IAM1781 – Best-selling Author Teaches Marketing Courses

Why it was selected for “CBNation Architects”:

In this episode of the I AM CEO Podcast, host Gresham Harkless Jr. interviews Teresa de Grosbois, the #1 international bestselling author of “Mass Influence – the habits of the highly influential”. Teresa is a 4X international bestselling author and teaches marketing courses around the world to business leaders and entrepreneurs on how to create massively successful word-of-mouth campaigns. She is also the head of the Evolutionary Business Council, a global community of speakers and influencers dedicated to teaching the principles of success.

Throughout the episode, Teresa shares valuable insights on marketing and influence, emphasizing the importance of creating meaningful relationships with clients and customers. She also discusses the power of word-of-mouth marketing and how businesses can create successful campaigns by focusing on building trust and delivering value to their audience.

In addition to sharing her expertise, Teresa also offers practical tips and advice for entrepreneurs and business leaders. She encourages listeners to spend at least five minutes every day being an influence to someone who deserves it, and to give themselves permission to fail as they work towards their goals. She also emphasizes the importance of having a powerful vision that inspires and motivates others.

Overall, the episode provides valuable insights and advice for anyone looking to improve their marketing and influence skills, particularly in the realm of word-of-mouth marketing.

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Transcription:

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Teresa de Grosbois Teaser 00:00

And people are coming at you in drove saying, Hey, how did you get three books on the bestseller list in only eight months? Would you teach us how to do that? And you're really enjoying coaching them, but you're not noticing that.

So that was one of those beautiful light bulb moments where I changed my brand overnight to teach what I'd always been really good at, influence. It's kind of like fish don't know what water is. We often don't know what we're good at until other people start demanding it from us.

Intro 00:24

Do you want learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you are in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:51

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from I AM CEO podcast and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we hit 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them, business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners. Or what I like to call the CB nation architects, those that are looking to level up their organizations.

This month we are focusing on knowing thy numbers. I could hear the phrases from Mr. Wonderful on Shark Tank, and if you understand or don't understand exactly what numbers is, think finance, economics, accounting, capital, investment, funding, bootstrapping, anything that's around numbers. So we have to understand how important it is to know your numbers and how important that is for you to forecast, make decisions, and to be able to truly strategize around your business and do that successfully.

So things are gonna be a little bit different, obviously, this month. So look for CEO hacks and CEO nuggets and interviews that focus around this. But more than everything else, make sure that you know your numbers because they're extremely important to the life of your business.

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Teresa de Grosbois of the Evolutionary Business Council. Teresa, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Teresa de Grosbois 02:22

It's awesome to be here. Thanks for having me, Gresham.

Gresham Harkless 02:25

Yeah, no problem. Super excited to hear all the awesome things that you're doing. But before we got started, I wanted to read a little bit more about Teresa, so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing.

Teresa is the number one international bestseller-selling author of Mass Influence, the Habits of Highly Influential, which is now a bestseller in seven countries. She's a four-time international bestselling author. Teresa teaches marketing courses around the globe to business leaders and entrepreneurs on how to create massively successful word-of-mouth campaigns.

Teresa has the Evolutionary Business Council, a global community of speakers and influencers dedicated to teaching the principles of success.

Teresa, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Teresa de Grosbois 03:04

I Sure am. It's great to be here. Thank you.

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Gresham Harkless 03:07

Yeah, definitely. Super excited to have you on, and as a new member of the Evolutionary Business Council, I'm super excited to get to talk with you a little bit and hear more about all the awesome things that you're doing, but I wanted to hear how everything got started.

So could you tell us, like your CEO story, what led you to start your business and get you where you're now.

Teresa de Grosbois 03:23

Yeah. It's funny, I'd love to tell you that there's this beautiful linear path between where I was and where I am now, and like a lot of people in business, my path was anything but linear. I actually cut my teeth in the oil and gas industry in Canada, and had a number of different leadership positions, became a management system expert, et cetera. I got to a point in my life where I just really wanted to change. You start to ask yourself, is this all there is question. Is this all there is? I want my life to count for something, right?

Now for something completely different, I quit my job started a charity. I wrote three kids books to raise money for that charity. That very quickly taught me that I hated running a charity, and be at I didn't love being a children's author all that much. But, sometimes we need to swing the pendulum too far to figure out what we wanna do. I can actually remember one day I was sitting having a cup of tea with Dr. Shada parent, who's a dear friend of mine. And she says to me, honey, here you are complaining about you don't love being a children's author, you don't love running a charity, and people are coming at you in Drove saying, Hey, how did you get three books on the bestseller list in only eight months? and would you teach us how to do that? And you're really enjoying coaching them, but you're not noticing that.

