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About Ed Andrew Every single individual has patterns and behaviour that hold them back. Ed Andrew, podcaster, author and international coach, is here to guide you in your new journey, Ed has helped over 19,000 people in 40 countries transform their business, work and life, and coaching through their transformation for greater fulfilment, wealth and profit reaching their peak potential and living on purpose. As a successful entrepreneur Ed has built 4 different companies on 3 continents and grown to 8 figure revenue. Through expert advice and proactive coaching, you’ll soon be exploring new paths and thriving in a way that you have always wanted. If you are committed to investing in yourself then Book a free discovery call today to find the change you’ve been seeking.
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My Movie ed andrew
[00:00:00] Best book Bits podcast brings you Ed Andrew, a successful entrepreneur who’s built four different companies on three different continents and grown to eight figure revenues. Author of the book, golden Ticket To Your Dream Job, host of the podcast, human Impact transformational Coach, business strategist, and really nice bloke.
Ed, thank you for being on the show. My pleasure, Michael. Thank you very much for inviting me. I’m looking forward to. . Great. Me too. As a fellow podcaster yourself, I know. How many episodes have you done so far? Just coming out for 150, I think. Yeah. Wow. I’ve listened to quite a few and really impactful as well.
Your story’s amazing. I want us, I want you to take me back on your journey as a a barrister in London in the mid nineties. How did your story unfold from there? Oh, here you go. Okay. I’m trying to, I’m trying to be brief for your. Benefit. So yeah, I always only ever wanted to be a lawyer.
In England, we have a two tier system, barrister, enlisters, the barrister, the specialist. We do a lot of the the litigation and the high level expert advice. Anyway, I always wanted to be a [00:01:00] barrister. I like debating probably, so I went off and did that. For a couple of years, I really enjoyed it.
It’s very much still in my dna. But I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. It was the, probably the first, so I’d spent my entire life until the age of, 24, pursuing one particular drink. Which was to be a barrister. I nearly went into the wine trade cause I really loved that as well. But anyway, I was, I advised by my grandparents.
That was a stupid thing to do. Bearing in mind you got a law degree. I dunno if it was or it wasn’t . Anyway, , we’ll go on from there. Anyways, the first time in my life I had to say, What am I gonna do with my life? This is the, I thought I would die age 90, still being wheeled into a court somewhere probably.
I was so passionate about it and and I decided I didn’t wanna do it anymore, simply because the one thing I wanted to do, I wasn’t able to do in that domain, which was arbitration. Mediation didn’t really exist, only 30 years. Tiny market. So I thought I’m not gonna be mediocre. I’m gonna go and do something else for my life.
And I had no idea what that was gonna be like. Many people, like how do [00:02:00] you change careers when you’ve only been focused on one? And so I went and spoke to as many people as I possibly could for about nine months. And obviously in the uk, being a young barrister has a lot of cudos, a lot of prestige.
We have the wig and the gown. Seen as being rather like a surgeon. We are well respected. And here I was I’ve just thrown that all away. What am I gonna do next? And it was all down to people. So I met this firm of head hunters in London, and they were ex-bankers.
They’re all very successful people like me. In fact, some of ’em more qualified than me. Marine biologists, all people who have done different things. The commonalities. We like people and we like research and we like inquisition and the higher level of head hunting those days than we were doing with investment banks and people making millions and millions of dollars a year.
It was about our ability to understand them and their drives and motivation also find out all their weaknesses. And so that natural style of interrogation, I guess as it was then led me into [00:03:00] that world. But these were most importantly, they were really good. and that’s what I was looking for. I wanted a home cuz Barris is a self-employed, right?
We do everything for ourselves. I wanted a home which was small, where we had that autonomy and independence. So anyway, that took me on that journey. I do that in the UK for a few years, but I had this my father had died and I just wanted to get out of England. It never really suited me. I felt that I, there was something else calling me in life.
the way I was raised in England, wasn’t gonna allow that to happen in my own mind. So anyway, went off to Australia, sold up a business. The day after nine 11, had my first client meeting in London where there were no planes flying, and my clients, we were talking about. Was everyone still alive because they had offices in New York.
Fortunately for them, they were, it’s so very surreal. I came to Australia knowing one person who I’d never met , but had a contact, right? I did, that was 21 years ago, landing in Sydney to sell up a business, which was a head-on business which I was very successful. We did that in over, 30, 40 [00:04:00] countries around the world.
I sold that 12 years. That market disappeared. So there’s another example of a business where incredibly successful for a period of time, but that market just no longer exists for what we were sending people around the world. It just, it’s a very different world now. So then what are you gonna go and do again?
And at that time I was very interested in technology and software and I thought, okay, I’ll build a marketplace a bit like a seek or a monster in those days. It’s hard to put people together, but using the inside of head hunting, so making more granular anyway, went off to London, built a SaaS company Lord of critical acclaim, no revenue.
So we closed it at enormous expense, was self-funded, so it was my cash. co-founder, who’s one of my oldest friends, came back to England came back to Australia with a very young family having taken them from Australia to the UK for two years. And what am I gonna do? So again, what am I gonna do with my life?
I’d always pursued passions and people. And I think one of the things about the tech companies, it wasn’t a people centric like we are a. [00:05:00] So we built software. I didn’t talk to people and actually probably what I enjoy most is resolving people’s problems at a face-to-face level. I don’t, solving them technically through software is probably not what I’m wired to do.
