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Introduction: [00:00:00] Welcome to the #PirateBroadcast™, where we interview #interestingpeople doing #interestingthings. Where you can expand your connections, your community, #kindnessiscool and #smilesarefree. Let’s get this party started.

Russ Johns: [00:00:10] We're off to another amazing week and another group of pirates. Lou, Sherri, good morning. How are you two doing this morning?

Sherri McManus: [00:00:23] Good. Good. How are you? It's super early over where you are, isn't it?

Russ Johns: [00:00:29] 7:00 AM. Arizona time. Currently Arizona time is in Pacific standard time. So it is a little early, however, it's worth it when I get to talk to people like yourself and connect and you guys have been coaches and people making a big difference in other people's lives for a number of years. And you're involved in coaching and helping other people. So I want to find out, we got the Lou Everett group. So Lou, you probably want to talk about what was the seed that got planted that brought you to this organization that you have going on here?

Lou Everett: [00:01:08] That's a good question. It all started really, we both have our own story. Sherri and I are a married couple. We started our first business in 2005, but the idea of helping people and helping them become stronger leaders started when I was very young. My mother would, instead of allowing me to listen to my own cassette tapes in the car when she was dropping me off at the friend's house or at school, when I was just a preteen, she would be popping in tapes of Tony Robbins or John Maxwell or Zig Ziglar, so that's what I had to listen to.

Russ Johns: [00:01:38] It's a great foundation.

Lou Everett: [00:01:40] Yeah. And little did I know then that she was really teaching me and grooming me for something bigger than I realized at the time. So it's always been something on my mind. And Sherri has always been a, she can tell her part of that too, but we've  both had a kind of a root, if you will of really one who we can add value to people.

Russ Johns: [00:01:59] Fantastic. What about you, Sherri? You have another story about your journey and how you got to where you are.

Sherri McManus: [00:02:05] Yeah. The earliest story that I love to share is I said that my mom always reminds me of is, we grew up in a neighborhood, neighborhood kids, we would just go out and walk every day, playing games. And here I was like the littlest one out of all of them. And here I was telling them what to do or the leader of the pack. And my mom would look out the window and just kind to laugh her head off, and here I was telling them what to do.

Russ Johns: [00:02:29] You don't have to be big to be a leader right.

Lou Everett: [00:02:31] At that age, it's more of do as I say, not as I do.

Russ Johns: [00:02:34] That's fun because so many people nowadays are looking for direction. They're looking for someone to give them an answer and sometimes you got to stop and think awhile and discover what that answer is for yourself. And a lot of people think they also need permission. So when you're thinking about that journey for yourself, what would you part to influence others? Younger ones that are struggling with what they're going to do with their life, what they're going to achieve? What are they going to think about? Where do they want to go? Zig Ziglar, Tony Robbins, John Maxwell. That's a great influence. That's the foundation. Not everybody has that. So what are your suggestions or recommendations for people that are searching for leadership?

Lou Everett: [00:03:16] The first thing is to remember that leadership is about influence. No, that's really all it is. It's really nothing more, nothing less. It's influence. It's how you influence people and those around you. And so as a young leader, do you use the resources and people around you that are where you aspire to be that are proven positive influencers around you and learn from them? If I had just hooked a little bit more time to learn from those around me, when I was in my very first leadership role, I really would have learned a lot more faster than I did.  And probably eliminated some of the failures.  But I would say right off the bat, remember that leadership is influence, that's number one. Number two, use your resources and those around you. It's okay to ask for help. And that's the challenge. Sometimes we don't want to ask for help. We think that's a weakness that it's not. That's actually a big, that's one of the number one strengths of a true influential leader is being able to ask for help. Yeah. Yeah. You need people. So those are the two things that I would recommend.

Russ Johns: [00:04:18] I also want to remind people that leadership doesn't have anything to do with your title either, right? Like you're listening to anybody, anybody can lead, if they take the initiative to step into that position of leadership. Sherri, what are your thoughts for individuals that are looking to at least become more confident about their own abilities. Confidence is something that helps build leadership because you have to have a certain level of, not arrogance, but confidence, to become a leader and ask people, hey, are you go out there? You can do this. You can do this or this is what we need to do. Go huddle. And so what are your recommendations or your thoughts around that subject?

