0:00:02.1 Wayne Brown: Hello, and Pura Vida. I’m Wayne Brown, and welcome to the ET project. As always, we’re delighted to be delivering this podcast for executive talent all over the world, whom we’re affectionately referring to as Team ET. And as the intro just now may have signaled, we’re coming from a very special location this week and have a wonderful guest joining us. We’re greeting you from the beautiful shores and highlands of Costa Rica in Central America. And a short geography lesson for those outside of the Americas, that means we’re sitting on that thin connecting strip between North and South America, smack bang in the middle of Nicaragua to the north and Panama to the south. As my new friend and guest on today’s show confirms, it’s truly a piece of paradise. And a fun fact, Costa Rica is often referred to as a happiest country on Earth. So now, please allow me to introduce the world acclaimed lady of Mass Influence, Ms. Teresa De Grosbois. I love Teresa’s mission, which is changing the planet one grassroots movement at a time.

0:01:09.6 WB: She’s the number one international best-selling author of Mass Influence: The Habits of the Highly Influential, which has been on the best-sellers list in seven countries since 2015. A four times international best-selling author, Teresa teaches marketing courses globally to business leaders and entrepreneurs on how to create massive, successful, word-of-mouth campaigns. Teresa heads the International Evolutionary Business Council, a membership-based organization, which empowers change makers to create profitable, impactful businesses that have a lasting and transformational impact on the individuals that they serve. Team ET, as you might expect, today our conversation is going to be focusing on the topic of influence. And I’m guessing that this is something that the majority of our listener base might hold a substantial interest in. So with that said, let’s get ourselves ready to launch into this episode titled Challenges That Shape Habits and Create Authentic Influences.

0:02:12.9 Speaker 2: Welcome to the ET project, a podcast for those executive talents determined to release their true potential and create an impact. Join our veteran coach and mental Wayne Brown as we unpack an exciting future together.

0:02:29.8 WB: Alright, well, Team ET, welcome back for another week. It’s fantastic to have everyone here again, and this week we’re on a journey. I haven’t been here before, but we’re in Costa Rica, so welcome to Costa Rica everyone. I will say it my way, but I’m sure that our guest Teresa will correct me. Pura Vida. Pura Vida.

0:02:50.6 Teresa De Grosbois: You got it. No correction required.

0:02:54.1 WB: Very good. Well, Teresa, welcome to the show, it’s great to have you on board, and I’m really looking forward to our conversation. I’m sure we’ll cover a lot of territory and jump around a little bit, but great to have you here. Who are you? What are you doing? What brings you to us?

0:03:14.5 TG: Great to be here. What a great question. Who am I? A lot of people know me as an influence expert, ’cause I wrote the book Mass Influence, and my brand as a speaker is all around teaching about influence, teaching people how to create mass epidemics, but who I am in the world, like what I’m up to lately is building an intentional community here in Costa Rica. And I have to say that’s exciting me more than anything in my life right now, bringing together people from all over the world to build a community in a biophilic setting, like integrating nature right in with our community, and seeing how we can evolve a vision as we come, every new person who comes into the community evolves the vision on a little bit. So that’s been really fun.

0:04:00.9 WB: Actually, you’re not from Costa Rica originally, I believe you’re from northern Ontario in Canada.

0:04:06.9 TG: Yeah, yeah, Canadian originally, live in Costa Rica now. So Costa Rica is kinda interesting that way, because there’s actually, and I’m starting to see this everywhere, but there’s people from all over the world here now. So even though the country is 70% native Costa Ricans, everywhere you go, you meet people from the Philippines, from Bali, from Canada, from the US, from Europe. I was at a gathering the other day, and people around the room went around the room and said where they were from, there was only two Americans and three Canadians and three Costa Ricans, and everybody else in the room was from a different country. I think the only other country there was two people from was the Netherlands, and it was like, “Wow.” The world has become so amazing and that so many people are now moving around and changing countries, it’s very cool to watch what’s happening.

0:05:00.1 WB: Yeah, and Costa Ricca I believe is listed as one of the happiest places in the world to live, is that what you feel?

