0:00:01.8 Wayne Brown: Hello, I’m your host, Wayne Brown, and welcome to the ET Project. We’re delighted to be delivering this podcast for executive talent all over the world, whom we’re affectionately referring to as team ET. Today we’ve been grounded, meaning we are not flying anywhere, we’re staying put right here in my little recording studio in Shanghai. Why? Because we’ve reached the end of another quarter, in fact, quarter four, and therefore we’re also celebrating our first anniversary. Yee-haw, party time. In today’s episode, I’ll be doing a short recap on all 12 guests that graced us on the show with their presence, insights, and their wisdom. What you’ll notice is just how much territory and diversity we cover geographically as well as across industries and roles. So let’s not delay any longer, and we’ll jump straight into the review.

0:00:57.4 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 mentor, Wayne Brown, as we unpack an exciting future together.

0:01:14.1 WB: Well, good morning team ET. We’ve reached the end of quarter four, which also means we’ve reached the end of first year of our podcast program. So as you know, it’s called the ET Project. ET for those that don’t know, the uninitiated, stands for Executive Talent. And you see on the screen, I’ve put the three levels of executive talent that we’d speak about. Now for each company, it may be a little bit different in terminology but essentially emerging talent, young, starting in your leadership career, maybe up to two or three years. So emerging talent. Then we move to the middle-level talent. So these are people looking after divisions, departments, et cetera. And then through to senior executive talent. This is those people looking to move into that top 1% of the organization, become the vice presidents, to become the directors, to become C-suite executives. Regardless of where you are on the journey, the whole point of the ET Project is to be able to bring you value through the guests that we invite to the show, that share their journey, that share their insights and learnings, their experience from their own careers.

0:02:31.3 WB: That’s the whole purpose of the ET Project. Today, we’re sitting here on a podcast. We have three different avenues, if you like, under the ET Project. We have the podcast, and as you can see on the screen through the icons, we also have the ET Live, ET Project Live. That’s a slightly different variation of the podcast. So I don’t bring as many guests onto the ET Live, ET Project Live. It’s more about looking at areas of interest, or areas that we’re focused on for that month or for that period with our different campaigns. And then, of course we have the ET Project challenge, and that’s every quarter we release a two, three, four or five day challenge that’s free of charge and all of the ET Project is free of charge. But the challenge is really there as a means of you gaining a deeper understanding on a specific topic. So for instance, we started this year looking at stakeholders and value creation. We then moved into storytelling. Next up we’ll be talking about facilitation, and I believe the last one for this calendar year will be about sales.

0:03:51.4 WB: So that’s what the ET Project’s all about. It’s about bringing new insights to you free of charge, no cost, through a live broadcast and our quarterly challenges. And as you can see, this is quarter four for our podcast. It’s the end of year one. So we’re celebrating our first year anniversary. And of course, in doing so, what I love to do at the end of each quarter is to do a recap on the guests that we’ve had on this journey with us in the last quarter. So that’s where we’re gonna start, and that’s where we’ll kick off. As you can see on the screen, we have the wonderful Milena Regos. Lena is sitting in Baha, Mexico. She’s a rebel entrepreneur, a visionary and the founder of a very interesting organization called Unhustle. She’s on a mission to disrupt the status quo and to revolutionize the way that we live and work to design sustainable live, work and play success but leaving behind the stress and the burnout that typically goes with our corporate environment. Milena’s become somewhat of a thought leader on the future of entrepreneurship as well as wellbeing, mental health.

0:05:10.5 WB: Not only wellbeing as we know it and talk about it, but also focused a little bit on digital wellbeing and the future of work through this focus, she was awarded a seat at the World Economic Forum agenda at Davos. And if any of you know me, you know that I’m an avid follower of the WEF and it brings together so many thought leaders, leaders of corporate, leaders of industry, leaders of politics from around the world every year. And they also are very active throughout the year. In this case, Milena was invited to come and sit on a panel and talk about her thoughts around how we deal with mental health and stress in the workplace. She’s also been awarded the People’s Choice Award at the Wisdom 2.0 conference, and shared the stage with some of the biggest business luminaries in the world to activate change on a global scale. Incredible lady. She’s even introduced her own world Unhustle day that we celebrate each December. Great way to start off journey at the beginning of this quarter in April of 2023. Thank you, Milena for the conversation.