Sherri McManus: [00:05:07] Yeah. That is key because really the biggest advice is that personal development and we can't lead others unless you lead yourself. And I found that out. I wish I'd done it a little bit earlier, than later, but hey, it is what it is, but. I think in our opinion, and even our experience is that, when you know yourself, that's where that inner confidence comes in. And then once you have that confidence, everything just falls in line with it. Now I also want preference too, that not everybody wants to be a leader or even has characteristics of leader. And that's okay. Because, if we have all leaders, we've got too many cooks in the kitchen kind of thing, but we do need workers. We need people. We do need in that sense. But in this, but here's the kicker. There's still a leader in their own and you're still influencing your peers.

Lou Everett: [00:06:01] And leading yourself. Yeah.

Sherri McManus: [00:06:04] Yeah. No matter what role you're in to. So I think that's amazing, but yeah, personal development on the short answer definitely is a great thing, looking and be careful on who you allow in and speak into your life. And I love the quote from Jim Roan. You are the average of the five people that you're around, and that is so true. And you don't know that sometimes until you step away and then you're like, whoa, like what happened?

Russ Johns: [00:06:28] That resonates so well because so many times  we're stuck in this group of individuals that we just seem like we're not fitting in with, and when you change the people you hang out with and you change who you're listening to, even if it's virtual, there's a lot of great leaders that are passed and a lot of great wisdom that you can read books or listen to audio tapes, but you can stream on Spotify. The reality is that you have to absorb and listen to other influences that are ahead of you, or at least giving you some of the information you need to help. Self-awareness is really about how you can actually change yourself. How can you become a different person and take some of this education and move forward with it? So it's really powerful tool when you change the people that you're listening to.

Lou Everett: [00:07:21] So that's where we grow. Don't we, as we grow our viewpoints change, our goals change, right? And especially if we're developing ourselves, I'd say that there's one way to do it. And I challenge every listener out there. There's one way to make it, to determine who the people that you surround yourself with that will continue to follow you where the path that you go and still be connected to you. Where you find that out is make a determined effort and dedicate yourself to your own personal growth. You will see significant change and not just your own growth, but you're going to see a significant change in the people that you begin to surround yourself with are those that are around you already because of the direction that you're going, which is what you want to have happen.

Russ Johns: [00:08:07] Yeah. And my experiences is different things show up in your world. Things that you never had imagined before. When you start changing your perspective, you start changing your attitude. You start changing what you're bringing into your world in terms of education and influence and information. Yeah. It changes everything. Shout out to Jenny Gold.Hi Sherri and Lou. She's in there, out there. Good morning, all and Russ. Thank you so much for being here, Jenny. And we got I'm not going to James. I'm just going to call you James. Absolutely. And then Russ Hedge in from Oregon. Thank you. How are you doing, man? Great influence always. Thank you, Russ. Sherri and Lou, Russ. What are the things that I think a lot of people last couple of years, obviously there's been a lot of change, a lot of challenge, a lot of people evolving and thinking about what's really important in their world. And I think that's really, whether it be family or more time with your kids or spending more time on yourself and self reflection or personal growth, this pandemic has really caused a lot of pain along with a lot of personal growth in a lot of individuals. Have you seen that in your business and have you helped people get past some of the limiting beliefs and challenges that they have?