0:05:07.6 TG: Yeah, it’s hard to be sad when you live in Paradise, it really is. But actually, there’s something really special about the people here too. I think there’s something to be said for being in a country where they don’t have a war in living memory. In fact, the last war in Costa Rica was won by lawyers. They had like a border skirmish or something and the lawyers resolved it in negotiation. They have no standing army and there’s been no war in hundreds of years here. So there’s no, as Eckhart Tolle would say, there’s no pain body here. Like there’s no this, “I gotta be super careful.” There’s no trauma carried around in the average person, and it’s really fascinating to watch how that changes the culture of a place. It actually creates almost like a vision statement for what the rest of the world can become.

0:06:02.5 WB: Yeah, it’s quite incredible. I know having looked at it in preparation for our conversation, it’s now in my bucket list. I have to get there. It’s a place that I really wanna come and visit. What’s the best season to come over?

0:06:17.6 TG: Every season is pretty magical here, but my favorite is the dry season. From about December to about May, there’s almost no rain and it’s sunny almost all the time. So that’s the equivalent of what Costa Ricans consider summer. But the rest of the year, what they call the green season, ’cause it’s not a true rainy season, it’s not like Africa where we get just pelted by rain, it’s usually sunny in the morning, and then by about 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon, you start to cloud over and you’ll get a rain shower in the afternoon. So it’s pretty much 365 days a year spectacular in the mornings here, which is why you notice most Costa Ricans get up at dawn and start their day really early, and you just, your body just kinda naturally wants to when you live here because the mornings are just so incredible. And then you just kinda get used to, for eight months of the year, there’s gonna be rain in the afternoon, and it just becomes something you start to adjust to. So it’s really beautiful year round, it depends on whether you like lush, lush, lush green when it’s raining or absolute sunshine when it’s dry season.

0:07:27.1 WB: I can imagine that it’s quite a contrast coming from northern Ontario to Costa Rica, the temperature in itself must be quite different, I guess, right?

0:07:37.7 TG: Oh yeah. Well, we live in the mountains, so we’re in what they call the Indoor-Outdoor Living Zone here, so it’s always between about 20 and 35 degrees Celsius. So if there’s Americans who listen to your show, that would be about 72 to 98 degrees Fahrenheit. And so it’s lovely all the time. Most of the rooms have indoor-outdoor living, like you can open up your windows. I close my windows when I’m doing interviews, ’cause I usually have really loud toucans sitting outside my windows, but most of the time, you can just have your windows wide open. So where we live, we don’t have air conditioning or heat, we just leave the windows open all day and it’s pretty lovely. At night, you usually need to close them and occasionally you need a space heater at night. In the green season, it can cool off a bit, but it’s really lovely.

0:08:27.1 WB: Right. Anything around the world at the moment that is exciting you or anything you’re doing at the moment that’s really got you excited?

0:08:35.8 TG: Well, I have to say, I’m excited at how small the world has gotten. It’s kinda fascinating when you view people at the community level versus what’s going on at the government level. And as someone who studies influence and how change happens in the world has always fascinated me. Like how do you influence change? How does change naturally happen? And sort of what’s happening at the grassroots level is usually 20 to 25 years ahead of what’s happening at the government level. Governments lag behind, it’s almost like legislation gets enacted because everybody’s doing something anyway. You know what I mean?

0:09:15.1 WB: Right, right.

0:09:16.9 TG: So it’s kind of fascinating what’s going on at the grassroots level. It’s like the average person has decided borders and this idea of countries and jurisdictions is a little… Getting a little irrelevant to society. The average person is like, “Why do we bother with passports still? What is this with all these territories and stuff?” And we’re starting to see that shift in the world, with the creation of the EU about 20 years ago now, there is now more thinking toward creating these free-trade zones. I’m wondering if in 50 years, it’s gonna be one planetary free-trade zone because the average person seems to be… Like digital nomads are becoming so common, who like, “We don’t care where we work. We’ll live here and work there, and who cares where we pay taxes?” And in a way, it’s kind of fascinating watching that and governments trying to keep up with it all and like, “Oh, how do we go after our digital nomads? We still wanna tax them when they’re six countries away.”

0:10:26.0 TG: And so it’s kind of fascinating watching all of that play out and seeing what’s happening. And at the same time, we’re having breakdown in currency. With the development of cryptocurrency, governments are running scared right now, ’cause they don’t know what to do with that, “How do we track it? How do we tax it?” At the government level, it’s all about, “How do we tax it? How do we tax people? How do we tax currency?” But it’s kinda fascinating the innovation that’s happening. And then, I don’t even wanna think about AI. I’ve chatted with ChatGPT several times in the last month and that’s kinda like, “Wow.” Fascinating and scary all at the same time.