0:06:28.9 WB: All right, then we move into cultural intelligence expert, if you like, a colleague of mine, ’cause we’re working in a program together, Mr. Liu Liu. Liu is based in Horsham. So I don’t know how many of you are geographical experts. So we’re traveling… With each of our guests, we travel around the world. I then make a point of it, introducing each guest to start by saying, “Today, we’re traveling to or we’re visiting our guest in this location.” Now, the aim is not to impress upon you how broadly we’re covering, but to really give you the insight that people we’re speaking to provide perspectives from different backgrounds, different cultures, different industries, and we’re bringing you this broad perspective on purpose, so that you get insights from leaders at really diverse backgrounds. So hopefully, that isn’t lost on you as we go through, but Liu is an ICF certified cross-cultural intelligence coach. He’s a project manager, a mentor, a trainer, and a facilitator. He coaches managers and leaders working in cross-cultural contexts to build trust, communicate effectively and deliver results.

0:07:44.7 WB: All right, so as you listen to our conversation, you’ll know that he goes into detail, he’s very intuitive when it comes to elements of self-awareness when we’re dealing cross culturally. His wife comes from the UK, he’s Chinese. My wife is Chinese, I come from Australia. So we had that common bond as a starting point but Liu coaches people on management, leadership, career development. He’s someone who really helps you to imagine a greater possibility for yourself, as well as gives you ways of achieving it, supporting it. So very insightful gentleman, plenty of real life experience and examples, as well as ways of overcoming the challenges that we all face as leaders as we walk this cross-cultural point. So a great second episode, great conversation, very insightful. Then we travel from the UK, from Horsham, sorry, Horsham by the way is Southwest of London about 30 kilometers. We go from there across to the USA, and to Atlanta, Georgia. Another area that is a favorite stomping ground of mine, is where one of our regional corporate headquarters was located. So I got to be there a few times in my career.

0:09:03.3 WB: And today, in this episode, we talked with Bernadette Boas. Bernadette is a real character. As we say in the opening of this episode, she’s a renowned ball of fire. In actual fact, she refers to her business as the Ball of Fire. She’s this way by character in everything she does. She does corporate executive coaching, training, speaking. Even in her hobbies and activities, she plays pickleball, which was something she introduced me to when in our conversation I didn’t really understand what it was, probably still don’t fully understand it, but anyway, each to their own and good luck with it. Within Ball of Fire Coaching, she brings her 25 plus years of corporate experience as an executive to entrepreneurial spirit to help transform corporate executives and teams, as well as businesses, by the way, around the world, into the powerhouses that they have the potential to be. During our conversation, you’ll hear Bernadette and I talking about the central theme of what she talks about greatly, and that’s who not to become as you progress in your career and climb that corporate ladder. And this is something that she experienced firsthand.

0:10:20.2 WB: So she calls herself, “The Corporate Bitch,” and that’s what she became and she talks a lot around the word bitch to help people understand what she means. But essentially what she’s saying is you need to be mindful of who you’re becoming as you climb that corporate ladder. And then don’t become somebody that nobody wants to work with. You’ll hear me talk a lot in our shows about toxic leadership. This is essentially what Bernadette was speaking. She’s worked really hard ever since realizing that she became that to alter that image. And as she will tell you firsthand, once you establish that, it’s really difficult to get rid of that label. From Atlanta, Georgia, in the USA, we move to Bangkok, Thailand. We catch up with a real character of the opposite gender, Ronnie Teja. Ronnie is Indian by birth, a real interesting guy to get to know. He’s got so many life experience stories. He grew up in, which probably classifies as a middle-class family, in a reasonably well-off environment compared to a lot of his colleagues. And therefore, he got to go to some of the better schools and colleges.