Lou Everett: [00:09:36] Yes, we have. And we've seen a significant the impact on people as a whole. Sherri and I say we're in the people business. A lot of people say that, but we really are. We live every day working with people and helping people and finding a way so that we can help them. And here's the challenge though. As leaders in our industry and you as a leader in your industry or whatever industry, whatever it is that you're a leader in quote unquote, is being able to be a futurist thinker, looking ahead to see what the impacts going to be on those that you serve or your business or whatever it might be. And pre pandemic, when people are starting to get sick and COVID was becoming a reality. We've surrounded ourselves with mentors. We have coaches for ourselves and we work with those people closely as things were starting to happen, because it impacts everybody, including those of us that are better leaders in the industry. And so the first thing we said is what should we do? What can we do to make sure that we're available for people during whatever's going to happen at the time? We had no idea. And we were encouraged. It says, listen, we suspect that there's going to be shutdowns. We suspect that people are going to have this challenge of working remote. They've never done it before. There's going to be this whole self-awareness as a whole bunch of there's going to be some space and time that people have always wanted. Now they have nothing to do with it, all this type of thing. And so Sherry and I sat down and said, what can we do to add that value to people so that we're always available. And that's what we did. We created no cost complimentary webinars and masterminds on personal development and just became available as much as we possibly could. More available. And we saw that was very well received and we were able to be there for people and help many. During this last year, probably more than we have in our entire career. And I think that plays a part in understanding that as a leader, it is extremely important for us, not us, our responsibility and our duty and our burden to be there for other people, regardless of what it is that they need.  Most of the time what we do, we put people before profit, it's hard sometimes in a business, especially during the pandemic. When you do that, as you said before, it's like the law of magnetism. When you make the decision to serve other people,  it comes back around at some point. And that's not why you do it. That's just the nature of how it works. So we've been very blessed in being able to help out so many people.

Sherri McManus: [00:12:14] And I just want to add to this, this particular time, this past year, especially really leveled the playing field out. And it really found out who were the players and the pretenders. And there were some folks in our own network that we thought that we're going to step it up and next thing you know, they just went away and it's just very interesting. Again, it all goes back to who you surround yourself with, their intentions, their values, making sure that lines up with your core values and it just makes your perspective so much better, it really does. You have two choices, put it this way, you want to be doom and gloom and be why is this happening to me? Or do you want to get yourself out of it? And look at it and be like, okay, what lesson can I learn from it? What can I do to, to help others? Or how can I help myself?

Lou Everett: [00:13:01] It starts there. How do you get to stuckness? We call it the stuckness. You got to get out of it.

Russ Johns: [00:13:07] Some people just have a couch vacuum that just keeps them down.  I got to binge watch another series of Netflix, right? The reality is we are living it. I was having a conversation yesterday with somebody, actually it was Saturday. I was having a conversation with Howard Kaufman, he's an entrepreneur. He owns this amazing mouth care product, ORL and we were talking about the opportunity that has so many people able to go out and create something from nothing. Jack Conte who owns Patreon, he built and created Patreon. They just raised another $150 million. And right now in history, you have a phone, you have communication, you have connection. You're in the East coast, East side of the country, I'm on the other side of the country. We're connecting, we're having this engaging conversation, sharing some nuggets of knowledge and producing content. This is the most amazing time in history to be able to go out and create something from nothing, build it up and help. A lot of people do something, and that's my whole purpose is if I can highlight you and you can have the experience to get on the show, which hopefully it was comfortable and easy access and it didn't cause any problems, no one lost an eye. And the reality is that same experience you can transfer that into an industry and a business. And Tracie, the producer was out there helping you, sending you messages and updates and, you were able to find out where to go and when to get there. And all of these things, just like coaching, you have an opportunity to help someone get from point A to point B to point Z and everywhere in between, if they're willing and open to listen and pay attention to what's going on because I see nothing but opportunity, even in the challenges and for anyone that's thinking they can't do it, they won't do it, or they don't have this or that, or the other thing, it's just a matter of exploring all of the opportunities are out there and deciding what you're going to change in your world because change requires...

Sherri McManus: [00:15:24] Get out of the comfort zone.

Russ Johns: [00:15:25] Get out of the comfort zone, folks. I want to give a shout out to Donna Dunn. Very interesting. Thank you so much. Cathi Spooner is in the room. Cathi, thank you. Love you always. And also Donna Dunn says, so true helping others does fill you up. I love that. I'm stuck. I can't get up. Amen, Russ. Thank you, Donna. This is such a fascinating subject to me. And I know that you guys have done this for a long time, even though you look like you just got out of high school.