0:11:05.6 WB: Yeah. We can have a whole session just on that itself, right? I’m a coach, and the impact that AI is gonna have on coaching alone is quite, quite extraordinary, but I think our future, as you’ve mentioned, is very, very different to where we’ve come from. Just to the point that you just raised about this globalization and the lack of boundaries, how does that play out, do you feel, for leaders in corporations? Is there a dramatic impact as a result of people feeling more free, released from I’m Australian, you’re Canadian, etcetera. How does that play out for leaders?

0:11:53.1 TG: It’s a fascinating inquiry, ’cause we’re now seeing so many corporations country shop, and it used to just happen at the big corporate level, where the big Fortune 500 companies would decide where they wanted their global headquarters based on, where do we get the best tax treatment? And now we’re actually seeing, especially with digital nomads, and like companies that are mobile, a really big push towards starting to move out of the countries that aren’t all that friendly to digital nomads or aren’t all that friendly to online business in general, and starting to pick, choose what countries they open up their businesses in. It’s amazing in Costa Rica how many digital nomads live here.

0:12:35.5 TG: And if you talk to them, the average person in Costa Rica, they’re operating their company out of another country, they will have nothing to do with the country that they moved from. So they’re Canadian, they live in Costa Rica, their company is in Dubai, or they’re an American, they live in Costa Rica, their company is in Singapore or whatever. So it’s really kinda fascinating. This globalization has allowed people to pick and choose what’s the best treatment for me and what I’m doing, where do I get the best ability to host, to be able to charge, like even things like PayPal and Stripe have become almost like another tax on business. In some countries, their fees are really low, in other countries, their fees are exorbitant, so business owners can now shop around. It’s really neat to see.

0:13:27.2 WB: Yeah, it’s quite an amazing world that we’re now embroiled in and living in and hopefully enjoying. It’s quite extraordinary. Let’s jump across to the book. I mean, it’s a great book. You talk about it. When did you release the book? It’s not in the last couple of years, right? It’s…

0:13:46.8 TG: Eight years ago now. Yeah, it came out like… Yeah.

0:13:47.9 WB: Eight years, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s still doing well, I believe, in terms of sales and how would you introduce the book?

0:13:58.5 TG: Yeah, it’s been actually really humbling the level of response this book has gotten. It’s really lovely the amount of people that have supported, creating word of mouth around this book, it’s very neat. It’s just a really a raw look at what creates influence. And a lot of people struggle when they think about influence. It’s an area we as human beings have a lot of inner dialogue around. I would say money and influence are the two biggest areas that we tend to create a lot of belief systems around that don’t necessarily serve us. With influence, a lot of people are walking around with, “If I try and become influential, I must be egotistical.” Or that kind of like, “If I write my book, someone should just pick it up, I shouldn’t have to promote it.” Things like that. And in the long run, a lot of that doesn’t really serve us. When you think about it, when good people, everyday heroes don’t try to become influential, then we risk living in a world where only the sociopaths of the world are the influencers. And it’s like, “No, we don’t wanna live in that world. Let’s embrace influence as an amazing tool, an amazing force to cause positive shift and positive change in this world. And let’s go after it unashamedly.” Because it’s influence that causes global shift. Everything starts at a grassroots level on our planet.

0:15:32.7 WB: How would you look at social media influence versus the more traditional… I don’t know how you even phrase it, a corporate influencer, yeah. So is there a difference or not?

0:15:47.8 TG: There is, but it’s not as big a difference as you might think. Like influence is just any time someone knows, likes and trusts you enough that they’ll take action if you recommend something. And so when we talk about mass influence is just a lot of people know they can trust you enough. And in a corporate setting, a corporate leader has situational influence. If they’ve got 3000 people reporting to them, they have influence over those people just from the situation that they hold, but remove the title, remove the position or the positional influence, and the influence is gone. Whereas someone on social media who’s just developed a following, their following is their following.

0:16:31.9 TG: They could actually change their brand and a lot of the following might come with them because the influence is based on the relationship with the person proper. And we often saw that in traditional media too, when we had big talk-show hosts and they might move channels that they’re hosting on or move networks even, their following is likely to come with them because in that case, the influence is not positional influence, the influence is based on the relationship with the individual. And social media just made that so much easier to do. You can become an influencer on social media with very little effort, whereas 40 years ago, you had to have a television station hire you to be a reporter or something like that if you wanted to have that level of influence. So it really has opened up the world.