So it’s interesting, came back into the Sydney tech scene, got involved heavily in st in the tech startup world. Made some investments find out I had cancer six months later. So that was a really good one. Lose a lot of money and then get cancer’s just what you want when you’re 42.
So I put everything on hold. I filed all my clients and said need to, literally the day after, so I got the call from the doctor. It was something tiny. It was never gonna kill. . Mentally it was destructive, particularly having closed a business. My wife said, are you gonna be okay? I said, just give me tonight.
I just need tonight just to wire in my pity for a little bit. Next morning I got on the phone to my doctor and said how do I get rid of this? So I went down the path of Ave Medicine, Chinese energy Medicine, cuz Western Medicine wasn’t gonna do anything cause it’s too small. And basically I had to re-engineer how I thought about [00:06:00] life because I’d obviously inflicted this on myself.
incredible amounts of stress running a co company with a young family and all the rest of it goes with it and losing a lot of money. So then it was a question, I’ll only really wanna work with people I like. And a lot of people I worked with, I didn’t actually like that much or respect where they were going.
So I did, I’d consult it for a little bit in Sydney, and then my wife was a fashion designer. She wanted to grow a business. I thought I’m not sure what I want. You want a fashion business? I’ll grow the business. We went to Bali with our two young children. That’s the next move. Two years later for, for my health to, to heal.
Cuz Poly’s a beautiful place, spiritual place. And and to grow our business. Cause we had factories in China and India and Indonesia. And the fact, it’s one of the most fun things I’ve ever done, cuz I love going to factories, seeing how people work, talking to them, touching the fabrics, seeing, an idea to solution.
It was a, it was probably the most fun I’ve had in many of the businesses I’ve owned. Anyway, we made a decision like many people who own a business [00:07:00] together we’re either gonna stay married or we’re gonna have a business, but we’re not gonna have both. . So we opted to stay married. Put this down to my wife actually said to me a few years ago, she said, I really only wanted to do it myself.
She said, you didn’t know what you wanted to do, so you imposed your money and yourself and your will on me. And I actually, I did it cuz I knew you were struggling, but I didn’t really want you to do it. I wanted, this was for. . That was a bit of a shock when she revealed that. It’s okay.
She’s absolutely right. I didn’t know what I wanted, so I attached to some idea that I could be helpful and I loved it, it’s not what she wanted. Anyway, , we then came back to we went to France for a little bit. . Then we went to the uk, did some leadership consulting over there, which was quite fun.
And came back to Australia again about another two years later. I just went there, explored that. But my little one was at Chronic Asthma and it was, I, even though I’m English, I haven’t lived there for. 20, 20 years, Michael and my networks actually are not there. My networks are [00:08:00] here. So going there and trying to build a new business in the uk wasn’t easy to do.
And we found that Australia actually suited us better. And anyway, so we came back here again. What am I gonna do now? And led me to building this program and course and writing, which is, okay, I’ve got all this. , I’ve had to re-engineer my life. I’ve spent my entire life helping other people solve their problems.
And I was talking to a friend who was 20 years young. She said, ed, if you don’t share your knowledge, it’s completely useless. And I thought, okay, so the first thing I’m gonna do is I’m gonna write a book about how to land your dream job. Cuz I used to be in head hunting, but I haven’t been in that space.
You. 10 for a decade. So I thought I’ll write the book and be done with it. , no one will ask me the question again. But and it’s true cuz it’s quite technical. You’ve read it, it’s philosoph Phil’s philosophical, but it’s also quite technical if you really want to be the best applicant.
In the interview process and it holds through today. There are certain things you’ve gotta do, and if you don’t do ’em, it’s just [00:09:00] not going to happen for you. And it the things which most people don’t share because they don’t have that information. So I thought the head hunter and recruiters, they all have their own agenda because they want.
to get paid to put you into a job. They don’t care if you’ve got two or three other roles going on, it’s gonna unsettle them because their chance of getting paid is gonna be reduced and diminished, and therefore they’re gonna be less invested in you, or they might be too committed or over-committed and not necessarily tell you the full truth of what you’re getting yourself into.
So I wanted to lift the lid on the world. , this mysterious, mythical world of head hunting and also given insight into, you’ve gotta take control of your own life. Don’t give your con, don’t give control of your life to somebody else, which is what we do when you’re looking for a job. If you put in the hands of other people, you’ve really got to, you can get advice and guidance, but you’ve got to understand they have an agenda at.
Some of them are excellent, some of them are awful. And you’ve got to [00:10:00] understand who’s gonna be good and who’s gonna be bad and who’s gonna help you. So that was the, and I really enjoyed writing like I always used to write. I don’t you Michael, you’re a writer. You’re a writer, right? Yeah. One of the reasons I wrote my book, success in 50 Steps was to put an end to personal development.
Cause I researched it for over a decade, did 500 book summaries and that’s where Best Book Bits Spawn. But for me writing it was finishing the research on personal development and everything to do with success. And like you said, with head hunting, you wanted to put it behind you. I know ex when you said that, I know exactly what you mean by that as well.
But yeah. Lots to lots to unpack what you said. So barrister traveling, cancer, marriage, health, business, head hunting risk, chance, money. Such a journey and a life as well. I do have one question though. Why Australia? When you first moved to Australia, wh what was the reason one of those things?
