350 Use Stories, Symbols, & Ceremonies to Lead Others with Nancy Duarte

"Being a leader is getting people to go to an alternate future." - Nancy Duarte If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes, video, and more at http://lewishowes.com/350 Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Lewis Howes?

  Episode number 350 with Nancy Duarte.

• 0:07Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:33Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone to the School of Greatness podcast. And today we're talking about how to ignite change through speeches, stories, ceremonies, and symbols. That's right. We've got the one and only Nancy Duarte in the house. And she is a communication expert who's been featured on major platforms like Forbes, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and on CNN. And her firm Duarte Inc. has created more than a quarter of a million presentations for the world's most influential businesses, institutions, causes, and authors. And Nancy has won several prestigious awards for communications and entrepreneurship, and teaches classes at Stanford University several times a year. Also, her firm has influenced

• 1:18Lewis Howes?

  how the world perceives some of the most important brands, including Apple, Facebook, GE, Google, and TED. She is also the author of three award-winning books and just came out with a new one called Illuminate. And in this episode, we dive in on how to cultivate a dream state to allow yourself to dream big. We also talk about why using speeches, stories, and symbols is so helpful for leaders and organizations. And we give some great case studies of using all of these throughout this interview. The reason most small businesses fail within their first four to five years, and how to overcome that.

• 2:02Lewis Howes?

  How to feel empathy for your audience, and really why a lot of big leaders aren't successful long-term when they don't. Embrace using empathy, the difference between enlisting and enrolling people into your vision and into your leadership. And so much more. I thought this was fascinating. I could have gone a lot longer with Nancy because for me, it's all about how we connect. Our ideas with others around us to support us in making those ideas come to life. And we all have great ideas at some point in our life, but if we can't get other people. To support that idea, it's really hard to build anything inspiring or.

• 2:42Lewis Howes?

  Create any lasting change. So for me, this is the key. This is what it's all about. If you can. Enroll people and inspire people through using ceremonies, symbols, stories, speeches, then you can create whatever you want in your life. This is what it's all about. So I hope you guys enjoy this one with the one, the only Nancy Duarte.

• 3:07Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone back to School of Greatness Podcast. Very excited about our guest Nancy Duarte in the house. Thanks so much for being here.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:13Lewis Howes?

  Appreciate it. You've got a new book out called illuminate ignite change through speeches, stories, ceremonies and symbols. And I first was connected to you through your other book. You have other books, but the other one was slideology, which our content editor Christine. Read your book and she actually used the stuff to connect with me and got the job through kind of some of your teachings. So thanks for bringing me a great podcast editor.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Lovely.

• 3:38Lewis Howes?

  She's amazing. And you're, and I'm curious, why did you, you know, when I first learned about you, you were. Teaching people about storytelling and presentations, right? To kind of connect and get your message out there to a world to inspire change or to inspire. Someone to take action, I'm assuming, correct?

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:55Lewis Howes?

  So why go from storytelling to illuminate, which is still speeches, storytelling, ceremonies and symbols? Why take it to this level?

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. What's interesting is I think people were a little surprised to get a leadership book from us, but storytelling is an amazing leadership tool. So if you look at the structure of a story, it's always about this protagonist. Who goes through something really difficult and is changed in the process. And as leaders, that's what we do every day, right? We can see a more ideal future and we are to drive, we call them travelers. We're to drive our travelers there. And it's hard and we're asking them to go through hardships on behalf of the company or the organization. And so using speeches, stories, ceremonies and symbols is a way to create longing inside your travelers to help them want to go there with you.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  And that's the biggest barrier is most of the time your travelers will resist. They'll look at the sacrifice and say, this isn't worth the reward that they're offering and they'll opt out of your journey. And you don't want that, right? You want the right people with you along the way because leaders don't get them by themselves. They don't get there by themselves. You get there because of the people that come with you. And that's why it's really important to use these tools and have them in your toolkit.

• 5:11Lewis Howes?

  Who do you think is the most inspiring leader who is able to use all the tools necessary to bring his or her travelers on the journey consistently?

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's so funny because there's kind of the classic, you've got Dr. King on the cause side and I think Steve Jobs on the corporate side. I think they both used all of those speeches, stories, ceremonies and symbols every day along the way. Yeah. And when they communicated, yeah.

• 5:37Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. How many speeches, let's say you're an entrepreneur with less than 50 employees, how many speeches do you typically need to give and what does a speech include?

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good.

• 5:48Lewis Howes?

  You know, do I have one good speech for the year to bring everyone along, all the hardship of everything that's going to happen? Is it a weekly speech? Is it a?

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Sometimes. You know, sometimes we consider a speech a designed conversation. Like if you're having a really critical conversation, so it just depends on, yeah, even an audience of one, you may need to do an impassioned plea. But it depends. Like for you, you're a thought leader, so you're giving speeches all the time too, but you're also having to rally the people who are kind of coming alongside you. So one of the reasons we called them travelers in the book, we didn't say employees or teams is because.

• 6:20Lewis Howes?

  Followers or something.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could be your consumers, it could be your listeners, it could be any number of people that aren't necessarily considered a follower. They're people that you want to have bumble along with you into the future, to this unknown place.

• 6:33Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  And so.

• 6:35Lewis Howes?

  Some crazy vision you have.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's like westward expansion almost, right? There's gonna be scary things, there's gonna be motivating things.

• 6:41Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  And just incredible unknowns. And that's what being a leader is, is getting people to go to an alternate future.

• 6:48Lewis Howes?

  Okay. How often do you feel like you're doing this for your company and your journey?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Right, so it's funny, because I, we featured a case study that's only partially done. A story about my own company and the leading that I've had to do. And this January, um, at our vision meeting.

• 7:04Lewis Howes?

  You've had your company for like, how many years?

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Thirty, almost thirty years.

• 7:07Lewis Howes?

  Thirty years, married for thirty-five, right?

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Twenty-eight years we've had that, yeah. We've married for thirty-five years.

• 7:11Lewis Howes?