0:17:24.0 WB: Yeah, for sure. I’m always curious, if you look at social media, I’m wondering if there’s a difference between influence and popularity or being the in thing at the moment? Like you can have 10-year-old boys and girls that have a mass following of millions of people around the world. Would you class that as influence or that’s more of…

0:17:46.6 TG: It’s more fame, I would say, fame or notoriety. Like fame is a lot of people know you, whereas influence is a lot of people know they can trust you and they’ll actually take action when you recommend something. And a lot of people have both. There are famous people that we also trust to influence us, like Ellen DeGeneres is a good example of that, or there’s Hollywood movie stars that are so well loved that if they recommend something, people will absolutely take action. And yet there are Hollywood movie stars that if they recommend something, the response is only so-so. And so I think that therein lies the distinction of fame versus influence. And we all talk about, “We can all get our 15 minutes of fame.”

0:18:33.8 WB: Yes, yeah.

0:18:35.0 TG: 15 minutes of fame doesn’t necessarily come with influence.

0:18:40.0 WB: So that’s a great segue into what does create influence? How do you create influence?

0:18:48.0 TG: Influence really comes down to relationships. So not only relationships with your following, but relationships with other influencers. And this is the principle a lot of people don’t get. You can’t make yourself influential or famous for that matter. If I stood up on a chair at a networking event and said, “Look at me, I’m so awesome, I’ve got four best selling books and I’m famous. Everybody come speak to me.” People would be either leaving the event or trying to show me the door as fast as they could. That would just be like, “Uh, get away.” Whereas if I stood up on a chair and said, “Guys, Wayne Brown just walked in the room, I love him, he’s got the best show out there. He’s such an awesome individual, love everything he teaches, everything he stands for.” Now in that moment of me giving away influence… All of that is true by the way, I love your show, and everything you do.

0:19:40.9 WB: You’re too kind.

0:19:42.6 TG: But in a moment of giving away influence, I become more influential, isn’t that ironic. In that moment, I’m the most influential person in the road because everybody’s like, “Oh, look at her talk about this other person. Isn’t that neat?” Right?

0:19:54.0 WB: Yeah.

0:19:56.2 TG: So it’s actually in the act of giving influence to others that we become more influential because then they can give it back to you. When you connect to influencers, the first thing they automatically do is talk about how great you are. So, the act of giving influenced other people actually is the main thing that grows your own influence.

0:20:19.0 WB: Yeah, that’s incredible. And it is so simple, and yet we… For the majority of people, we just don’t practice it. I’ve heard many stories of the people like Bill Clinton, when he meets you in person, it’s as though you are the only person in the room. His focus is 100% on you, regardless of everything else that must be going on in their life. So, is that the same as reciprocity? Or it’s a little bit of a sideline to reciprocity, I guess.

0:20:50.9 TG: I would say it’s a part of reciprocity. Let’s call it that. And this is where Cialdini, when he wrote the original book on influence, he talks about reciprocity a lot. Reciprocity generates influence. And as human beings, we naturally use reciprocity. I do this for you, you do that for me. When we look at reciprocity for how influencers do it, they do it a little differently. They tend to give influence each other… To each other, to create reciprocity. So, when you meet the new neighbor, you’d bring them an apple pie or a lasagna or whatever to get to know the new neighbor. When you’re building a relationship with an influencer, it’s far better to say, “Hey, I got a podcast, can I interview you?” Or, “I heard you saying you’re talking in Chicago next week. Can I connect you with some people in Chicago that might help generate your event, or.” Anything that draws more attention to them, is how you wanna generate relationship with influencers. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking their book or a product sample is gonna generate reciprocity and it might, at the one-on-one level. Giving out product samples creates reciprocity if you’re just speaking to Joe Nobody. Right?

0:22:12.8 WB: Yes.

0:22:12.8 TG: But if you’re speaking to an influencer, that’s more about you. That hits a lot like going to the neighbor you just met and saying, “You’re gonna really love my kids, you’re gonna really enjoy babysitting them.” [laughter] It’s too soon in the relationship for you… ‘Cause the inference when you give out a product sample to an influencer is that you want them to endorse you. So that’s more about you than it is about them. So it’s far more important to give influence, than to give any other form of gesture if you wanna build reciprocity with an influencer.