So I was sitting in London and as I was thinking of setting up my first business, I thought, I’ve only done the very high level [00:11:00] executive search. We get paid a fortune to do this. I want to see the other one. I really wanna see the dirty side of it, the churn and the burn.
So I went and took a job with someone else for six months just to see this contingent site where, you know, they only get paid on success, whereas head on, you get paid regardless. You’ve gotta succeed, but you’re getting paid to do all the work. And there’s Australian girl and the lady who’s a, also a links lawyer, and she said, we are talking about what I want to do.
She said, no one does that in Australia. It’s never been done right in terms of what I want to do. So I thought, okay as I say, my father had died. I had some money in my pocket, I thought, and I was not happy at all. I was pretty miserable with life mainly because of that. But I didn’t know what I wanted to do.
My passion as about it had gone and head hunting was fun, but it wasn’t really, it wasn’t inspiring. . And so Whimsically I spoke to a couple of clients who were global law firms and I said, this is what my idea is. I said, sure we’ll, if you do it we’ll with you. So I literally got on a plane, booked a flight, came to Sydney
I’d always had a. An interest in being. My father always wanted to come [00:12:00] here. He spent some time here. My brother spent some time here, so like I, and I wanted to get as far away as I possibly could from England, to be quite honest, right? 10,000 miles is a lot of distance, . And I came here and I fell in love with it.
It’s just, it. I think for many people from the Northern Europe, it offers us the freedom, I think, at a spiritual level, even if we don’t necessarily know what that is. That we just never get there. Yeah. Thanks for sharing and we’ll go back and forward between your journey and your stories as well.
Just want to untie the things. So is it the human Consultancy business set was founded was the next business that you did. So then so when we came back five years ago. Yeah. The human consultancy was. Founded to solve many different problems and like business is a journey iteration, right? So what am I gonna do?
These are things and I had to map out, and this is what I teach now, right? Here are all the things which I’m good at. Here are the things which I’m good at and I’m interested in, and here are the things which I want to [00:13:00] learn more about. So if you look at. Book of personal development, right? Is that curiosity to continue to learn.
And I was in that hyper-growth phase, hence the podcast, right? Cause I wanted to learn from as many people and share and talk and also see where do I sit in the matrix of all of these con transformational coaches. People like Jack Anfield wrote Success Principles, chicken Soup for the. . And his co-author Mike Victor Hansen.
Now, where do, if I talk to them, where’s my knowledge base going to be against their knowledge base? And I discovered it was exactly the same. , right? This is that they’re weapons and marketing and I wasn’t. So the iteration was, I’ve always had, I like business. I’ve always been an entre. and I like people and I’ve had a very successful career in the world of careers and the recruitment and head.
So how do I take that knowledge and apply that to some that I can share and teach? And so there’s very, so the human consultancy was set up to do that. [00:14:00] But the reality with that is that if I was going into the corporate. that I think a brand such as the Human Consultants is a strong brand.
I remember said that the branding, the logo was very powerful, but I didn’t want to do that. I actually wanted to go and talk to you, Michael, or whoever it was, and that’s not in the corporate world. That is very much talking to business owners. So what I want to do is blend all of my knowledge of business with how do we change our life.
as you would’ve spoken to authors, public speakers, many people get to a certain stage of life and you might be 20 hitting that stage. You might be 40, 56, 70, 80, where you’re getting all this information. You’re not happy with where you’re at. So how do we change that dynamic? But also we need to earn money to support our life.
Like we can’t kid ourselves. I love, I, I’m gonna segue a little bit here. I love all the stories of these young women, mainly young women doing van life around the world. And the reason I. is because it shows courage and [00:15:00] freedom and autonomy. They’re just going to, they’re not necessarily sure what they want, all of them, but they’re going to chase a dream and they’re going to remove themselves from the convention of the world to chase that dream, and I think that’s very powerful.
They’re in between stages of life. So I’m gonna go and explore. And I think that’s such an important part of what we do and something that we miss. Hence, coming to Australia, going to Bali, going back and forth, is that constant process of exploration. So to answer your question, finally I decided I don’t need a brand.
I just need to. Like all of the major coaches or training businesses, like you’ve got even Marshall Goldsmith, you’ve got Marshall Goldsmith training, you’ve got Tony Robbins International, you’ve got Jack Canfield. Training is, it needs to be me, like it people are coming for the problem that I solve, but I’m the person who solves the problem.
Yeah, ab absolutely. We have a similar day to day business consulting, podcasting, reading, educating, sharing. It’s a beautiful thing and I get, I guess you [00:16:00] get to a point in life where I’m only starting the journey and I know you are trying to encapsulate the journey you’ve had, and you’ve had such a, an amazing couple of decades, so of working with businesses in crazy companies as well.
You advise, fortune 100 CEOs, world champion athletes, veteran startup founders, professional coaches business leaders and all that kind of stuff as well. What’s some trends that you see or what are some of the things that make these people in the top sort of 1% of their field, or what are some of the strategies or tactics that you help ’em out with, or some things that sort of my listeners can take away with?
So what are some of the common things that you see? It’s interesting. You can unpack, like there are podcast you can listen to unpack the top thousand leaders on the planet. There’s actually, there’s a guy who’s who I, and I don’t normally share other people’s podcasts. There was a guy called Corey Quer, you might have come across him in Canada.