0:11:32.6 WB: He started to study in the UK at the London Business School of Economics, if my memory serves me correctly. He was really getting into it. He was studying as a digital marketing expert or marketing expert, only then to find that his parents moved to Canada, and requested that he join his sister and his parents over in Canada and leave his studies in the UK, which at the time was quite an upheaval for him. And he arrived, I think, at the age of around 22 in Canada with nothing. So he had to start from scratch. He was of Indian descent, living in a foreign country, not really understanding the culture and needing to earn money straight away, pretty much. Because there they were starting afresh in a new foreign country. I think he started, maybe it was strawberries, maybe it was blueberries, I’m not 100% sure, but the advice he got from some of his Indian family associates, let’s say, that had also migrated to India was head down, buckle up, you’ve got to make the money, so work hard. Do it. That was one of the things that he valued the most, was working hard and putting in the effort. And where he’s now as a result of those humble beginnings transferring to Canada is quite extraordinary.

0:12:57.6 WB: So the journey, I’m not gonna go into now, but today he’s the head of multiple online businesses in e-commerce, multi-millionaire, running extremely profitable businesses. He speaks at e-commerce events around the world, from Dubai to Barcelona to Africa, Palm Springs, and he was even identified as one of the Top 40 Under 40 people to watch in e-commerce back in ’21, ’22. Great guy. And as you’ll hear us talk about at the end of the conversation, he’s really just getting started, watch out for Ronnie Teja. He’s a really interesting guy and I’m sure there’s much more to come. So keep a watch out for him. We’re hopping around the world as you can see, right? Then we go from Ronnie all the way, we’re in Europe, we’re in Switzerland, to meet up with Ms. Hanna Herbst. Hanna and I sort of come from similar backgrounds in some ways, and we joke about the fact that she went to NYU at the Stern School of Business. Really nice business school by the way. And she works as a project manager, which is also my background. And so we have a few things in common, where we’re both career coaches and she wears multiple hats in her professional career.

0:14:25.7 WB: She’s a leadership career coach, she’s a management consultant. She’s a podcast host as well in a show that’s called Reaching Your Goals. I was fortunate to be a guest on the show. She did her MBA at NYU. Hanna is a really interesting person as well. All of my guests are very interesting, they have some great stories to share and some really impressive insights that they bring to the show. Hanna started a business called Delegate early in the piece, and then she sort of moved away from it when she got back into the corporate. She’s now come back into working for herself, and during the conversation she touches on some of the things that she likes to speak about as keynotes. Now one of those is why corporates need to be thinking about values more than what they might be. As well as she’s a feminist in the sense that she believes females are underrepresented in the corporate world. And so she talks about women in management and she challenges the women, where are you? Yeah, very interesting conversation. Great lady and huge number of insights come out of that episode. All right. Then we move back across to the USA.

0:15:42.7 WB: And in the USA, being a coach, it’s always very personal for me to talk with other coaches. And so, we head off talk with a gentleman by the name of David Goldsmith. For anyone that is really into coaching, you will probably know this gentleman. He is based in Santa Fe, in New Mexico. David is one of the really early coaching pioneers. His story of how he got in there was quite remarkable and what he did and what he continues to do, still doing it, but the way that he helped shape the coaching world that we have today, starting more than 30 years ago, is quite remarkable. His mission, of course, is to grow the quality of coaching and leadership worldwide. And my own observation is he’s quietly chipping away at the target and making huge impact. We go all the way back to almost the beginning of 1990 where David teamed up with another legend, Thomas Leonard, with the Coach 100 Corporate, served as the first President of Coach University. This is more than 30 years ago. This is when coaching was really just something that was thought about at a very high level, not practiced by many.

0:17:07.3 WB: We had Peter Hawkins, we had Tim Galway, we had the legends that really were foundational. He and Thomas Leonard were the co-founders of the International Coaching Federation. So if you know coaching at all, you know that this is the number one coaching body worldwide where it’s the most referred to and commonly used, ICF is what it’s more likely known as, International Coaching Federation. But not only the ICF that he founded, he also founded other major institutions. So from Santa Fe then we pop across to Los Angeles. Something about this lady and I just resonated, right? I was a guest on her show, originally had the opportunity to bring her back as a guest on my show. And of course, I’m talking about Janine Hamner Holman. So we start in Los Angeles where she currently is based, so on the West Coast of USA. But then we quickly transitioned to the East Coast. As you grow up, you always have these ideal locations. So being Australian, I grew up and of course Monopoly was one of the games I played. And therefore, when you get to go to London and you’re walking through the streets, you’re literally on the Monopoly board. It’s like a walk through history and through time and down memory lane for Australians as we visit London.