0:22:47.7 WB: Could even say it’s about how you can value add, or create value for that other person, without the expectation perhaps, of anything in return.

0:22:57.2 TG: Yeah, it’s important. And in the same way we would do if we were creating a friendship. Like when you bring the apple pie to the new neighbor, you’re not expecting them to return a pie next week. You’re just expecting that there’s an opportunity here to get in a reciprocal relationship, where you start to support each other, and know each other, or become friends in some way. Right?

0:23:17.7 WB: Right.

0:23:18.9 TG: And so, in true reciprocity, there’s usually not score-keeping, but if the energy is all going in one direction, then there isn’t a relationship there. So you kinda have to judge and determine. The trick with when you’re building relationships with high influencers is, you gotta remember, if you’re trying to build a relationship with someone like a reporter, they might have a million followers, they might have a 1000 people trying to build a relationship with them, and they’re ridiculously busy. So it might take you doing something nice for them 10 or 15 times before they could do something nice back. So when there’s a big in-balance in the level of influence you both hold, the reciprocity doesn’t always catch right away. Sometimes you have to give it a little time and see whether it takes, and if enough time passes and there’s no reciprocity, then maybe you’re just not investing in someone who has a good relationship with you.

0:24:14.5 WB: Yeah. How has that then dove tail to building a following? I get the, build a relationship with the other influences. Is it because your status or your visibility becomes greater that people then see you more? How does the following come…

0:24:38.5 TG: It’s not so much about status as it is about reach. So when you have a way to give influence to other people, they can give it back to you. So, this… A good example of this is in a book launch. A book… A best-selling book is nothing more than 200 influential people all shouting out your book all at the same time. Well, then that begs the question, how do I get in a relationship with 200 people that they would be willing to shout out my book all at the same time? There’s the inquiry. And the answer is, you get in a relationship with 200 influential people. Well, how do you do that? You send your following to them on a routine basis. You might interview them on your podcast, you might shut them out on your social media, there’s a 100 things you could do it, that’s why you wanna have your own social media. If you wanna become influential, you wanna have the tools of the trade so you can shout out other people. Your social media isn’t to sell you if you’re a business owner. You can sell your own products on it, but it’s far better to use your social media to build relationships with hundreds of other influencers, because then when you’ve got something big going on and they share your stuff, now instead of in front of your following of whatever, five, 10,000, you could be in front of a couple million because all your influencer friends shouted you out. That’s where the reach grows.

0:26:00.2 WB: Right, makes a lot of sense. So we have the… This side, so we need to create the influence by giving influence. Anything else required to become influential?

0:26:12.3 TG: Well, there are specific habits that you wanna get into. And influence is like anything, if you start to develop the paradigm of how influential people operate, then you’ll become influential quite naturally. And I can always hear in my head all those people saying, “But Teresa, I’m never gonna have the time for that. You’re just adding a bunch of stuff to my do list.” Human beings always have this going on. And, I like to use the analogy that influence is a lot more like breathing. ‘Cause there was a time we as human beings had to learn how to breathe. We came out of that nice warm environment, somebody whacked us on the back, we cried for a minute, and then we mastered the skill of breathing. And then, by and large, we never really thought about breathing as a skill until maybe we did yoga or martial arts or something, and somebody taught us that, “No, there’s an advanced level of breathing, you gotta learn to breathe properly.” And influence is a lot like that. When you start to develop the habits of influential people, then you will just naturally walk through your day being the way an influencer is, and naturally giving influence to other people who deserve it without worrying about specific reciprocity in that moment. And then you find influence naturally starts to flow back to you.

0:27:32.0 TG: So, I actually have a little 30-day influence challenge that I give people so that they can start to learn the basics of how to start embody these habits. Do you mind if I give that a shoutout Wayne?

0:27:44.5 WB: By all means.

0:27:48.5 TG: Okay, if you come to massinfluencethebook.com. Because of the anniversary of my book being on the best seller list for so long, we’re actually giving the digital version of my book away for free right now.

0:27:57.0 WB: Wow.

0:27:58.1 TG: And you can sign up for the 30-day influence challenge if you want. It’s just 30 days of quick little one, two minute, exercises, that get you to think about some principle of influence that day. And you practice doing that habit for that day, and then in 30 days, you just watch how different your influence levels are with the people all around you.