He has this thing called Business live University. He’s interviewed, I think 7,000 people. And no, I’m not gonna plug it anyway. I’ll leave it. But the point is so you can go and unpick the the attributes of these highly qualified people at a technical. What I’m more [00:17:00] interested at is how do we unpack it at a human basis?
And when I look at all of them, the reason they’ve got to where they want to be is drive. Like they’re generally running to something or they’re running from something. They don’t necessarily know what that is. And this is the interesting part of where I get to work with them because in the case of the Fortune 50 ceo highly successful as a business leader.
However, his challenge was that he never built a network because people come to him. So he didn’t need to do this. I said, let’s unpack who the people are, and it was very few people, but he never had to ask for help because everyone was al always selling him something. So that was, developing a networks is very important.
Otherwise, in his case, when you lose your role, you’ve got. , right? So one of the, one of the I guess the criteria they’ve developed good networks, so they generally know how to [00:18:00] ask people for things. So there’s a lot of drive, but generally they’re also running from something. We look at, when I start to work with them, what is the generally unresolved trauma that’s led them to this incredibly powerful high charging life.
Like you look at. She, her clothes was a hessian sack. She never wanted to wear that sack again. So generally they’re driven by something they’re experienced in their childhood. What happens is that the mission they set, which is, I never wanna wear a hessian sack before. I never want to be abused again.
I never wanna see a, another alcoholic or, even though I’m incredibly smart, I never wanted to go and be a doctor. Actually, I wanted to be a painter. Like these things doesn’t really, it doesn’t have to be, when we say trauma, it doesn’t have to be. A higher level of abuse. It’s just that to them, they’re not getting what they want.
Their emotional needs are not filled, and so it drives them to move out of that, or, and generally they stay attached to it, so [00:19:00] the further they run from it, we have these principles in in what I teach, but it comes from Tibet and Buddhism called the Three Obstacles of Life, attachment aversion and lack of knowledge.
So we push away from the thing that we want to get. But in pushing away from that and not wanting to be part of that, we’re attached to the notion of that. And so we’re always held back by what we’re trying to run away from, and eventually it trips them up because they have these highly successful careers.
Which no longer fulfill them. They don’t understand why it, and it’s very frustrating. Why does this highly successful career no longer satisfy me? I’m wealthy, or whatever it may be. Because they haven’t set a new mission in life. They haven’t realized that the little boy or a little girl they’re running away from, they did a long time ago, but they never stopped.
And so now the passion and the energy is dissipated and they dunno how to. Yeah, it’s I like what you said, drive two people either drive into something [00:20:00] or they’re driving away from something as well. And trauma does. The un undisclosed or undiscovered trauma you might get to a stage later in life and you realize, hey, what you were running from is no longer chasing you, and you could have dropped that burden a long time ago as well.
Let’s touch on a little bit about your trauma and. Going through cancer and you’re basically changing your whole paradigm and your foundation as well. And, moving to to Bali. And I’ve heard you say once before that you went to see a shaman and he said your cancer was a mental thing, not a physical thing.
Do you wanna expand on that and tell us a little bit about how your life shifted? In an instant? Yeah. Just, I’ll answer, I’ll ask that, that last part first, is that in Chinese, They believe that prostate cancer, which is what I had and is an emotional illness. It’s not a physical illness.
In other words, it’s a blockage in our chakra system from our head, which is our logic center as men into our reproductive system. And so they believe that it’s a blockage and a blockage can [00:21:00] be removed. So that’s why they say you’re not sick. It’s just, you’re basically, you’re sick in the head, not in the physical body.
So we need to relieve it. Doesn’t mean it won’t it, it might, the cancers can kill you obviously, so you’ve still got to remove the blocks. So the interesting thing and is, I said in my twenties, I recognized that there was something greater than me in this universe. But, I was brought up English boarding school boy, very traditional childhood.
But I had exposure to some things we shouldn’t, like my grandmother was a she was an American philanthropist. She was, she was a Rockefeller Vanderbilt at one stage, so she’s married into the most, old school American families. But she had this very whimsical. , this fairy spirit.
And so you saw this, my grandfather was a neurologist. He was a professor at his own hospital, so he was very scientific. And then you had this very whimsical person. And I think what interested me is what else is going on out? That. [00:22:00] So in the my twenties in England, I started doing things like Tai Chi, just practicing.
And I started beginning to feel, not think, cuz I’d spent my life thinking, wow, there’s something pretty cool going on here. I’ve got no idea what it is, but I’m drawn to it. So going back to your question about Australia, I think I was naturally drawn here as well as it plays to. Emotionally grow, spiritually grow in whatever context that is.
Cause I’m not religious, never have been. But I’m curious. And I think from that perspective and that journey, when I had that diagnosis, I knew, okay , there’s a whole world out there which I can explore and I’m gonna do that. No, I’m not gonna wait a second longer. And Chinese, I had two businesses in India.
So Ave Medicine, I would go and get a massage from a healer. That’s their practice. So I’d always been immersed in, in, in Australia our proximity is to Asia, which is experiential. It’s not to America and Northern Europe, which is scientific. So I think we are naturally more.
To, there may be [00:23:00] something else slightly more powerful than us, and maybe we should dive into that a little bit more. Yeah, definitely. And I read that your diet change, raw vegan diet, reiki treatments, sun and meditation retreats, visualization of breaking down cancer cells, sending out white light.