0:18:41.4 WB: But also for people that work in the educational field, in academia that have an interest in development of people. Janine grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and of course, if you know anything about some of the most famous universities in the USA, this is the home of Harvard, this is the home of MIT. Not the home of Yale. Where am I pointing? Not the home of Yale, but I wore that shirt just on purpose to have a little dig at Janine today. Her parents really encouraged her as she was growing up, remind her that she’s growing up in fortunate times. She’s living in a family who are not super wealthy, but they’re not poor either. They’re middle class or well to do, and therefore she needs to be mindful of that and give back. And so that was one of the values she grew up with. And as a result she moved initially into law. She did an internship under one of the Harvard professors in law. So it was a huge foundational building block for her. But she realized eventually that it wasn’t the direction she wanted to be, and she moved from there to a more an area of how she can serve with people.

0:20:03.0 WB: And she focuses today very heavily on diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. And she talks much about that in her keynotes and within her consultancy, her coaching, well, she was born in New Orleans before they moved to Cambridge. She got a very diverse background but she’s recognized internationally. She’s the best selling author and she just has so much experience and talks on so many areas that I have a common interest in. So we built this relationship very quickly and it’s all centered around leadership. Wonderful person, real character as well, calls a spade a spade. Really encourage everyone to listen to the episode 47. Take the opportunity. So from there, we head out of the USA back to the UK. So from Cambridge, Massachusetts, we head to the UK to a small township Southwest of London in the UK called Guildford. We we’re chatting with a gentleman in an area that I’m really interested in.

0:21:14.3 WB: The gentleman that we’re talking about is an expert in innovation. Mr. Elvin Turner is an award-winning innovation advisor. He’s an associate professor of innovation and entrepreneurship, MBA and executive programs. Very knowledgeable person when it comes to anything around operations and should be focusing on to help them sustain their future. And he is worked with a lot of really innovative organizations in finance, technology, music, publishing. I was first introduced to Elvin a few years back when listening to a presentation that he gave, I think was in WBECS which is a coaching organization. He was talking about helping leaders spark corporate creativity. This is something that I was really heavily thinking about and trying to do myself in my own career and in the teams that I led. And so therefore there was an immediate area of interest and so interesting conversation as they all are, of course, but all right, then we’re back to the USA.

0:22:29.3 WB: My guest today is Bethany Corbin, and Bethany comes from Charlotte in North Carolina. Bethany is a healthcare innovation and FemTech attorney, very topical for where we are at this moment. You think about technology and the changes, the radical shift that is creating in all industries around the world. Bethany’s focus is on FemTech and she’s an attorney. So she gives a legal perspective to some of the things we need to be thinking about as leaders. So her mission is to help thought leaders revolutionize the global women’s health sector. So if you listen to our conversation, you can really hear my naivety when it comes to certain areas of HR and legalities, but a really knowledgeable person. You’ll see she’s really well regarded. She speaks at a lot of seminars, conferences. She’s the founder of a business called Fem Innovation. She is an advisor to clinicians, to politicians and to advocates to help them transform, disrupt the standard care delivery for women health that we see today, let’s say through specifically tailored legal and educational programs that she offers.

0:24:04.5 WB: Great episode, great conversation and really a lot of value for the leaders to take a look. I’d encourage all of you to connect with Bethany and just follow what she’s doing, it may serve you well going forward. All right, next person. Another great person that I have a strong connection with. So we’re staying in the USA. We’re moving from North Carolina to Denver, the capital of Colorado, to the home of Mr. Terry Tucker. Terry is a keynote speaker, is sought after, he really believed in the power of good stories to motivate and inspire, to help leaders lead people through their lives, but to really untap their uncommon and extraordinary typical lives. So his mission is to consistently enrich and improve lives through inspiring and diverse uplifting content, without sacrificing any of the relationship often do with our families and our friends and the community, and even the teams that we serve. Terry’s got a great backstory, really motivational, inspiring backstory. He was a narcotics undercover investigator, he was a hostage negotiator. Fantastic that I had the opportunity to connect with him.