  That's a long time to have a company in these days.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  It is, it is. And what's interesting is my own firm has been through, we're in our eighth reinvention.

• 7:18Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  So we actually reinvent ourselves about every four years. And if you look at the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics, it says that most small businesses fail between about four and five years. So it is interesting. They just, the partnerships fall apart, they wind up not invigorating their, their, um, company with the right, you know, things shift so quickly. Everything just changes so quickly. And if you're asleep at the wheel even for a second, you're not the right place. Like, look at you, you could sit and rest on your laurels with just one book, but you, you know, each time you come up with a new body of work, it shifts the direction of your trajectory for you and your firm and, and the whole thing. So there isn't like a set amount of speeches a leader should give. Um, but I have to say, in my twenty-eight years, I gave the speech of my life.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  This January, I, I had stepped back in as president of my own shop. I haven't had to do that for about ten years. And, um, it was the most important speech I feel like I gave in my life, and it was to my own team.

• 8:14Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  And it was to just re-energize them, give them this moment of endurance, because we had a few more things to complete before we could enter into this new dream. And, uh, got a standing ovation. People cried. It was unflipping believable.

• 8:28Lewis Howes?

  In January this year?

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, so I actually wanted

• 8:31Lewis Howes?

  How long was the speech?

• 8:31Speaker 01

  It was just the vision speech lasted about forty minutes.

• 8:34Lewis Howes?

  Forty minutes?

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. And it was like, I, I mean, I do the whole thing. I rehearse. That's the most important speech I give every year. Because how well you do that.

• 8:41Lewis Howes?

  You're not just winging it. You're not just like, okay, guys, here's a little bit about me.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  I let everyone, I look, let my exec team, they look at the slides, they, they're really picky about word choices. Like, one word choice from someone in a position of power can flip people one way or the other. Yeah.

• 8:55Lewis Howes?

  The full speech slideology style.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Full thing. Yeah, we use resonate, slideology, illuminate.

• 9:01Lewis Howes?

  All the tools you could.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  I've had to pull the little, there's a little pullout in there, a communication toolkit and illuminate. I've had to pull it out a few times to read my own work, to know how to do my, my, talk to my own team.

• 9:12Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. Wow. That's really cool. How long did you prepare for that?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  It took, take a long time. So I spend a lot of time. So you have to actually kind of come up with the strategy and the vision talk about the strategy. I spend at least a hundred hours every year on our vision talk.

• 9:26Lewis Howes?

  One speech.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. It's that important to me to get enough traction. Because if you screw that up, you, nobody's rallying all year around what it is you're trying to do. So Monday, a week from yesterday, I'm doing the half year update to the vision talk. And I've been working on that for a few weeks. Not solid, but yeah.

• 9:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's crazy. It seems crazy.

• 9:46Lewis Howes?

  And what about your Ted's, your Ted Talk speech? How long did it take for you to prepare?

• 9:49Speaker 01

  That was interesting because the book was written. So I had to do a subset of that. And the hard part is murdering your own darlings, right? When, when you write a really great piece of work, you don't know how to pick what would be the best piece to keep in and what wouldn't. So I rehearsed and rehearsed and it was like, I had a coach and she'd be like, I, I think you spent thirty seconds on that. I think you could spend twenty-two seconds. So let's shave eight seconds off that and give those eight seconds over here to the.

• 10:13Lewis Howes?

  Because we have fifteen minutes.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. So literally, like, I'm the presentation lady, so I, it would be the worst thing to have me get the hook. Because they literally, once you hit eighteen minutes, they come out and they walk you off. Yeah.

• 10:26Lewis Howes?

  So you have to cut it off.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  You have to kill it. And I remember I was like, thank you very much. I looked up, I had six seconds left.

• 10:31Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, six. I was so relieved. I didn't even know what to do with myself. Um, so, yeah, it was, that was hard. So I rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed. It was high stakes for me because I, it was a TEDx. And I thought, you know, if I kill it at a TEDx, I knew a small percent of talks make it onto ted.com. So talk had about like, I don't know, eight months later, I had like fifty thousand views. And I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. So I just tweeted, so happy my TEDx talk is fifty thousand views. And I copied. At Ted Talks and they call and they're like, hey, we want to put your talk up on Ted.com on Tuesday. So it was all kind of unexpected.

• 11:02Lewis Howes?

  And what's how many numbers or how many views?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  It's got about a million, if you count YouTube and my talks, one of the few on Ted that isn't connected to my YouTube version. I don't know why, but so it's about a million and a half, million three quarters or something like that.

• 11:15Lewis Howes?

  And what did that do for you with that one speech?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Well, it was unexpected quite a bit. The phenom, the Ted phenom that happens afterward. And we went into a season that I now refer to as catastrophic growth. Like the inbound queries, the, the people who wanted time with Nancy, you must get this all the time. I just want 15 minutes of your time. But it, it really, we grew fast. So I had two storytellers at the time. Now I have a team of 10. But ramping and finding people qualified and getting the smartest people on the planet, you know, it just took an incredible amount of time. So it just bent us. We didn't break, I mean, at all, but it bent us. Yeah, yeah. Stretched us.

• 11:59Lewis Howes?

  Wow, I remember everyone was talking about you for a while and everyone wanted to like, learn how to use your slide strategies and all that stuff. It's pretty cool, but you must, you must have a lot of corporate clients coming in then, right?

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:10Lewis Howes?

  All the big leaders wanted to come and, and learn those, those strategies.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:13Lewis Howes?

  Storytelling is, is really challenging for people.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I, I went on my own journey through storytelling. So for three years I studied storytelling, story structures. You know, what is a character? How do you develop one? Every Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. And, and that was, you can't be a student of story and not be changed. It really changed me and stories become a bit of a coping mechanism in life and in business, right? It's like, oh, it's hard today. Oh, I'm in the middle of my story. It'll end soon.

• 12:43Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  You know, it'll have some sort of resolution, whether it's amazing or, or, or not. And so once I applied storytelling to speech making, that's when I identified the tension and release that the great speech makers have used over time. And so that's where resonate came from was after, I wouldn't have seen those insights if I hadn't gone on a three year journey through story. I wouldn't have been able to identify what great speech makers use from, from story.