Like you wouldn’t have done, correct me if I’m wrong, if you didn’t get the cancer, you wouldn’t have done any of this. I think that’s probably right. I think I suspect I would’ve done it. , I was always on that pathway, but I think that was the catalyst to, I need to really answer my true calling.
And if you want, if I was saying this to someone, a client say, this is what your soul’s looking for. Like we can trash our emotions every second of the day by using our analytical mind. But actually we need to sit and stop and say, what am I actually, what am I designed to do here?
What do I enjoy doing? And I think that’s the. And sometimes, adversity does, shake our foundations and make us move, sometimes we don’t need that major adversity in our life to change our foundation and change our life completely with a total 180 reversal as [00:24:00] well.
Are you still practicing those type of things as well? Like how have you incorporated sort of those into your lifestyle now? After I’d been seven years. Yeah. I have a daily meditation practice. Which should generally do first thing in the morning for about 20 minutes. And that’s a, it’s a breath work practice as well.
And the most important part of that meditation practice for me is to calibrate where I’m at. And this is part of what I train people as well, is energy. Like everything we do is end. Is based on energy, money’s energy. We as cellular human beings, an animal is all energy based, right? If we have low energy, we’re gonna be in a bad mood.
We have high energy. We’re gonna have be excessive high mood. If you’re go and take caffeine and alcohol and drugs, you’re gonna have a full sense of a high mood. So everything’s rated to energy. So one of the things that helps me to do is say, okay you wake up in the morning, you think I’m good.
Sit and meditate now. Oh no, I can feel there’s some tension. I’m anxious about something today, or something’s disturbed me, and I have to then hook into that and let that go so that I can get a better quality of day. And this is one of the things [00:25:00] I share with people as well when I work with them, is that to understand their, to calibrate this level of energy.
Because if you’re going to go into, say the typical example, I’ll make it very quick, is, you wake up seven o’clock on Monday morning and you feel, yeah, I’m good, and you get. and if you’re commuting, so you get on a train or a bus and someone coughs in your face and he goes, so he puts you in a bad space.
You open, go to work, you open your laptop. Nine o’clock, you get a message on the bus, which came in on Friday saying, where’s the report? You’ve file some horrible message back and your day’s unraveling already, right? ? I’m sure everyone’s been there. Whereas, and then, you, it unravels. The boss explains, I was just asking where it is.
I wasn’t having a go at you. It’s just a question like, there’s no blame attached. Just let me know what’s going on. . So of course then you go home at the end of the day and you have an argument with your boyfriend, girlfriend, partner, husband, wife, whoever. It happens to be your friend. If you do this little exercise, what you realize is the reason you’re actually the whole day started like that is because say, [00:26:00] you, you were exhausted over the weekend.
You did something for a friend at the end of last week, or you went to an event. where you are already exhausted so you depleted yourself even more. You didn’t recharge cuz you went and had a really busy weekend. So here you are, you’ve had no sleep, you’re stressed, you’re anxious. Your body is telling you, we are not feeling good today.
But you haven’t listened to it, right? You haven’t tapped into it. So this little meditation breathwork exercise makes you, I realize, okay, I’m not feeling good, so what am I gonna do about that? I might do 10 minutes of yoga. I might go for a walk. I’m gonna do something to change the way I feel.
so that my mood state becomes six out of 10, not below five, so that when I do get on that train or that bus and I see that person coughing, I’m gonna walk into a different carriage. I’m gonna stand further away. And when I get that email from the boss, I’m just gonna pick up the boss and pick, make a phone.
Make a phone call and say, what’s going on? What do you need? Otherwise, I’m gonna react completely differently to the way I would’ve done if I hadn’t done that exercise in the.[00:27:00]
Yes, so the app is, that’s not my app, that’s actually an Aussie guy called Christopher Plowman who’s been on my show. But it is a, it’s a meditation app. Those courses are on there. There’s some training on there. And that’s a beautiful app cause it’s free. And me and my family for years have listened to meditations before we go to sleep.
One thing that I’ve heard you say before, and I think exactly what you’re talking about then to people understand the point was you’re talking about getting yourself in a heart instead of a mindset. Because what happens is we walk around unconsciously, mentally, in, in the minds. So we’re so busy, social media, this, that and the other.
We’re always thinking. , but getting yourself connected with your body and getting yourself in a heart set, and it’s instead of reacting through the day, you’re responding during the day. I think that’s so important and we are missing that, that connection to our body. So slowing down, having the meditation or whatever your process is, but just connecting, breath work what, doesn’t matter what the process is, just connect this to the [00:28:00] heart and then you’ll have a better day instead of just going unconsciously.
In the mind all day anyway, that you can expand on that if you like. But yeah, I’ve heard you talk about heartset before. Yeah. Heartset, that’s exactly right. And if you look at as I say, coming from Australia, we look at the experiential side. But a lot of people nowadays in the western world, they want science, they want facts.
So neuroscience now helps us prove with people like George Dispenser and Guyer and these apps like that, exactly how this works. And there, there are 10,000 chemical markers in your heart, which your brain cannot access unless your heart is. . So when you breathe through your heart and you feel gratitude and you feel love and kindness and empathy, these chemical markers are released.