0:25:30.6 WB: Then we move on to our penultimate for this quarter, our Top Gun episode if you like. And we move from Denver, Colorado across to Las Vegas in Nevada. And we meet up with the gentleman who is literally the top gun or was in the Air force in the military. He is an ace pilot, Mr. Joseph, and he has a nickname ChroniK. So he calls himself Joseph “ChroniK” VanDusen. I could list all of his credentials, it would take me the next hour, but if you were to find him today, you find him somewhere in the air piloting or captaining a 787 Dreamliner somewhere in the world. His backstory is what really makes Joseph such an interesting character. I’m sure you’ve all seen pictures and heard stories about the Stealth Bombers, the B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber. Now, each one of these aircraft costs something like over 2 billion US dollars. They’ve been around now for about 30 years, and in that 30 year history in the US, there’s only been 600 hand picked pilots to ever fly these planes. Joseph was one of those 600. Through his career, raised up to the level of being an instructor of those handpicked.

0:26:54.9 WB: And he is been flying for 20 years and then moved out of being a pilot, moving into managing businesses, and then multimillion dollar businesses, turning around loss making businesses to being successful businesses. And today what he does is he shares that story. He talks about the learnings, the trainings, the education that he got as an elite bomber pilot, and the learnings that came out of that, as well as the business corporate learning. Alright, and then that brings us to our final guest for the quarter. And we go from Las Vegas to Kansas City in the USA still. Kansas City, as you would think, would probably sit in the state of Kansas, but it’s not the case. It sits near the border of Kansas and Missouri. It actually sits in the state of Missouri. We head over there and we catch up with a very interesting lady by the name of Ms. Kara Payton. Kara is an author, motivational speaker, authenticity strategist, subconscious reprogramming expert. And if any of you know me, you know that one of my mentors was Tony Robbins, has been for the last more than 30 years.

0:28:12.3 WB: And Kara actually worked with Tony Robbins, building volunteer teams, etcetera, traveling around the world with him. So she got to experience Tony’s insights and education, not only working with Tony Robbins, also with many other modern day legends, if you like, in the personal development motivational space. So she’s got this huge background of personal experience being educated, coached, and mentored by some of the world’s greats. So she brings a lot of information. But what I found really interesting with Kara is she’s not just taken what she’s learned from these people, these greats, she’s actually then gone deeper with it herself and built her own ideas and presents it so eloquently and insightfully. I would love to have spent much more time with Kara just understanding some of the wisdom that she talks very much about the holistic whole body of rather than just the mind of thinking, so she combines the thinking and the emotional.

0:29:26.9 WB: So it’s very much a holistic process. So really interesting conversation. She really helps people to find their authentic self. But she has a great podcast she calls Happiness Habit Podcast. She’s bringing out a workbook. It’s in August from memory called Re-Authenticated. So it’s really a workbook that helps people that are struggling whether it’s with stress, anxiety, depression, etcetera. And it gives you the tools to start to work through those using the whole holistic approach. So a very powerful conversation. Great way to finish off the quarter. So blessed to have these 12 incredible guests on the show. Please go back and refresh and reflect. And the great news is we’re already well underway with our recordings for the next quarter. So we’re already fully booked for the next quarter.

0:30:24.3 WB: We’ve recorded probably more than half of the next quarter already, and we have some fantastic guests. I can’t wait to bring them to you as we dive into this new year, second year of the podcast, one of the great takeaways for me is the amount of wisdom that sits out there with so much diversity, so much willingness to share their insights, their learnings, their experiences. And I learn, every week I learn so much. Every program we bring, I get to meet new interesting people. So my life is pretty good at the moment. So with that, I’m gonna leave you team. We’re sitting here under the umbrella of Coaching for Companies, and I hope it was a great recap for you. And please go back, check out the episodes, will find them on most platforms. You can find it on our website. Look forward to catching up next quarter.

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0:31:26.4 Speaker 2: Thank you for joining us on the ET Project, a show for executive talent development. Until next time, check out our site for free videos, eBooks, webinars and blogs at coaching4companies.com.