How Emotions Drive Engagement with Brad Montgomery
Welcome to SkyeTeam's People First! In this series, we explore the people side of successful business and careers. We all have a story to share, a leadership journey that we are experiencing.We'll be interviewing authors, business leaders, thought leaders, and people like you to uncover the latest ideas, resources, and tools to help you become more effective at work - and in life. As it turns out, the secret is cultivating winning relationships. Business is personal, and relationships matter!So, sit back, and grab a coffee as Morag and Brad Montgomery talk about emotions drive engagement!Chapter Layout:0:00 - Open1:48 - Origin Story3:49 - Pivot Point6:00 - Trips & Stumbles8:11 - Receive Feedback 11:44 - Happiness Is...16:38 - Applications17:52 - Common Sense20:36 - MBWA23:04 - Contact Info & Wrap Links:Website: https://www.bradmontgomery.com/Transcript: - [INTRO] Welcome to Skye Team's People First with Morag Barrett.- My guest this week on People First is my friend and colleague Brad Montgomery. Brad is a certified speaking professional. And if you don't know what that means stay tuned and you will learn. But ultimately Brad teaches people to use happiness to boost productivity, creativity, innovation and profits. He turns typical meetings into transformational events using the power of happiness. And he's a pretty funny guy. And if you are unsure, he has been able to make audiences, across 50 States and on four continents giggle his clients include Microsoft, Verizon, the FBI, yep, that one, the CIA, yep, that one too and the IRS, you mean the IRS has a sense of humor, Brad? I love it, I love it. Anyway, audiences of meeting planners describe Brad as authentic. He's a real human a funny guy on stage and off. And I am excited to share his leadership journey with all of us today. Brad, welcome to People First.- And the crowd goes crazy.- I don't know, I really should have a laugh track going or you should maybe you could have hit that button for us.- That will do, it still goes boom.- I'll say, it's nice to be... I've got my little graphic going, I'm sorry. I forgot that it comes up, Morag I'm so glad to be here.- Well, I'm excited for the conversation and as we're there three People First episode, Brad, I'm always a little bit nosy and a little bit curious about everybody's origin story, 'cause of course we see you, the Brad of today, the successful keynote speaker Hall of Fame speaker no less.- Oooh!- And it's easy to lose sight of the wee lad you once were. So when you were a wee lad back in elementary school, the teacher said, "Brad, what do you want to be when you grow up?" What is your answer?- I wanted to be a larger lad- A larger lad.- So in fact, I'm... In a second I'm going to walk behind the camera and grab a prop. 'Cause it's visual, baby! I wanted to be the... Not just the owner of an ice cream parlor. I wanted to be the owner of a chain of ice cream parlors. 'Cause I thought that was so cool.- It would be. So can I ask what's your favorite ice cream color, not color, flavor?- Well, I can tell you what, it's not, it's not vanilla and I'll tell you why it's not. I love my wife, my wife is a vanilla with chocolate sauce woman, that's what she wants and I like variety. So the key is variety, It's about... It's really has nothing to do with the vanilla it has to do with, Oh, for Christ's sake. Can we get something else?- So when I was little at my granny used to buy Neapolitan in a block, it was... It was the vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, also with all the additives and you had to fold the box down and she would slice it and put it between little wafers, and I thought that was the height of luxury. But I have to say, I do like my sort of caramel waffle cone, mix with a bit of chocolate in there too. Well, there you go.- My experience with Neapolitan, is it the strawberry is always left over. People are scooping out those vanilla and chocolate and the strawberries left.- Well, I know, I didn't like the chocolate 'cause it was... It was always fake chocolate. So very important leadership journey in terms of ice cream flavors and how that has either emotionally scarred us or shaped us into the leaders that we are today. So tell me what was the pivot point that then took you from aspiring ice cream parlor leader, to professional speaker and Hall of Fame?- My like so many of us Morag, my line is not straight. So I got out of... I did magic tricks in college, so my summer job was being a magician at a Renaissance fair, and oh, I have stories about that.- Go on then. And then after college I thought, Oh I'll do... Honestly, I'll just master magic, I'm pretty good at it, I'll master it in a year, and then I'll go to law school, like my dad, and that'll be that. And then of course, when you're 21, you're an idiot and you don't realize you can't master anything in a year. So after being in it for a while, I realized one, Oh, this is hard and a year is not going to cover it. And two, I kind of got lucky because or I don't know lucky, maybe it's because I was awesome but my goals were just... My only goal that year was to have fun, master magic and not borrow money from my parents. And I got lucky and I got into some cool places and the money was coming in, and I was excited and I won a contest, which was cool, and I got booked at the Magic Castle which is a really prestigious magic club for magicians. And I came back and said, "screw law school, I'm not going." And I was kind of open to it thinking, well eventually I'll probably go to grad school but that time has not come so...- Next year.- I was an entertainer for years, and it was through that Morag, that I got exposed to professional speaking and professional speakers. And then it was a 15 year morph into becoming not just a guy who stands on stage to entertain but a guy who has an idea that he wants to communicate.- So you make it sound so easy, but I have heard from you, around the stories around the Magic Castle, that it wasn't as smooth sailing as perhaps the jump, the time warp from then now might appear. So tell me about some of the trips and stumbles along the way.- I didn't have any.- It was perfect. Cool as a cucumber.- I was born awesome, come on.- This is where I go, liar, liar, pants on fire, Mr. Montgomery. I think it's like every... Every job is the same and that you start out as a young person thinking you're better than you are. And I think that's a nice that we all have that protective quality that we don't know at the time, how dumb we are and how bad we are. We only know that with hindsight. 'Cause like in my case, standing on stage, I never would have done it, if I would've known how bad I was. Thank heavens, I didn't know, 'cause I wouldn't, whatever. Yeah so, the trips and stumbles, when you're a guy on stage are obvious, I think, if you're entry level in a big corporation or whatever, sometimes they're not as blatant but when your audience walks out on you, as they have on me, if people just come up to you and say, that sucks which they've done to me and we're not talking like maybe that happens at your quarterly 360 review. We're talking if that happens daily or multiple times a day, which has happened to me, that feedback is instant and inescapable. So, quickly you learn, you can't be on stage and not have some dings. And it's just part of the process. It's just... You cannot be a good anything onstage until you're at least mediocre and in my case, really quite bad, but that's part of it, you know, at this point I'm proud of that. You can't... One of the reasons I'm good now is I've been on stage thousands of times and lots of them sucked.- And li...
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