You can’t do that by thinking, so the whole process of neuroscience is how do we, so when people will say to you, I feel stark or frozen or lost, or I can’t think straight it’s because their prefrontal cortex is basically shutting them down saying, we’re not gonna allow you to do anything cuz your body’s exhausted.
And that’s very frustra. . So we have to, as you [00:29:00] say, Michael, slow down in order to start connecting and reconnecting with the heart. To get into a place is called a place called coherence, where our mind and our heart is coherent with each other. So I would describe it as a human operating system.
We’ve been programmed to only turn the laptop on, right? And that’s it. To do everything in our life. So imagine your laptop does everything for you, which is of course our brain, our logical, our analytical thinking. It because that’s what pays the bills, because that’s what the value is. Dollar equals thought.
And we’ve lost this animalistic instinct to feel, I think. Jeff Bezos says his greatest decisions come from a place of instinct, not analysis. And intuition. Yeah. And it’s something that we need to tap into as well and take chances and bets on ourselves because your body knows more than sometimes your brain knows.
So the intuition is a real thing. They say your gut is your second brain, but I think your [00:30:00] heart is your number one. Your apparently isn’t. The heart gives that a strongest single than the brain or something like that. On an electromagnetic basis, I’ll have to go and look. But yes, on a vi, we give off a vibrational frequency, right?
And when we don’t connect with our heart, our frequency is gonna be much lower than it is when we’re feeling in an upper mood state. We’re feeling a, a natural euphoria. And so the whole premise of this is that we want to go through life in a place of homeostasis, which means harmony if we are balanced.
between heart and mind. The chemical and our body is balanced. With the right oxygen, hydration, nutrition, then we have a better chance of living a happy longer life. We don’t get extremes. So when you see people celebrate and they do the ex, celebrate the big rah, and they go off in a bender for days, there’s a natural crash that comes with that celebration is.
But also means that when we have, really crisis in our life, we don’t go into a state of depression as [00:31:00] a result because we’re experiencing the extreme low. We want to stay place where when things hit us, we can manage them easily and move on. Even, the most extreme levels of grief. And there’s lots of research into this as well, and we’re gonna have time for that.
But there’s a lot of research into supervisors, which is based around proximity of time to getting help and experiencing g. in terms of accelerating the recovery journey. So all of these as you rightly say, these are fundamental, but we can’t go into a corporation and teach how to connect to your heart.
There are businesses which do that. They want to know, how do my perform at my peak? The reality is you’re not gonna perform your peak if you’re only using your brain. And you have to understand that why won’t I only perform. . If I’m just sitting at my desk bashing away on a computer all day long because there’s no connection and there’s no observation, you’re not, you’re gonna miss the opportunity that flies in front of you.
You’re gonna miss the red flag that pops up and go something’s wrong and something’s off with [00:32:00] this because you’re gonna ignore it. Because the, you’re told to keep going. It is actually not using this human operating system efficiently at all. Yeah, it’s, we get so. We waste our time in quantity sometimes.
It’s all about quantity, numbers, output, never really about quality. And I was listening to a podcast recently with David Goggins and they talked about his morning routine and he spends like six hours on the body stretching all this kind of stuff. And the person said when, where do you find time for business?
And he said, you gotta cap success. And it was just like, you gotta cap it. And at the end of the day, you got the three buckets. Health, wealth, relationships, you gotta. , some people burn themselves out because they’re trying so much and they’re trying to do so much, but they’re never really putting the quality work in.
There’re always trying to put the quantity in there as well. Really just interesting stuff. But I wanna switch gears a little bit and get a little bit selfish and talk about tech startups and entrepreneurs. I know you’re into that as well. I’m involved in a tech startup at the moment, which is very exciting.
Hopefully [00:33:00] it’ll be a unicorn business in seven years. And, reading the. Billion dollar apps, and I’ve been through startup values as well. What are some of the reasons why startups fail, but what are some of the traits of why startups succeed as well, and what are things that you look for in the founders and or trends?
So just an oddball question, but let’s talk about tech startups. . I got 60 seconds to answer that one. Yeah, good one. Okay. First of all, as we all know, we don’t really look at product. We look. It’s something I learned very much, very early days as an investor and as an investee. They’re the product’s interesting, but they really want the people.
If you’ve got a if you’ve got a really good cohesive team that is able to be coached, that is far more valuable than a product, right? So that’s the first thing for startup founders. In terms of you, this goes right back to the point. Red flags, intuition, you’ve got to be absolutely on the ball the entire time with what’s going on.
I was helping a business which had a $1 billion valuation and they had a, just they was [00:34:00] having a conversation about it and they said, can you help? I said sure, what’s the problem? Was the problem with their raising money? Cuz they had a dispute amongst the shoulders and said where’s your documentation?
We don’t have any, how many shoulders you got? 30. So you’ve got 32 shareholders who are all at war and you’ve got no documentation trying to raise 50 million. You’re not gonna do it because they got Slack. They got so excited by the idea of this vision, and they had a contract. You It, the business was legitimate and a really good cause.
They just got really slack. And these were highly experienced business owners, entrepreneurs. They weren’t coming from the corporate world. They were highly experienced because they got so excited, they forgot the document. . Like when I see a new technology, you’ve got a high, got a high growth tech company.
The first thing I do goes back to my legal days is I want to go and see the IP agreements because you might not have any technology. I was advising a company last week and I said show me the moral rights clause in your contracts. They don’t have any. Moral rights clause for the audience [00:35:00] means that when you work for somebody else, you give away your intellectual property to that organization.
