seen it where it’s to do small steps every day and over a year you’re doing you’ve magnified that by tremendous amount. So don’t try it. Don’t try and quit smoking. Just stop just one cigarette less today than yesterday. And continue to do that. And pretty soon you won’t be smoking anymore.

Matt Hawksley: And yeah, absolutely, celebrating some of those things, you’re right, because then too often we never see how far we get. We’re only looking at that step right ahead. So sometimes it’s like running a marathon, we’re 26 miles, but then sometimes on that 24th, 25th mile, you’re like, oh, this is it, but yeah. You didn’t take the time to look and see how far you’ve actually come.

Find that kind of power, even if it’s the people around you, the crowd that’s cheering you on and everything else, but you can then grind that out for the last couple of miles and you can use that same analogy for other things in our life too. Sometimes you’re taking those small steps, those atomic habits, but yet you don’t ever really look to see how far you’ve actually come before you make that next decision.

Richard Lowe: Well, you’ve written a book, that’s a big step for, I mean, anybody who can write a book, whether it’s ghostwritten or not, has done a major step in their life. That puts your philosophies out there and your beliefs and your credibility so that other people can see it. And that becomes, in my mind, and that’s what I tell clients or pre-sales clients is, becomes the foundation of your everything. If you put just one book out about your experiences, then people start to know who you are and you can use that. Without that book, your foundation is built on sand.

If it’s all built up on LinkedIn, people lose LinkedIn accounts all the time, Facebook accounts all the time. But with a book you’ve got something permanent. I’m glad you told me you did that. That’s a big step. Congratulations on that.

Matt Hawksley: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it was a fun journey. We called it Wednesdays with Wayne. So really the structured writing period and kind of the outlining and really defining the characters. And we built it as a business fable rather than just kind of a stale, but like kind of more methodic type of, let’s say coaching or leadership type book.

So we took it for the everyday person, kind of told through a coffee shop, a cafe, and some of the people that frequented it with Wayne and Matt, the coaches, and went through that that three stage kind of diagnose, prescribe, thrive type scenario, brought in the Pygmalion or the my fair lady type analogy where, you know, when you have the right type of mindset, when you have people that can help you see yourself for more than what you do, and then put in the right types of guardrails and, you know, the right type of structure, you can achieve amazing things.

And it doesn’t have to be, and everybody can do that and just take those right steps. So it was a lot of fun. The whole process was a lot of fun.

Richard Lowe: I have written that kind of style before, also StoryBrand, which is very similar. I don’t know if you follow StoryBrand, but it’s a style that lets you write a story of whatever you want to write about. And it’s very structured, written that kind of thing. And then much like you’ve said, I wrote a book on SCADA that was written the same way that you just said. Taking place in this case in conference rooms and coffee shops and things and talking over their problems. And then a crisis comes up while they’re having that talk and have to go deal with that, you know, kind of thing.

It was fun to write. It was fun to write. It’s kind of like writing a novel in that case instead of a coaching book or something. Right. And it makes it more fun. It makes it more fun to write and it’s more fun to read. Right. I agree. Okay, so we’re coming up on the hour, even though you kind of left me for a few hours, for a few minutes.

Matt Hawksley: I tried not to leave you. Never going to leave you again.

Richard Lowe: I was so sad crying. So is there any final things you want to say to our listeners before we cut off?

Matt Hawksley: So just one thing I’m working on another book, it’s called Reinvention, Thinking Beyond the Ladder. And I think really the one thing to really leave people with is kind of what we talked about, that foundation is changing, right? And it’s not always gonna be very solid. So we’re gonna have to get used to really finding a new way of either navigating our careers, kind of getting through life and changes, because we don’t have the full picture of what it’s all going to look like.

So the more that you’re able to connect with people, build your ecosystem, the more that you’re able to embrace some of the technological things that are happening with AI, you don’t need to be a programmer or a coder, but just understanding how you can actually interact with it. Taking those bold steps and thinking entrepreneurially, no matter what position you are, even if you’re retired or whatnot, the more you’re able to think through that, you’re going to be able to really thrive in this next era, this acceleration era.

Richard Lowe: Nice. Well, I look forward to seeing that. And thank you for being on the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. You like how I did that segue into that? Yeah. Well played. I’m Richard Lowe, the Writing King, and you can visit my site, thewritingking.com, and learn more about me and my business. And how do people contact you?

Matt Hawksley: Yeah, great. So, Matt Hawksley, you can contact me on my websites, leadogo.io or freshlybrewedcoaching.com.

Richard Lowe: Sounds good. Sounds good. Well, thank you for coming on the podcast.

Matt Hawksley: You betcha. It’s been a pleasure, Richard. Thanks so much.

Quotable moments