0:28:17.0 WB: Well, we’ll definitely link to that in our notes so people can find it. And I will be there. So I will practice it as well, so I look forward to that. So that… You mentioned something that made me think about another point that I’ve heard you talk about, which is being authentic. By doing this just as a natural habit, I guess you become more authentic in the way you approach it.

0:28:42.6 TG: Yeah, authenticity is actually one of the core habits of influential people. And there’s a lot of different definitions of authenticity out there, so let me give you mine. Authenticity is just your inside voice saying the same thing as your outside voice. And that’s why sometimes we meet people who are sociopaths that seem really authentic, and it’s because they believe everything they’re saying. So not that I’m advocating for sociopaths, but I’m just saying, we can tell when somebody’s got thoughts in their head that’s different than what’s coming out of their mouth. When you go to a store and the salesman is trying to sell you a product, and you know their inner dialogue is, “Oh my God, I really gotta get this sale.” We can tell there’s a disconnect there, between what they’re recommending and what they’re thinking. And as human beings, we can simply sense that. Whereas when people are congruent, when their inner dialogue is the same as what’s coming out of their mouth, that’s one of the basises of influence, because we naturally mistrust when we can feel that inauthenticity happening. And again, influence requires trust, inauthenticity will break down trust in a heartbeat.

0:29:55.7 WB: This might be a strange question. I was trying to think of whether I should even ask it. But, how do build your own authenticity? How do you become more authentic? As an individual, as a leader, what are some of the things that you would have to do to know that you’re being authentic?

0:30:13.0 TG: That’s a great question. I do a lot of work on this in a lot of the programs I teach. We do a lot of inner child work, because one of the things research is now showing is all human beings have negative self-talk. We develop certain messaging, usually when we’re first learning language, around the age of two, the very first failures we have in our life, we start telling ourselves things to make sense of those failures. We’ll say things like, “I’m not big enough, I’m not tall enough. I’m too white, I’m too black. I’m too short. I’m a girl, I can’t do this. Nobody loves me, nobody likes me.” We have a whole plethora of these negative ideas that we picked up at a very young age, and whatever the core ones are, we tend to create repetitive themes around that. There’s usually one or two that stand out for every individual, and then that almost becomes the lens through which they live their lives, and that theme starts to repeat. And so we do a lot of inner child work. This is where I love the work of Jennifer Hof, ’cause she does a lot of work with give your ego a new job. And so we sort of adjusted her work and we call it, give your inner child a new job. Because it’s really that two-year-old version of you that’s constantly ringing the alarm bell in your head.

0:31:38.0 TG: Like, “Oh my god, I can’t speak in front of a million people. What if I look bad, what if my makeup’s not right. But nobody’s gonna wanna listen to me, I’m not smart enough, I don’t have enough credentials.” All of that is inner dialogue that was created by a very young version of you that’s just playing on repeat. So when you give your inner child a new job, it’s like, “Okay, you’re not in charge of ringing the alarm bell anymore, I’ve got this. I’m gonna adult, I can do this.” And now in it’s the inner child’s job to just say, “You can do it, I’m gonna cheer you on.” And make the inner child in charge of reminding you to have fun. I call my little inner child Tessie, ’cause that was my favorite childhood nickname. And so Tessie reminds me when I’m doing an interview, or if I’m on stage, or when I’m thinking about, “Am I okay with my book selling to a million people? Am I okay with that?” Tessie is the one that reminds me to have fun with it and enjoy the journey.

0:32:41.7 WB: When you talk about your inner dialogue, and most of us have this negative connotation towards our dialogue. I heard you mention somewhere about being okay with that negative discussion and seeing how that might even be serving you. Is that something you still…

0:32:57.7 TG: Absolutely, that inner dialogue, usually it becomes also the thing that drives us. And for me, one of my first negative self-talks was around, “I’m too small to play with the big kids.” ‘Cause I’m not only Canadian, I’m from Northern Canada, and we used to spend our summers in a remote backwood setting. And so my family was my whole life and as the youngest, I was always getting left behind, the teenagers didn’t want the baby around. And so I had a lot of inner dialogue around, “I’m too small to play with the big kids, I’m too little, I’m not important.” And the interesting thing about that though is when you start to develop a certain lens as a child, like most human beings, you’ll start doing one of two things, being terrified that it’s true, or spend all of your time desperately trying to prove it’s not. And the desperately trying to prove it’s not true can be actually a pretty incredible motivator to a lot of people becoming real overachievers in the world. Trick is to learn to fall in love with that little inner child who created that. ‘Cause little Tessie was just trying to protect me, she was just trying to make sense of the world.