• 13:10Lewis Howes?

  What are the parts of a story? How many parts are there?

• 13:12Speaker 01

  There's three acts.

• 13:13Lewis Howes?

  Three acts.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  There's three strikes. Yeah, it's all the way back to Aristotle. Same thing is true. So the three, the three acts are you kind of set the stage with the protagonist. That they're a likable hero. And then they go through roadblocks. There's all these roadblocks thrown at them. And you watch them overcome. So you root for them. The reason they have to be likable in the first act is if they're not likable.

• 13:33Lewis Howes?

  You're not gonna follow them.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're not gonna be like, turd can lose. I don't care. But they, what's interesting is it's like, no sooner do they have like, they lose the girl, the alien attacks them, they're impaled in the shoulder. Like, or Frodo, right? Half dead, and then they still have to climb out this great big thing. So it's hard. And then, and then at the end, it either ends, you know, positively or negatively. And, and you root. And, and the thing about a story is that person's changed in the middle. It's messy, it's ugly, but they change. And for some reason, humans love to observe transformation. They love to watch someone else transform. Cause we're like, am I like, would I have done that same decision? You compare yourself to them. And then you learn the moral lesson they either did or, or did not learn.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  And that's why storytelling, when you're leaving, leading change, thinking through it with a story framework in your mind, helps you know how to communicate as your little travelers are right in the middle of the story, that messy, hard part. You have to, you have to communicate with them in a really compelling way.

• 14:36Lewis Howes?

  You talk about torchbearers. What's a torchbearer?

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was funny, cause we didn't want leader and follower. So we have torchbearer and travelers and the torchbearer is someone who decides to lead. I think everyone's called to lead, but few actually choose to accept it.

• 14:55Lewis Howes?

  It's a lot.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  And it sounds heavy, yeah, but it's like a mantle. You choose to, you know, Frodo got the ring. He was a ring bearer, right? And, and he had to choose to go on this journey or not go on it. He had a choice.

• 15:07Lewis Howes?

  Given it to someone else.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, flipped it over his shoulder. Then like, ding. And so it is, I mean, it sounds kind of heavy and I wish it sounded more delightful

• 15:16Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  to lead, but it's like you're the bearer of a torch and we liked the concept because if you think about the places in which you use a torch, they're usually a little scary and dark, maybe wet.

• 15:27Lewis Howes?

  Unknown.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Cave, unknown. And a leader, what they'll do is cast just enough light to be like, oh, I can do that. Right? It's just this short term thing. You may have this vision, the long view, but you have to communicate the short trip in a compelling enough way that makes people want to take those next few steps and get there. And so that's why we chose torch bearer.

• 15:48Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Because it also, something about fire and the passing of fire, kind of burns in your belly, right? When you have a vision, it burns inside of you. Like you'll do everything you can to make sure that vision's realized. And so that kind of passing of fire and it kind of burning in your belly is a big part of it, too.

• 16:06Lewis Howes?

  It sounds like over thirty years, you've evolved your vision many times, every four or five years. What's your current vision?

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Current vision is to help others lead through change right now, which means my own organization has to be change ready. We have to be agile. We have to be nimble. And so we, we just have mapped out kind of our vision for the future. And we've got this, you know, really delightful work we're doing around story, storytelling, and it applied to business, to everyday life. We're working on a really great body of work around empathy.

• 16:37Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Which is really fun. We just launched a delivery training, like how to deliver your speech, which is how to use your kind of body as a visual symbol, body language, voice variety.

• 16:50Lewis Howes?

  Sure. I did Toastmasters.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Dynamics. Oh, yeah.

• 16:53Lewis Howes?

  A number of years ago, and this was all the things that we learned, you know, every week was a different challenge of like vocal variety and tonality and all those things.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:01Lewis Howes?

  Props.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, props, the whole thing. So it's based in empathy and dynamics and how comfortable you are. So we've got this little model that we use.

• 17:08Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  So we've got this like vision.

• 17:10Lewis Howes?

  Is that a course people signed up for? What is that?

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I've got the agency, which is services, and then the academy, which is all kinds of training. They come to us, we go to them. It just depends, we have an e-course, the whole thing. So as we map out, I think empathy is going to be a tool that that's very critical for leaders. And that's why storytelling is a critical component of it, too. I think for me, like as a leader, I spend a lot of time in the future. As a kid, I used it as an escape mechanism because all I knew is I didn't want to be here. So I'd imagine an alternate future for myself. I would imagine this place that was very different than where I was. So I was conditioned to use the future as an escape. And then leaders have to fixate on the future because you've got this entity and these people

• 17:56Speaker 01

  and these customers, all these people, you have to move en masse to this alternate place in the future. So leaders obsess quite a bit about the future, which makes you not as present. And to have empathy, you need to be present. I need to have considered, oh, maybe I should or shouldn't say this because you, you know, that would be dumb for me to do this or say this in this way. But because we don't spend as much time in the present, it's a skill that has to be learned. I think they don't, I think a lot of leaders don't naturally have empathy.

• 18:26Lewis Howes?

  They're so focused on the future.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:28Lewis Howes?

  Like this doesn't matter, let's go here.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:30Lewis Howes?

  Right?

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:31Lewis Howes?

  Why did you go to different worlds as a kid? Or escape?

• 18:35Speaker 01

  It was interesting. So I was, I was raised by a narcissist. My mom was a narcissist. And if you look at the definition, it means that she was missing the empathy gene. That's what a narcissist is. And all my life, I thought she, she doesn't know I'm here. She doesn't care. She doesn't root for me. She doesn't know what I'm do. Like she just doesn't know me, therefore she doesn't love me. Right? And they're somewhat incapable of love because they're so caught up. And, and when I realized it was a mental illness and not something wrong with me, my world changed a lot, but that only happened a few years ago.