That was one of those beautiful light bulb moments where, I changed my brand overnight to teach what I'd always been really good at, influence. It's kind of like fish don't know what water is. We often don't know what we're good at until other people start demanding it from us. Which eventually led to me founding an organization that helps teach people who run impact-based businesses all about influence the Evolutionary Business Council.

That's truly the passion that has lit me up like nothing else. It's what gets me up in the morning, I have to say.

Gresham Harkless 05:14

Yeah. That's definitely awesome to hear. I always usually say, sometimes we have to do the things we don't love to do to push us towards where we should be.

It is great that sometimes we can't even recognize that ourselves, but it's great to have that environment and people we can be around and say, Hey, you're really good at X, Y, and Z, so maybe you should start doing that.

Teresa de Grosbois 05:31

Yeah, I know. It's funny because as kids, people would never say, do you like basketball? Do you like hockey? And the kids would say, I have no idea. I've never played any of them. Sometimes we got to get on the field and try something to actually figure out what our true mission and what our true strengths are in life.

I think that's a lot of times why a lot of business owners end up with a couple of failed businesses because it's them getting on the field, figuring out what they're good at and what they should be doing.

Gresham Harkless 05:56

Yeah. That's super powerful. I think it's so funny because I say a lot of times we should go back to what we used to do as kids to find out what our passions and our gifts are, but just as you said, we know what our passions, our gifts are.

Usually, it's what we do well because we're doing it, not because we're sitting on the sidelines and just looking to say, oh, that looks good, but because we're actually getting our hands dirty and actually doing it.

Teresa de Grosbois 06:17

Yeah, it's so true. There's a human condition that we all have. We tend to discount stuff that we're really good at and we tend to not move toward things we really, really love because you know, most people don't feel worthy to live their own dreams, right? Because your dreams are bigger to you than they are to anyone else, right? They're your dreams.

Ah, that's huge. So we tend to never feel worthy to really step into the things that we would really, really love to step into and at the same time, we've got this. The things we're really good at, we tend to think everybody's really good at them. We don't see our own strengths because they're so easy and so effortless and so intuitive to us that we don't get that the rest of the world isn't finding that super easy and super intuitive. So there's that interesting combination of parameters that a lot of people really struggle to find.

What's that thing they really love and they're really good at? And it takes a little bit of swinging the pendulum back and forth before you hit it.

Gresham Harkless 07:13

Yeah. Absolutely. It definitely sounds like it takes a certain amount of acceptance as well too, because I know I can say so myself is that sometimes when people say, oh, you do X, Y, and Z you're like, oh, no, everybody does that. So you have to, sounds like accept that as well too and step into that.

Teresa de Grosbois 07:27

Yeah, very much so. Because it is true our dreams are scarier to us than they are to anyone else. So it really really makes sense to start looking at what really are your dreams. I don't mean your dreams to tone a nicer sports car or big house.

We all have those kinds of appropriate dreams, right? Like the self-reward dreams, but what are your really deep dreams to contribute to the world? Like if you were to think about one legacy that you wanted people to remember you by, that's what you should be doing in business.

That's where you'll be able to make a real difference.

Gresham Harkless 07:59

Exactly. That's when you'll be able to push that pendulum even farther than you think you could. So I know obviously you're heading in helping so many people be able to do that. So could you drill down a little bit deeper?

Tell us a little bit more about the Evolutionary Business Council, Exactly what we're doing there and all the awesome things you're doing.

Teresa de Grosbois 08:16

Yeah. The Evolutionary Business Council was an idea to break all the rules, right? This is what if we create an organization for people who are the rule breakers, an organic, and I don't mean rule breakers in terms of not doing things that are legal or appropriate. Let's rethink the way we live as people, right? Who are the change agents, the people who wanna teach us a better way to live, who wanna teach us to get past our own inner dialogue, or the people who wanna invent better products for cleaner water, or smarter living or healthier living. Because, society really depends on those people that are out there on the cutting edge, thinking of better ways of living, and better ways of doing.

It's those people we wanted to support. So basically what we said is, what if we created an organization for those people who are on the cutting edge of the evolution of humanity. Let's think through a better way for a world that works for everyone. Let's teach those people about influence. Let's teach them how to create world of most epidemics around their work and how to really support each other. Influence is a very simple principle once you learn it but it's kind of like a lot of things until you have that paradigm shift, right?

There was a time when we all had to learn how to breathe and came out of that beautiful, warm environment. Somebody idiot whacked you on the back and you cried for a moment, and then you mastered the skill of breathing and by large, you never thought about breathing again, right? Influence is a lot like that. It's very intuitive and natural once you get the paradigms and the principles of it. But a lot of people have never thought about it. They've never stepped into that realm and so they simply don't understand the way influence, especially mass influence like the world of word-of-mouth epidemics.

They don't understand how that works, and yet once they get it, it's so simple and so easy. They can't imagine that they ever didn't know how it works.