So if you work for Google and you invent, goo Google number three, that’s owned by them, not you, , right? But if you don’t have that clause in your contract you’re stuffed, right? Because they get it. So the first things I do is look. the technical. So the people like, can I work with these people?
Are they open to being coached? Are they open to advice? What’s their technical level of integrity? Are they sloppy or are they really good at it? Do they really understand what the me it means to lay the foundations of a business? Then we look particularly in, in tech world, is we have to look at product market.
So that obviously has to go hand in hand, but one of the biggest failure. Of high growth tech companies is they’re so obsessed by product. They don’t understand marketing or sales, particularly if the owners are engineers and they’re product obsessed because they don’t understand it. Iterate cuz they iterate and they over iterate constantly, right?
Is [00:36:00] get the product into the market, find a customer, make your first dollar of sale, and make your first dollar of profit. Then you have a. When you make your first dollar profit. Until then, it’s just an idea. It’s a concept. Doesn’t mean it, but I know it took Bezos 10 years I think, to make Amazon profitable.
But he had, the business was generating cash. It just wasn’t generating any profit because the amount of debt and everything else and the systems and he was expanding rapidly, but he had a lot of cash to enable him to do that. Most startups have cash poor, right? So they burn a huge amount of money on product iteration cuz they’re scared of putting the product to market.
I was, , oh, one of my podcast guests, and he came on to explain how, why the business fell over and he had 800,000 subscribers in the app store, 80 million visits on it. He was the darling of Apple In the world of meditation. I get highly commercial, highly critically successful. They took their eye off the ball on.
they knew it wasn’t generated. It was a free premium [00:37:00] service. They knew it wasn’t there. They kept building. They had this incredible audience, but they couldn’t sell it to anybody. Shut it. That’s a big failure. And it’s because they didn’t lean in to where the business wasn’t working.
I spoke to a lot of people that say spend 90% of the time on where the business is failing, not 90% of the time where the businesses winning and you’ll grow and succeed. So it’s yeah, it’s a tough world tech startups and it’s very exciting. That’s what we see a lot of. It’s and even at the unicorn level, Michael, I had, there’s a lovely lady who came on the show who had.
A what was an eSports business? Fank it was the biggest eSports business in the States, and it was bought by Patty Power. And I think the price was over a, it was a billion dollar business. They haven’t received a dollar. , you think, how do these incredibly smart people who’ve created the biggest eSport bus eSports business on the planet not receive a dollar because the paperwork went against them.
So basically the new owner devalued the business and the earner and got reduced to [00:38:00] zero. In a nutshell, you people can go and listen to it. So here you have the other end of the scale where you’ve got your unicorn, but the founders end up with nothing. How is so possible? Law contracts, documentation.
So they, they did all this work, but they got screwed. They got screwed by the vc. Yeah. And it happens all the, look it’s, this is relating the story, but effectively they got screwed by the VC apparently, and it happens a lot. So again, this goes back to, so the, what I teach now is this program called Reclaim, and it’s part of the other program I have, which is the Business of Life, which if you wanna go and do this before you even.
Putting a dollar or a thought into it, you really need to understand how this system works cuz it’s designed to protect you. It’s designed to allow you to work 17 hour days. It’s designed to tell you I’ve had enough 17 hour days, I need to sleep, it’s designed to pick up on, I don’t need to do that.
Deal with that person cuz it’s off, right? [00:39:00] It’s designed to protect you and it’s designed to give you as much wealth and abundance. As you possibly need, because when your system works right in harmony with each other, what happens? You can manifest just like that. Opportunities will come straight into you and you’ll know whether they’re right or they’re wrong.
But if you don’t do that, your mind, your brain will allow you to create. But you’re gonna miss so many different things. You’re gonna miss so many red flags. Your idea may even. The wrong idea at the beginning because you’re so obsessed with it. So what I say to them now is, like you were talking about when they fall off the cliff we wanna get them to fall off their cliff, but we also want to teach the young ones.
This is what you need to know before you say you wanna run, own a business. Great. Learn this before you learn the business, because then you’ll have a much better chance of success when you. Yes. And it’s all about having those micro failures and those wheels coming off early in your life.
[00:40:00] So the later the later in life that they don’t fall off when things get really serious as well. Yeah, I I think there’s a lot of research into older stage older entrepreneurs tend to be really good because they have tended to have loss of failures, but. Entrepreneurs coming out of the corporate world have a lot of failures as well, because they follow corporate principles that don’t follow lean principles or startup principles.
So that’s a big thing says this cuz you’ve got a guy who’s come out of what man? Or a woman who’s come out of, news Core or Google or Atlassian. and only had a corporate career, last, they’re gonna be short anyway if they come outta it last anyway. But the point is don’t believe they’re gonna make a good founder.
Because if they’ve only been used to enterprise level architecture and enterprise level systems, they don’t know how to sell a widget to a human being on the street. They’ve got no idea. But the failures, if they’ve had lots of them, those micro failures and failure’s not even a word that we want to use in investment terms anymore because it’s just a human experience.
Put it down to an experie. You’ve got to, the whole process of iteration is [00:41:00] 80% failure , right? Or is it even 90%? Is he say, Michael. So if you don’t allow that to happen and you can’t allow that to happen, if you’re obsessed only with success, . Yeah, absolutely. And there’s so much more to unpack about this and we can have conversations offline about technical things on this, but yeah.