• 19:14Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  But I think that what happened was I would, I knew what I didn't want because of my upbringing. So we were, you know, emotionally and financially starved as children. And so I knew what I wanted to build for myself. And like my play, I didn't play with dolls. I didn't, I found an old abandoned desk in the neighborhood and put it in my room, put papers in it, start vying, started color things, started to organize them and catalog them. And I had my little, I had my little business already set up when I was probably in the third grade, man, I knew what I wanted. And so I obsessed over that. I just obsessed over it. And then life doesn't turn out the way you want. My lovely mom abandoned us when I was 16.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  So I stepped in, I don't know why, third in line, I stepped in as kind of the parental figure, did all the grocery shopping, the cooking. Clothes folding, the like just everything until I graduated from high school and then I got married when I was eighteen.

• 20:09Lewis Howes?

  Holy cow.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, my husband and I met when I was sixteen and fell in love. Yeah, still married for thirty four, thirty five, August first will be thirty five years. And so my whole life has been a quest for empathy. If when I was in college, my first year of college, my only year of college, actually, I got a C minus in speech communications in college. I got an A plus in the visual aids. They didn't have PowerPoint or keynote or anything. Then you had to make posters and props to your point. And so I did a good job on the posters and props. So I got an A on that, but I actually got an F in connecting meaningfully with my audience. So that was my first declaration of a failure of being a failure at empathy. And it's like F, right?

• 20:54Speaker 01

  And I feel like my whole life I've been clawing at models or mindframes for me to understand empathy. So resonate when I made that discovery of the presentation form. It was a model for empathy for me and illuminate me being able to understand that as a leader, what my followers are going to feel. That was a model for empathy for me as much as it is for anyone else. So I have to kind of visualize what it looks like. So I pause long enough to feel the empathy.

• 21:26Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  And that's all. Yeah.

• 21:28Lewis Howes?

  That's a tool right there.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  That was a long answer, but yeah, I, I, they're coping mechanisms for me.

• 21:34Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  I'm a heartfelt leader.

• 21:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  I think naturally, but I'm having to teach myself empathy.

• 21:40Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:41Lewis Howes?

  When did you start teaching yourself empathy?

• 21:43Speaker 01

  I think I've been on the quest for a really long time. So even with Slidology, resonate, that, that was when I first ran into empathy. Illuminates based in empathy, but now I'm going to do a whole body of work on empathy.

• 21:56Lewis Howes?

  That's next up.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So we're doing it on empathy. The other thing we're doing is the first phase of the venture scape and illuminated is to dream and I want to do a book teaching people how to dream.

• 22:06Lewis Howes?

  Gosh, I'll tell you what, this is like, glad you said that because it's something I feel like is a lost art.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:11Lewis Howes?

  In so many adults.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:12Lewis Howes?

  There's so many people that come to me and say, I don't know what I want. I don't know what my passion is. This is like a common question I get every day via email or text or whatever it is from people. Who are going through this journey of greatness. It's like, they don't even know what they want. They don't even know what they, makes them come alive.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 22:27Lewis Howes?

  And it's so frustrating for me. I'm like, how do you not know what you want or what your dream is? Like, just go sit in nature and like, don't have any electronics around you and allow yourself to imagine, you know, just allow yourself to go on a journey. If you could have anything, what would it be? I feel like it's, it shouldn't be that hard, but for some people, I guess I need to have empathy and understand that it is hard.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  I don't understand it myself because like I, I have people in my life that are like victims, like life is happening to me. It's like, well, just a tiny percent happens to you. Most of the situation you're in are because of decisions you made or whatever. And I just, you can, it is like the American dream. You can have and be anything you want. Like if I can do it, I'm just a scrappy, street smart, not a kid, but used to be a kid. Yeah, it's like, it's, you're limiting yourself. And so how do you, how do you do that? And how do you, how do you dream? When it's not just your dream, but you have to take all these people with you.

• 23:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you have to enroll people.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like in Creativity, Inc., I loved Ed Catmull's book. He's the CEO of Pixar. And in there, he, it was just this one little line. It said, George Lucas imagines the future like westward expansion with all the, you know, drama and excitement. And, and I was like, wow. And so I've been interviewing, how do you see the future? I have another client at Cisco who said, ever since he was little, he could just imagine an alternate future and he could actually observe it. And he could, he could lay, he remembers laying in the grass. Yeah. He remembers laying in the grass, just kind of examining it. He could hold it in his hands and kind of examine his own future, which is interesting to me.

• 23:58Lewis Howes?

  That's pretty cool.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  And how do you, how do you cultivate that? So I did a, Ted this year did Jeffersonian dinners. And so I hosted a team of 10 different people at Ted to talk about prophetic imagination. Is it cult, are you born with it or can you cultivate it? Because that's a curiosity of mine. How do you, how's it that you know what the next book is you want to write, right? It's like, are you cultivating this curiosity? Or is it just something you know you want to do? And so how do you dream and how do you suspend your constraints enough to have a dream that scares even you?

• 24:32Lewis Howes?

  I mean, I don't know if you're asking me personally, but just to answer that, I think that a lot of my dreams come from pain and heartache. Like a lot of pain, emotional pain that I've gone through as a child and growing up is like to get away from the pain is like, what do I really want? If I don't want this pain, then what would be like the dream?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. What happens though, when you get into a pain free place?

• 24:53Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, right? Then this is the interesting thing. This is the interesting thing. And I don't know if I'll ever be out of pain, but I think when I was aware that like, a few years ago, I did a lot of work on emotional intelligence for myself and like realized, and that's where this new book topic, The Mask of Masculinity started to come from. It was like, wow, I've been holding on to certain things my whole life. I've been, you know, passive aggressive in certain situations or angry or defensive. When certain things come up, I would have these triggers. And now that I'm aware of them, and sure, things are still painful or frustrating or I get defensive now and then, I'm aware of it and it doesn't like consume me for months like I used to growing up. And I think I'm in a much better place, but I come from a dream of wanting to serve and inspire people so they don't have to feel the pain anymore.

• 25:38Lewis Howes?