0:34:14.7 TG: And then she actually gave me a motivation that had me become fascinated with the whole idea of importance at the age of three. At the age of three, I started studying, “Why do some siblings get listened to and others don’t?” And, “What makes someone in this family influential? Oh, the ones who have better senses of humor, are… ” At the age of three, I didn’t know the world… Word authentic, but that’s what it was, that’s what I was seeing. The authentic ones really have a lot more trust. And as I got older, that became a passion that I really wanted to dive into and understand. So when we can forgive ourselves for the negative dialogue, and actually see the gift that it was, the gift to drive us to new levels of inquiry around those things, then actually, it really becomes an amazing piece of who you are as a human being.

0:35:13.7 WB: It’s so powerful just listening to how you phrase it, because thinking back on my own childhood, there would have been many occasions that I could recall that influenced how I turned out as a adult. And for sure, I never tapped into a lot of that. I grew up with these belief systems that a lot of the things that I saw were bad versus good, but I never leveraged it, essentially is what you’re saying. Yeah, thank you for that. Is there anything that we haven’t touched on in relation to the book or in relation to influence that is really important that you’d like to mention?

0:36:00.3 TG: Well, I would say for sure, give yourself permission to take actions on your dreams. And I don’t just mean your dreams of buying a bigger house or a nicer car, those are important dreams too, don’t get me wrong. But most human beings have a dream of doing something that would really matter, to their family, to their community, to the world at large. And those dreams are actually where our real happiness lives. It was actually Aristotle that first talked about the different types of happiness, and he talked about hedonistic happiness, which is like the joy you get from the really great latte in the morning, or the really lovely piece of chocolate cake. But when the chocolate cake is gone, the happiness is gone. But he also talked about eudaimonia, and eudainistic happiness, is the happiness we get from knowing that we really matter, from knowing that we’re a deep contribution to our family, to our community, to the world at large. And when we give ourselves permission to really step up and play bigger around those dreams, guess what, our happiness goes up a notch. So I would say give yourself permission to dream big, and play big, and take action on it. Because until you take action on your dreams, you really are just dreaming.

0:37:16.1 WB: What was the decision process for you to move from northern Ontario to Costa Rica? Was it a happiness decision, was there any connection there?

0:37:29.0 TG: A lot of it was, yeah. It was… I lived out West, in Canada, in between. I must say, I didn’t go straight from northern Ontario to here. But a lot of it had to do with just being done with winter, really. Having lived in the Canadian Prairies for 25 years, I found that I was just getting to an age where I felt like I was being stuck in doors too much. And I really wanted to live somewhere where I could be outside more, so once I got to experience Costa Rica, I was just like, “Oh my God, this is just so much nicer than anywhere else on the whole planet that I’ve ever been.” I was sold. And initially, I just started coming down for parts of the winter, and then very quickly realized, “I don’t wanna go back.” So that had me shift and decide, “Okay, I can make a home here and move.”

0:38:27.5 WB: You have a fantastic story, and I know you’re extremely busy with a number of things you’re involved in at the moment. Is there another book in the making?

0:38:38.5 TG: There’s one rattling around at the back of my head, but I’m not sure when I’m gonna get pen to paper and get it out. Probably in about 18 months to two years, I’m thinking.

0:38:48.3 WB: Okay. So what’s keeping you busy right now?

0:38:51.6 TG: At the moment, really focusing on building this community. I’m dabbling a little bit in currency trading, I’ve always done that my whole life, money fascinates me, especially as a tool to really move energy around this planet. Where money flows, influence flows, and the two play together so well if you really wanna create change in the world. So that’s got me having fun. And then of course, working with the Evolutionary Business Council, which I lead, is always a joy in the day. That’s a pretty amazing community of thought leaders that are up to some really cool stuff in the world.

0:39:30.4 WB: Could you explain a little bit more about the council, like what’s the purpose behind?