Lou Everett: [00:15:58] Thank you for that, we've got two grown children and grandchildren, so yeah, thank you.

Russ Johns: [00:16:03] Dang. Good genes, I guess. So the reality is what's on the agenda for you. What's in the future? And you talked about future, Lou, is this idea of being able to see the future and map out what is going to take place next. So take us through that journey from your perspective as it sits today.

Lou Everett: [00:16:27] Yeah. Here's the thing. Humans are very resilient people. We're very resilient people and either way,   we're gonna get through it. And here's the thing, whether it's a pandemic, whether it's something else, the reality of it is that we have control whether or not we stunt our own growth and moving forward into the future. It doesn't really matter what it is we cannot control. What matters is what we can control. And the only thing we can control individually is yourself, your thinking, your purpose and your why and how you're going to get there. That is what you can control. And so moving forward, future thinking here, of course we're not future, we're not fortune tellers or future tellers for that matter. But what we have seen over the years is people will find a way to get through it. Now there's always going to be segments of people that have really difficult time and that's okay. Not everybody really has that background or that support system in place. And we're talking business as well. There have been businesses. And I think that we're going to still see this challenge that when we went remote, there were companies, we're talking medium sized to large corporations that had a no work from home policy up until then it was like not even considered. And then when that happened, they had no choice,  they weren't prepared. And even if they were prepared  technology-wise, they weren't prepared enough to manage remote workers because they had never been trained to do that because they had no work from home policy. We're going to see now that transition from that to, because now they have no choice. So they figured it out and now they're realizing, wow, people are performing well, overall. Matter of fact, work more.

Russ Johns: [00:18:20] Yeah. I think salesforce.com said they're never coming back.

Lou Everett: [00:18:23] Why have the overhead if it works? And a great example, there's a company, a particular every worker is working remotely right now and they had the CEO that came on to make a major announcement recently to the entire company. And the big announcement was that they had invested in this large property to build this huge building so that everybody can go there when the pandemic is over. That's a challenge right there, right away. I'm thinking, hold on a second, are you going in the right direction here? And it's because sometimes what we ended up doing is we get stuck in our vision instead of meeting people where they are.  And that's what we'll end up creating. We've seen companies over the years that's what happened and it failed miserably, like Blockbuster. I can just go on about those. And so to wrap that back up in a nice bow, focus on you. As a person, a leader needs to develop who they are first, our empowerment system, which there's a webinar. We may talk about that week that we're doing it's complimentary on empowerment leadership, and it's based on 10 principles that we have developed over the last four and a half decades that have, we have found and sharpened that realized that works. So we use this in our coaching and our training in our end, our teaching and everything that we do. And we're teaching  this to other people. And the first principal in the empowerment system is that empowerment starts with an M, not an E M. So we took the E out of empowerment, 10 letters. Each letter represents the principle. That first letter M is me because it all starts with you and ends with you. And that is one of the first ones we taught. It's imperative that we lead ourselves first, before we can truly lead and train other people.

Russ Johns: [00:20:09] I love that and not every journey is meant to be the same, there's no roadmap. There's no template. There's no diagram that says this is the way you need to be. And I think a lot of people get stuck in that model of go to high school graduate, go to college, graduate, get a job, find a family, do something with it and then live happily ever after. It's not the model for everyone. And it's not necessarily the way life has to evolve. And everybody being unique and individual. I wake up every day with #gratitude and I think what is going to move the needle today for my goals, my life, and I try to create something every day. I try to learn something every day and I try to help someone every day. And that's the basis of the way I live. The reality is that served me well. And I've learned a lot. I've been able to meet great people like yourself and, receive some nuggets of knowledge and #inspiration from other stories and I soak that in and I figure out, okay what piece of that can I add to my life? What can I do to maybe change it? Doesn't have to be a big change, two degrees, one degree, and make sure that I'm moving in a direction. That's going to fulfill my desire to be happy every day, or find a little piece of joy every day and be comfortable in the moment and know that the future is going to be unfolding in my life. And you don't necessarily have to be rich and famous to be comfortable and happy. Those things are not consistent with each other.