  As opposed to like me not having to feel the pain anymore. So I think it's just a different shift.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:43Lewis Howes?

  As opposed to like, oh, I want to do something to prove people wrong. It's like, I want to do something to move people forward.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 25:50Lewis Howes?

  And that's where like everything comes from.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Weird, like sometimes I wonder if my children have suffered enough, right? What is the role of suffering?

• 25:58Lewis Howes?

  Have you protected them too much? Maybe you need to be like your mom.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 26:02Lewis Howes?

  Cause then what type of leader would you really create in the world?

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Right, like what?

• 26:06Lewis Howes?

  If she wasn't like that, she wasn't a narcissist, would you be so determined to be like on this mission?

• 26:11Speaker 01

  I don't think I would.

• 26:12Lewis Howes?

  That's the thing, right?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  That's what's so weird. I mean, my kids, I've always supported them like you, they, they're both living their dream. Oh my God, they're living their dream. But I don't know that they understand suffering. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. My son, it was funny, I did my talk, my own personal story about empathy and my mom being a narcissist at the last speak up, which is a storytelling event we do at our own shop. And my son was in the audience and he's like, He goes, Mom, I gotta tell you, I'm sorry because I was saying, I was telling people our family was dysfunctional. And I'm like, what do you mean? He goes, well, at the dinner table, everyone talks at the same time. And so we're, I was telling people we were dysfunctional. Because but when I hear your story, I started from my earliest memory through to knowing that

• 26:57Speaker 01

  I've broken the cycle because my own daughter is a beautiful mother because I'm a grandma now. So it was this really beautiful arc, right? And he goes, I just stand corrected because I had not remembered how far we've come to think that interrupting each other at the dinner table is dysfunctional. Yeah. So it was a really beautiful moment. So I was like, that's interesting how kind of protective sometimes.

• 27:18Lewis Howes?

  That's cool. So how do we cultivate this dream state then?

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:24Lewis Howes?

  This alternate future?

• 27:26Speaker 01

  I think it's funny because I think you actually said it. It needs to be on behalf of others. I think, I think we're born to advocate for those less fortunate than us. And once we get to that place, we, it's, we give ourselves away, right? So you, the only reason you need self mastery is so you can give it away. I think the happy people do that. The miserable ones, the miserable ones don't. So I think that's part of it. It was funny when, when we were looking at stories for illuminate, there were these great stories of how business used to be run. Like people don't realize like Watson senior, the CEO of IBM during the war, he kept

• 28:10Speaker 01

  producing computers. The world didn't need them, didn't need them at all. I mean, they were the, the, you don't even remember what, you don't even know what computers were back then. They were more like calculators than they had cards and, and stuff. Anyway, he just kept making them just to keep the people employed. Now you wouldn't be able to do that today, right? You have to return so much to shareholders, kept them employed. And he had to build warehouses to just put these computers. They didn't need them. The war was over and suddenly the US government needed a census and he had all the computers in stock that they needed. And he made this great big sale right after the war was done, right? Yeah. Hershey, same thing. Kept all of his team employed during the war, doing civic projects. They would build parks and he just kept them going. Like you can't make decisions like that in business, especially

• 28:53Speaker 01

  not public businesses today. So I think there is this purpose. I think you have to dream with a purpose. There has to be a purpose in mind or, or your dreams will be blocked. So I do think it's It's

• 29:06Lewis Howes?

  And it can't be self centered only, right?

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 29:09Lewis Howes?

  Of course, we want to have a better life. Right, right. We want to have a better life, make more money, or be helped, whatever it is, but it's, I think it's got to be a greater good.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:16Lewis Howes?

  True.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Right. Or you won't be happy.

• 29:18Lewis Howes?

  Or you'll be very unfulfilled. This was my life. It was to, I had, I achieved every dream pretty much I wanted, right?

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Young.

• 29:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I kept achieving and achieving and achieving, but then within fifteen minutes I'd be so miserable. I was like, why am I unhappy and unfulfilled after achieving all these lifelong dreams that I had? And I remember just realizing it's to prove people wrong, or to like make myself look better than, or whatever. And I was like, this does not feel good, you know? And when I started to shift that and say, how can I do something to be a, a symbol of inspiration, or to call people forward? And achieve something I want at the same time, it felt a lot more rewarding, you know what I mean?

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:55Lewis Howes?

  So, service became a big thing for me, yeah.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  The biggest dream you can think of, but on behalf of others, is energizing.

• 30:02Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  It's energizing.

• 30:03Lewis Howes?

  It's probably like, you know, Dr. King, it's like, it wasn't just for him, it was for everyone.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  It was liberation. So I think there are underlying, we spent a lot of time looking at storytelling, like, why does the protagonist choose to jump in? Like, why did he choose to fight the aliens? There's always that inner journey and an outer journey. So the outer journey is fighting the aliens.

• 30:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  But there's always a heart journey going on. And what is that heart journey that makes it so people will keep going?

• 30:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Through all the heart, yeah, yeah.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  And it's usually all truistic, you know? So, it's interesting.

• 30:33Lewis Howes?

  Crazy.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:34Lewis Howes?

  So what are some of the ceremonies and symbols that you create for your business?

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I, I worried a bit about the concept of ceremony, because it's new language we're introducing into the business lexicon. Woo woo.

• 30:48Lewis Howes?

  Spiritual.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. And I, I have a real, real, um, respect and regard for not mixing the sacred and the profane, right? So I didn't want it to be, um, I, I walked that line very carefully. And so, um, ceremonies have been around for a long, long time. Um, when you go back anthropologically at the earliest artifacts, we can find they were used in ritual. So there's something about community needing a ritual together, to have collective catharsis, to have some sort of emotional release together. And so, I was shocked at how much ceremony is in business. It might not look like ceremony to you.

• 31:28Lewis Howes?

  You know, not like lighting smoke bombs and

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:30Lewis Howes?

  Ringing bells and Chanting together.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  You could do that.

• 31:35Lewis Howes?