Gresham Harkless 10:05

Yeah, absolutely. I think that something that, as you said, you have to step into, and I think that not even understanding, I know that before I, joined or I applied to join, I should say the council, I picked up your book and starting to read the beginning parts of that and understanding that it is something that you can learn and there is like an art to it as well too.

Being aware of all those things is something that we sometimes take for granted, like breathing or riding a bike or walking as well too.

Teresa de Grosbois 10:31

Yeah. And the reality is, many people learned a rule book when we were first playing in the sandbox about, you do this for me and I'll do that for you. This tit-for-tat fairness in rules. Then we started networking in business and we learned things like you should buy a colleague a coffee, or if you've got someone you want as a client, you ask them for lunch or stuff like that and then you only have to offer to buy a coffee for the head of a Fortune 500 company and faster than you can say gatekeeper.

You run into the notion that, oh, there's a different set of rules at play when you're dealing with the highly influential, right? There's this other etiquette, there's another rule book out there that nobody ever got you related to. It's like you've been playing basketball your whole life and suddenly someone sat you on the hockey rink and you can't figure out why you ended up on your butt and everybody's shooting pucks at you. But once you get related to it as, oh, it's just a different sport to play, it's amazing what you can achieve and especially when you're in a community of people that really wanna create, change and shift in the world.

The Evolutionary Business Council is really an amazing group of colleagues that really just deeply support each other and when you find there's like an army at your back when you're up to something, it's pretty amazing what you can accomplish.

Gresham Harkless 11:46

Yeah, absolutely. I always say your environment is infectious. So a lot of times when you're in that environment, it starts to create that momentum. And as you talked about with the Evolutionary Business Council, what you're creating is these influential people that are coming together to make the world a better place.

So I definitely, appreciate that.

Teresa de Grosbois 12:03

Yeah, thank you.

Gresham Harkless 12:03

No problem. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. It could be for you personally, or it could be for the Evolutionary Business Council, but what do you feel sets you apart and makes you unique?

Teresa de Grosbois 12:14

I would have to say, when you really understand the whole notion of pay it forward and pay it forward powerfully. I think there's something to be said for really investing in leaders. So for me, the secret sauce is to find the people who are worthy of investing in, and I don't necessarily mean money, I mean investing of your time, investing of your influence, investing of your help. When you find those people and just continually pay it forward, pay it forward, pay it forward, it's amazing how much energy comes back to you.

The influence works on one basic principle. You can't make yourself famous or influential. You can only give influence and fame and credibility to other people, and other people can give it back to you. So when you set aside this whole notion of scorekeeping and just live your life to shine a light on people who deserve it, It's amazing the amount of influence that you can hold and the amount of influence you can bring to bear.

Gresham Harkless 13:12

Definitely appreciate that. I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

Teresa de Grosbois 13:24

My favorite hack is every day, spend at least five minutes and give influence to someone who really deserves it in your life. I don't care whether it was the shopping clerk who helped you and you write a little email to their manager or it was the janitor who went the extra nine miles and you write an email to their superior, or whether it's someone in your industry who's up and coming, who really deserves it, or someone in senior management that needs to be nominated for an award or something.

But spend five minutes every day shining a light on someone who really deserves to have a light shine on them. When you get in that habit and you consistently do that on a consistent basis, you will be amazed how much your life changes in terms of the amount of energy and gratitude and influence coming back to you. It's quite incredible what can get created from that.

Gresham Harkless 14:14

Very powerful. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. This could be like a word of wisdom or a piece of advice, or if you can hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Teresa de Grosbois 14:25

I would say give yourself permission to go outrageously big. Give yourself permission to fail.

Gresham Harkless 14:32

Awesome. Teresa, truly appreciate that. Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on this show. So Teresa, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Teresa de Grosbois 14:45

To be a CEO is really to have a powerful and incredible vision that lights people up and then inspires other people to follow that vision, right? So the more you invest in the leaders around you, the better the CEO you are.

Gresham Harkless 15:00

Absolutely couldn't have said it better myself. I think that's definitely right in line with influence and everything that you're doing with the EBC so definitely appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time even more.

What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know, and then of course, how best they can get ahold of you and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

Teresa de Grosbois 15:20

I would say if you're someone who's really inspired and fired up to help build a better world in some way, maybe you're teaching principles of personal transformation or personal health, or maybe you've just invented a better product, then please come see us at the evolutionary Business Council.

We are invitation only because we wanna make sure people don't come in who just wanna sell to the highly influential. But if you are someone who is inspired to really build a better world, then we want you and you're very welcome and encouraged to join our organization. So please come check us out.

Come speak to one of our senior members, and find out about the organization. We're at ebcouncil.com. I just wanna say, what are you waiting for? Just take a leap.

Gresham Harkless 16:08

Awesome. We'll have, definitely have those links and information in the show notes. So thank you so much for that and have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Outro 16:14

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast, powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

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Grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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