0:39:35.4 TG: Yeah, the EBC is really just a place for people who are really putting themselves out there to try and create change. To try and get people to live better, to think better, to build more sustainable products. Anyone that’s sort of pushing the needle on changing the way we as human beings live on this planet. And really, it’s just a group where those people can come together first and foremost, to do their own work as leaders. I think as leaders, we so often bump up against the limitations of our own self-doubt, that it’s nice to have a safe space of colleagues that you can come into, to work through that stuff and have the courage to go out and do more, play bigger. But secondly, we are a business mentorship body, where our members mentor each other. We mastermind together and help each other. And, it tends to be a community of very influential people. The collective reach of our members is over half a billion people. So it can be a pretty amazing community to come into to meet other influencers, so that you can grow your own influence and develop a more influence-based business that you don’t need to pay for marketing for, but that you can start to market strictly on the force of word of mouth. When you’ve got a group of colleagues who love you, that are all willing to shut out what you’re doing, it’s not that hard to grow. Right?

0:41:00.1 WB: Yeah. How did the council start in the first place? Were you the founder of this council?

0:41:08.7 TG: I am… I was the founder, I have to… I chuckle when you ask me that, ’cause some… It really started more by intervention than anything. I was doing a big event in Calgary one year, it was about 12, 13 years ago now. And I had invited a lot of my favorite big name speakers, people I masterminded with to come and speak at the event. And afterwards, I rented a bunch of condos up in the mountains and brought all the speakers up to the mountains, just so we could have a fun weekend together, I just thought it’d be nice to hang out for the weekend. And we were all sitting around that first evening after the event and out of my mouth pops, “Someday when I’m influential enough, I’d really love to create a community of people who really wanna change the world, to help them all become more influential, more profitable.” And everybody in the room started laughing. And I’m like, “What? I just told you guys my dream, why are you all laughing at me?” And Daniel Gutierrez, who’s… He’s one of the top Latino speakers in the world. He looks at me, he says, “Wait a minute Teresa, you were just on stage five hours ago telling people to notice when they say, some day I will, and inviting them to make that day today.”

0:42:20.6 TG: And then Jennifer Hof turns to me, she’s also one of the largest speakers in North America, and she says, “So when are you gonna do that Teresa?” And that was actually the moment the EBC was born in. And I needed a group of dedicated colleagues to challenge me on my own inner dialogue that I wasn’t ready or big enough or strong enough. The great irony of the EBC is, it’s a very… Leading that organization is something you almost can’t fail at, because any mistake you might make, you have a group of amazing leaders around you to pick up whatever ball dropped. And it’s just been such an amazing community to be amongst. And they’re the ones who get the credit for my book staying in and out of the number one spot on the best seller list for so long. I can’t take personal credit for that, it’s that group of amazing individuals that keep shouting out my book out for me. So it’s been a really joyful, amazing journey to be part of that group. I think in the coming year, I might step back as the leader as I’m starting to ease into retirement. But I think the group will continue to go strong, it’s a pretty amazing community to be a part of.

0:43:34.3 WB: Is it open to everybody? How do the people that may be interested if they’re listening…

0:43:40.4 TG: If you’re up to stuff in the world and you’re all about causing change and running an influence-based business. Yes, it is open to you. We do have minimum criteria to be a full member. We like to see you already an influencer, and already running a successful business to be a full member. But if you’re not a full member, we have an incubator group, we call the Evolutionary Business Council, where you’re more mentored and coached as opposed to at a full membership level, then you’re more masterminding and working more collaboratively with the other members. So people at both levels are welcomed in, and if you’re in the incubator group, we don’t publicize that externally, we never wanna harm someone’s brand. But businesses at all levels are welcomed in the EBC.

0:44:23.1 WB: Excellent. So where do people find you, if they wanna connect with you?

0:44:28.8 TG: You can visit our website, ebcouncil.com, and just hit the apply link if you’re interested in joining. And if you do wanna do my 30-day influence challenge, you can check out massinfluencethebook.com. And just learn how to flex your influence muscle, that’s usually what gets you ready to join the EBC. So it’s like a one-two punch.

0:44:51.8 WB: Right. And on LinkedIn, you open to people connecting with you on LinkedIn and…

0:44:58.8 TG: Absolutely, I’m just Teresa De Groisbois on LinkedIn.

0:45:02.2 WB: Well Teresa, it’s been a fantastic conversation, I’ve learnt so much and I appreciate having you on the ET Project. I’m sure our listeners will take a huge amount away from our conversation, so thank you very much.

0:45:16.6 TG: It’s just been a joy to be here Wayne, thank you so much for having me.

0:45:20.9 Speaker 2: Thank you for joining us on the ET Project, t a show for executive talent development. Until next time, check out our site for free videos, e-books, webinars and blogs at coaching4companies.com.