Lou Everett: [00:21:52] No, they're not.

Russ Johns: [00:21:54] Good morning pirates. Welcome. The Admiral is collecting new PA pirates by pairs now.

Lou Everett: [00:22:00] Yeah.

Russ Johns: [00:22:01] Love you, Wendy. Thank you so much for being here. I get excited when I think about change and learning and education and it's really an empowering opportunity and I encourage you and others to anyone that has an opportunity to learn something new or see a new perspective and that's why I do the #PirateBroadcast is people like yourself that can come on the show and inspire somebody talking about your journey, talk about what you're doing. And sometimes, someone, somewhere is going to say, that's pretty cool. I think I would like to try that. I would like to do that. And that's the big why for me is allowing other people to see a new perspective.

Lou Everett: [00:22:43] That's good. And that's, I like, I love how you talked about that. The empowerment piece, being empowered and we call that the ability to see you're empowered future. And that's what we do. We help you get from where you are to where you intend to be and where you intend to be is your empowered future. And the way you do that is you, number one, you create it yourself, make a determination agreement that you're going to make this next year the year of you're making, nobody else's, that's the beginning point. That's the starting point. Then you've got to take that inventory of who you are. Who are you? What is it that you want? Write it down, make sure you feel it. Make sure you see it. Then you gotta take an inventory of those who are around you. Like we've mentioned, who you allow to speak into your life.  Then last but not least, step into your becoming. Because once you see it, once you feel it, once you've made those adjustments, now you're becoming or stepping into that new empowered future. And it takes effort. It takes work.  It's action. Action. We have a mentor of ours that he has, I love his spirit. He has this quote, he says all the time and it sticks with me every day. I'm going to pass it along to y'all. Success happens where you step not where you stand. Stepping is action, standing a stagnation. Success happens where you step not where you stay. So it takes action and movement. And whether it's connecting with us or anybody else for that matter, ask for that, let's meet with us. You can pick up the phone and call us, email us, and we're not going to send you a bill for talking to you for half an hour. We want to  get to know who you are and see what we can do to to serve you. But we'd love to hear from everybody on that perspective, but movement action.

Russ Johns: [00:24:25] Yeah. Grass grows where you water it.

Lou Everett: [00:24:29] Yes, it does.

Russ Johns: [00:24:30] You've got to nurture that influence. And also you have to understand who do I need to become to get where I need to be, to feel like I've made the goals that I'm looking to accomplish, any sport, any analogy. Anything, life is practice. Life is a practice session, just like music. It's an instrument that you have to continue to practice that in order to improve on. So we don't still get there by thinking about it.

Lou Everett: [00:25:00] Nope, and you're going to fail and fail a lot and it's a matter of getting back up and listen and it's okay if you don't know where to go, if you're not sure what the next step is. See, we've all been there. Then there's people like us that are here that can help you through that process. We don't tell you what to do. You know what to do. All we do is guide you there.  It's okay to ask because then you're going to get unstuck. That's the whole point.

Russ Johns: [00:25:29] That's fantastic. Thank you so much for being here, Lou, Sherri, I just really appreciate what you're doing. I appreciate the fact that you're here helping others in the world. And if you want to get ahold of Lou and Sherri, go to LouEverettgroup.com and reach out they have some material and some information that you can use to just test out, to see how it fits and feels in your world. And also know that we have the ability and the opportunity to change. We have the opportunity to grow and evolve into someone new. Just take that first step and get started because imperfect action is better than no action at all. So let's make sure that we go out and do what we can to help others be kind because you know what? #kindnessiscool and #smilesarefree and we want you to #enjoytheday. Thank you for being here, you guys.

Lou Everett: [00:26:25] Thank you. Appreciate the work you're doing, man.

Russ Johns: [00:26:28] Take care and we'll see you next time, #enjoytheday

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