  Slaying ghosts and drinking the blood together.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Not a lot of bloodletting, but there's things like, like it's interesting when Steve Jobs re-entered Apple, you know, the whole story, how he was kicked out for a decade, he was gone and he came back and his primary goal was to get people to move from macOS nine to 10. He knew that was going to make or break Apple. So every speech he did, every symbol he raised up, like the think different campaign, all those different things he did were in service of moving them. Well, there was a lot of confusion. They were skeptical, super skeptical, because they'd been jerked around for a decade before Steve showed up. And so he did a ceremony, which is a vow. He pulled out an oversized piece of parchment paper and made a commitment to the developers in the room, saying, I'm going to stick with this one single software strategy. So it's a vow, which is a ceremony. It's a commitment ceremony.

• 32:23Lewis Howes?

  Like a document.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a big document.

• 32:25Lewis Howes?

  He wrote it down or he just?

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, you could see through it. It's kind of typeset. So of course it's in Apple. What was Apple's Garimond font back then? And then, um, once, once he had a new dream, uh, he really wanted them done. He was done. He was like, we gotta stop talking about macOS nine. He's like, we need to really bury this old operating system because we've, we've moved on to 10. He had this vision that all your machines will be hooked up to the central operating system. If you look at that speech, he prophetically imagined a decade of products in that one speech. For 10 years, our most beloved Apple products came out of that one speech of this vision he had of everything connected to macOS 10. So he was done. The developers that hadn't moved from nine to 10, he was just tired

• 33:08Speaker 01

  of it. So he did a ceremony where he buried the old operating system, literally a coffin and smoke came up out of the stage. Yeah. He comes out, he has, there's an oversized box of macOS nine in the coffin. He does a eulogy. There's stained glass. Yeah. Eerie music playing stained glass. And then he does the eulogy, shuts the lid, puts a red rose on it. It's gone. Mr. Jobs never talked about macOS nine again.

• 33:34Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  It was very clear to the developers that it was over. So ceremony isn't so much this creepy. Killing a goat thing. It is, it is a way for the organization to convey to the travelers that one thing has ended. So something new can begin. So if you look at the rites of passage, like a bar mitzvah or a quinceañera, which is in the Hispanic culture that my husband's from, it really is about passing from the old into the new. And I'll, I'll never be a little girl again because I went through this quinceañera and now I'm a woman. Or I was a student, I've gone through a graduation and now I'm a graduate. Right? So there's this moment, it's just, it's just a five minute ceremony.

• 34:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that's it.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Suddenly you're like different. Suddenly you're a doctor.

• 34:14Lewis Howes?

  It's a wedding too.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:15Lewis Howes?

  Fifteen minutes.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  I was single, now I have in-laws, right? Same thing. So there is something to be said about endings and new beginnings, simply because a ceremony happened. And when you're driving really big change and trying to transform a lot of travelers, they hang on to the old, they cling to the past and the past clings to them.

• 34:34Lewis Howes?

  It's normal, it's what they're used to.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  And so you have to kind of almost surgically and ceremonially cut from the past. So a new beginning can begin.

• 34:42Lewis Howes?

  What are some of the ceremonies that any business or entrepreneur should be using or having throughout every year, you think? Like what are some things?

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know what? It, it really is about listening. So that's why the empathy was really important. Like I can sense the atmosphere, like it, it's for like different stages, you need different things. Like there's moments you need a commitment ceremony, there's moments you need to rally them to be brave. There's moments when they need to endure. Like it's in the moments of endurance that CEOs love to pull out cheesy race car metaphors, right? That's like the worst thing you can do. So they need moments of endurance and then they need moments to reflect. And so you, you need to know and sense the culture and then that's when you hardwire the ceremony in. Honor the heroes is the ceremony. In the dream phase, it would be immersed deeply.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  We were talking about how do you suspend your belief long enough for others to immerse themselves in your dream? I think a great story there was when Howard Schultz took his team to New Orleans. He stepped in as CEO, he stepped back in and their, their stock was just tanking fast. It was just driving in the ground. And he did a super counterintuitive move. He asked for millions and millions of dollars to fly all of the store managers into New Orleans. Now, New Orleans was used as a symbol. Of disrepair because Katrina had already come through and it was in disrepair. So we asked them to give 10,000 hours of service in a city of disrepair. So they would understand what it takes to pull themselves out of

• 36:15Lewis Howes?

  10,000 hours total.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, total from all the people. Yeah. Each person.

• 36:18Lewis Howes?

  Like whoa.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Not that many hours in a day. And then it was really, really cool.

• 36:23Lewis Howes?

  To serve.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  To serve. So they went there and they served and then they had a big kind of a galvanizing moment, which is what your travelers need. You need, they need a great galvanizing moment. And they set up these kind of displays. He did a talk and then they walked through their potential future. They could rake. He wanted them to fall in love with coffee again. They could rake beans. They could roast beans. There was this one display where they could pick up a cup and listen to actual, actual audio recordings of the call center of their actual customers to immerse themselves again in the shoes of their customers because he knew if he didn't get the managers of the stores reengage with the brand, it was going to fail.

• 37:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  And so he put all of his energy into walking in their shoes, getting them to fall in love with coffee again, again to understand their role in turning the organization around. And he did it all with a galvanizing moment where he immersed them into an alternate future where Starbucks was going to thrive. It's fascinating.

• 37:16Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he used speeches, stories, symbols, the whole thing. It was amazing. Yeah.

• 37:22Lewis Howes?

  This is incredible. And you tell all these stories in the book.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have, I think, eight, eight case studies in there.

• 37:28Lewis Howes?

  Amazing, amazing.

• 37:30Lewis Howes?

  What about the year ceremonies? Do you have any specific ones?

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, we do.

• 37:34Lewis Howes?

  Can you share maybe one or?

• 37:35Speaker 01

  We, um, it's a simple one.

• 37:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Well, we, we, there's a few things. So some of them are, some of them feel contrived. If the leaders just host a ceremony and it's not pulled from within the culture itself, it can be cheesy. So.