Thank you for unpacking and sharing that as well. Where can people find more about yourself and where do spend most of the time socially? I know you’ve got the podcast through there, but where can people find you? The best price to find is through my website, which is just head andrew.com.
I’m gonna be creating more. I’m not a huge social media player. I’m a consumer of it, but I need to put more out there. So I have Instagram. I probably, out of all the channels, I probably hang out on Instagram more than anywhere else. And that’s just Ed, Andrew, and YouTube is going to have to grow because as we discussed earlier, we need to get good at marketing.
Here’s the thing on that, you can grow highly [00:42:00] successful businesses without enormous social media followings. It just depends on where your client is. And how you want to get them. You can do it organically or you can do it with money, I’ve got a friend who sold a 70 million business.
He didn’t have even have any social media accounts. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. The sometimes people forget that the online business is not always cracked up to what it be. It’s hard work like the offline business is. Sometimes more profitable than new online business. Kids these days forget about brick and mortar stores and brick and mortar businesses and old school businesses and they just keep thinking about the new stuff as well.
But yeah, we could go on and on forever. I do apologize we didn’t even get deep into the book as well about the recruitment industry. Explain head hunting being in the top 1%. Rodney, your killer resume. You had all these notes. For it. We can save that for a later date. I know you’re working on a, another book that will come out later in the track, so we’ll definitely have you on to my audience out there.
Yeah, go check out Ed his podcast as well. He’s got some amazing guest and stuff on there as well. And you’ve got a lot of programs on your websites too certified Transformational [00:43:00] Life Coach. What other programs have you got through there as well? Oh yeah I changed it in between. I spoken today, so
Yeah, I might have caught you up. Oh my God. . So basically the, Yeah main program, the Business of Life is what we’ve been talking about. So whether you’re a ceo, whether you’re a entrepreneur, it’s mainly for business owners, but obviously executives and people starting their journey.
And it’s to teach them exactly what we’ve been talking about today. So how do we prepare ourselves, the battle, which lies they have. Because everybody, even these wonderful people who are love in doing their van life. They’ve still got to pay to put fuel in the van. They’ve still gotta pay for their insurance.
They’ve still gotta put food on the table, right? So the concept is how do we build the life that we want to lead and the person we want to be, and then layer into business, which supports that, not the. Correct. Not the other way around. Yeah. That’s this notion of reclaim, which is the business we need to reclaim our life and [00:44:00] then build everything which pays for our life around that, not the other way around.
And then the transformational coach is where I certify and train people in the art of what. . So I have clients who’ve come through the program, they’ve come out the other side. They’ve, they’ve, their business has gone through the roof and it’s okay, the business is making a lot of money, but what I really want to do is help people like you.
So right now I can certify you in that process, but just before we wrap up, when you talked about bricks and mortar as well my, me and my wife created a a bricks and mortar store for our girls who are 12 and 13. So it’s their business. It’s called a Secret Life of Sweets which won’t mean anything to anyone outside of Australia.
But basically they have an online lolli store and we go to the markets. That’s awesome. So tomorrow I’ll be going to Y Mundi Markets, which is the biggest markets in Australia, up here in outside new. So they get about 1.5 million people a year, and I will be there at six o’clock in the morning setting up on my Saturday [00:45:00] morning because they’re excited about learning about the value of the money.
They also have horses and we say, Can you pay for your own horses? Let’s see if you can actually have a business which pays for your own horses. So it’s bricks and mortar yeah, and I’ve always wanted to have a cash generative business, so you know, it’s fun. It might not be fun for a long time, but the moment.
We gotta teach, you gotta teach the kids to take over the businesses so then you can relax even more and get those 17 hour days down to a couple hours, which you’re probably doing. I don’t do many. And when I don’t do a lot the next day. We you do the same, Michael, you’ve got five businesses to run.
We know when you need to put the drive in and other times where you can go, I’m just going to the beach for the afternoon because I’m not . Yeah, abs, absolutely. I’m getting to that stage of stop working 17 hours and really putting the things into place. But yeah, I’m sure we’ll have some great conversations offline, but tomorrow’s out there.
Check out Andrew’s got some great stuff out there and some, 150 episodes on your podcast. As well. So definitely subscribe to the podcast and I might be able to give some tips on some YouTube going forward. But [00:46:00] yeah, thanks for being a guest on the Best Book Bits podcast and we’ll speak very shortly.
So have a great day and enjoy the nooses weather today. I’m sure it’ll be lovely up there. Thank you very much, Michael. It’s a pleasure to talk to you always. No problems at all. All right, speak to you soon. All right, bye.
About Ed Andrew Every single individual has patterns and behaviour that hold them back. Ed Andrew, podcaster, author and international coach, is here to guide you in your new journey, Ed has helped over 19,000 people in 40 countries transform their business, work and life, and coaching through their transformation for greater fulfilment, wealth and profit reaching their peak potential and living on purpose. As a successful entrepreneur Ed has built 4 different companies on 3 continents and grown to 8 figure revenue. Through expert advice and proactive coaching, you’ll soon be exploring new paths and thriving in a way that you have always wanted. If you are committed to investing in yourself then Book a free discovery call today to find the change you’ve been seeking.