• 37:48Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  For years, we would do this thing called Pass the Giraffe. One of my employees wanted to have this little stand up at staff meeting and say, Louis did such a good job. Yay. I'm going to pass this token. And she happened to have picked up a wooden giraffe at like World Market. And so for years and years and years, we would applaud or celebrate each other through the passing of the giraffe. And I talk about the case study in the book where my team had just gone through this really difficult season of hardship where we had to put systems in place. You get to about 100 people, you have to start putting some bureaucracy in process and then you have to get an MIS system where everyone's connected and it was just hell. I mean, you bring in, you bring in process to a creative firm. It's like bringing the devil and they just resisted

• 38:35Speaker 01

  it like crazy and it was really, really difficult time. So I was, we were going through this season and some employees were like, the risk isn't worth the reward. I had some employees peel away too. And that's what happens in the climb phase. And so I, I was really kind of in this place where I was like, what is it? What is a group of giraffes called? What's a, what's a herd of giraffes called? Because I thought I need to pull on something that's already in my culture to find strength. And a herd of giraffes is called a tower. And I thought that was fascinating that this very thing that was already in my culture had so much symbolism. So we elevated the giraffe into our mascot. We've probably, we have thousands of giraffes at the office because we passed them

• 39:18Speaker 01

  around so much. So we elevated it into our official mascot. We changed the name to giraffe formations that we pass back and forth. But it, it was a ceremony that was already there that we kind of amplified and kind of formalized. So it didn't feel so contrived as it would be if you just showed up one day and were like, hey, everyone, we're having a funeral today, you know? Interesting. Yeah. So there's all kinds of stories, but then, then there's ones that spring up from the hearts of the people. Like in this really difficult season of three years, one of the biggest signs of decay for me in my heart was that for 27 years, my husband started every

• 40:00Speaker 01

  single Monday morning staff meeting with a blessing. And it wasn't this hyper religious thing. It was just like you say blessings at Thanksgiving, right? He would say a prayer for their creativity to be unlocked for favor with our clients. It was just lovely. It was kind of the same thing every Monday. And after twenty seven years, one of the employees asked it to stop. So for me, that was a sign of decay. So they all had the right, they all knew they had the right, but nobody had in twenty seven years asked it to stop. Cause you can't have, it's a thing where if someone asks you to stop having a prayer at a mandatory meeting, you legally have to. And we knew that, so we knew the day would come someday. But to me, that was like meaning there was a little breakdown in our culture, cause that at one time was something that meant a lot to a lot of people.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  So after I did my January vision talk, I was telling you, it was like the talk of my life, just this last January. We did a whole lot of little activities all week, little exercises to connect people to the vision. And at the end, we brought in a drum circle for fun, just like we had this guy, it was like unbelievable, cause it kinda hits you in the chest, right? So it was all done, and then an employee says, cause the prayer had stopped for about a year. And he said, hey, we want you and Mark to stand in the middle here and hold hands. And we're like, okay.

• 41:08Lewis Howes?

  The guy who asked you to stop?

• 41:09Speaker 01

  No, a different guy, just an employee. So we stood in the middle and held hands, and every employee whipped out a transcription of what my husband said, and they said.

• 41:19Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were both crying, everybody was crying, everyone in the whole thing was crying. Now, that was a ceremony, it was a ceremony, but nothing that was contrived, but one that sprung out from their hearts toward us in a way that was unbelievable. So they've asked us if there's a way, you know, to change it to a wish, or you know, if there's some way that we can like.

• 41:40Lewis Howes?

  It could be a gratitude moment.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Right. And so that's, so now, it was so, so for me, that was a sign that as I stepped in as a leader, that it made a difference. It really made a difference. The hearts of the people had shifted incredibly. Yeah. So that's a spontaneous one, less than one that's orchestrated by the organization.

• 42:04Lewis Howes?

  I love this stuff. A couple of questions left, I could keep going forever with you, but a few questions left. Why is enrollment so powerful? And what does enrollment mean to you?

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Enrollment?

• 42:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 42:17Lewis Howes?

  As a leader?

• 42:19Lewis Howes?

  Being enrolling.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's interesting. That's interesting language because I don't use that language. So, so I think it's funny because when we first were writing the book, we called the people the troops, you know, instead of the travelers. And it's because, well, they're enlisted.

• 42:36Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  They're in, and it sounded very leader follower. Like it sounded too much like you just, a troop has to do what they were enlisted to do. Enrollment is very different because the people are self-selecting in, which is very different than being told that they have to. So I think if, if you have a journey, if you look at like Frodo, you know, his friend Sam, those guys chose to go along. They, they enrolled. They weren't enlisted, you know? And I, and I think that if, if you're a good leader, people will want to go where you feel they need to go. They'll know because you convey it in a way that's so beautiful. It'll create longing in them to see your future realized.

• 43:21Lewis Howes?

  I love it. Okay. Final three questions then to wrap things up. Now, this is one of the questions I use at the end for everyone. If at the, the end of the day, many years from now, all your work has been erased.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:34Lewis Howes?

  You have all your friends and family there. And you have a piece of paper and a pen to write down three things that you know to be true. The three truths of your experience in this world. You would pass on to everyone a ceremony of passing of your message to the world.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Passing the torch ceremony.

• 43:51Lewis Howes?

  What would be the three truths that you think you'd want to pass on?

• 43:55Speaker 01

  I think, I think one of the truths, and it maybe didn't come up much in this interview, is that when you forgive someone, you actually are setting yourself free. Things sometimes we think. Our own bitterness is holding them in bondage, but it's only holding ourselves in bondage. Um, that would be one. Um, I think another one is something my husband and I have lived by. And that's if you wake up every day and you follow your passion and you do what brings you peace, you'll find your destiny. So, so many people are like, how'd you know? How'd you know? How old were you? When you knew that you loved presentations, it's like, oh, they found me. I didn't find them. They found me, you know? So I let, I didn't let life happen.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  But if something really turned my crank and really made me go, oh, that just feels right. It brings me peace. Um, we would do those things. The third thing would have to be that everyone can live the American dream, I think. I think that's, it's just seems so obvious, but every single card is stacked against me. Right? Really, you know, just poverty to not having a degree, to landing in the middle of the Silicon Valley with nothing more than my hand on my hip and read every single book I could to make myself smartest person in the room. Walk in a room, tell CEO what to say. Nobody asked me if I had a degree.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Nobody said I wasn't qualified. Nobody questioned, questioned that. My husband, American born, but a hundred percent Mexican, like we're living la vida loca, not because of any reason, except we had the hustle, right? We want, we knew what we wanted and everyone can still have that. You either, you either live off the system or you're contributing to the system, right? And we wanted, you know, we wanted to be the ones, you know, not living off the system.

• 45:49Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. That's cool. I like those truths. Those are great.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:53Lewis Howes?

  Uh, what are you grateful for recently in your life?

• 45:55Speaker 01

  I'm grateful for my grandson, of course, and grateful for my husband for his health. He's on his third round with prostate cancer. So every day is a new day. So every time, you know, he had, should have decades, but. We sit down at the dinner table with mortality sitting there with us, right? And you just have to make sure every day is leveraged to its finest.

• 46:16Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  So that's what I'm grateful for.

• 46:18Lewis Howes?

  That's very cool.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:20Lewis Howes?

  I want to make sure everyone gets this book called Illuminate. You can learn more about how to ignite change through speeches, stories, ceremonies, and symbols. Make sure to pick up a copy of this book. Where should we connect with you online? Where do you hang out?

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, online, I'm, there's Duarte.com. I also connect to everyone who connects to me on LinkedIn. My Twitter is at Nancy Duarte. My co-author is at Patty with an I, San, S A N, which is short for Sanchez.

• 46:46Lewis Howes?

  Okay, very cool. And do you hang out on Twitter yourself? Do you connect with people?

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:50Lewis Howes?

  Do you have an Instagram as well or no?

• 46:51Speaker 01

  You know what? I'm not as good at Instagram.

• 46:53Lewis Howes?

  Twitter and LinkedIn, you're there.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  And, and Facebook somewhat. I'm, I'm trying to like,

• 46:58Lewis Howes?

  Cool.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  I don't paste, post up pictures of my grandson up there because I'm like, I don't want any stalkers. Grandkid, but I'm trying to figure out that.

• 47:05Lewis Howes?

  Okay, cool.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:06Lewis Howes?

  Awesome. Uh, well, before I ask the final question, I want to take a moment to acknowledge you uh, for your ability to turn all your pain into a lot of people's pleasure.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  You too, man.

• 47:17Lewis Howes?

  And ability to be consistent and live your American dream. Because it sounds like you had a lot against you and you could have easily allowed the system to support you, but you really contributed in a huge way to more than just the system, but the world and, and, and everyone's needs. I mean, you're making an impact on so many people's lives because stories are everything. And it's a lost art form. And you're allowing businesses, individuals, people who want to build relationships, personal or, or corporate, to really bring their dreams to life.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:48Lewis Howes?

  Without these stories and these tools and your consistent vision of giving these to people, we wouldn't be where we are. So I want to acknowledge you for that.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  I love that. And I think you're very much uh, similar, right? I think that pain and the quest for healing it has driven you into a super lovely guy.

• 48:08Lewis Howes?

  I appreciate it.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  This is very fun.

• 48:09Lewis Howes?

  I appreciate it.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:11Lewis Howes?

  Uh, my final question is what's your definition of greatness?

• 48:15Speaker 01

  I think to define greatness, you have to understand leastness. I don't know what the opposite of greatness is, but I think that if you want to be great, you have to understand the least of these, right? And I think having come from that place, it's easier to recognize. But I think the truly great will help the least find their greatness. And I think that's kind of where you're at, right? You're like going back and trying to pull greatness out of those who feel like they're least, and that to me is greatness.

• 48:49Lewis Howes?

  Thanks.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  It's so good to meet you.

• 48:52Lewis Howes?

  Appreciate it.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  I really admire what you're doing.

• 48:54Lewis Howes?

  Thank you.

• 48:56Lewis Howes?

  There you have it. I hope you guys enjoyed this, all about, again, igniting change through speeches, stories, ceremonies, and symbols. If you did, make sure to share this episode. It's LewisHowes.com/350. Wow, we got to 350 episodes, and it's all because you guys continue to share. You continue to let your friends know about these episodes, and you have built the movement of greatness in inspiring your friends and uplifting yourself to get to the next level. So, thank you guys so very much for all that you do to come back each Monday, Wednesday, Friday, when we release new episodes, and for sharing them with your friends, telling people about them. That's how we are doing this together. So, thank you guys so very much.

• 49:39Lewis Howes?

  Check out the full video interview at LewisHowes.com/350. Also, how you can connect with Nancy back on the show notes, and all the other things we talked about, including illuminate, get a copy of her book, which we have a link back there for you as well, and all that other good stuff. So, thank you guys so very much. 350 in the books, wow. It's kind of amazing to think, you know, three and a half years, 350 episodes, complete. What a journey. I'm just so very grateful in this moment to see how far we've come. I'm looking at my wall of greatness with all the people that we've interviewed, and all the incredible moments, the lessons that I've personally learned over this journey have been incredible. And I feel so blessed every single time I get to connect with someone and really dive

• 50:24Lewis Howes?

  into their story and learn their strategies and their lessons, and how they become a master of what they do. So, for me, it's been, it's been an honor and such a privilege to be able to connect with people and then share with you that wisdom. So, thank you guys for being here. For continually lifting me up when I'm down and for just making this an incredible experience. I'm super pumped for the next 350 episodes, so make sure to subscribe if you have yet to subscribe on the podcast app or on iTunes. That's iTunes.com/SchoolofGreatness and leave a review. If you enjoyed this episode or any episodes, please let me know what you think. Leave a review over on iTunes. It's going to help spread the message even more. It would mean the world to me.

• 51:08Lewis Howes?

  So with that, I'll leave you with this. You know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.