Your problem is not the problem, with Ben Robins

Welcome to Building Your Leader Brand. Today on the show, Bob is speaking with Ben Robbins. The only way that I can get people to resonate with things is if I tell my storey in the most transparent way possible and hope and trust that people are going to see themselves in it and say, well, actually, this Ben guy doesn't seem like he's a a shark or a charlatan, this makes a lot of sense. And he's walked in my shoes, right? Hi there and welcome back to Building Your Leader Brand. My name is Bob Gentle, and every week I speak with incredible people who share their secrets to building, marketing, and monetizing their expertise and the mindset you need for your business to grow and thrive. If you're new to the show, take a second to subscribe. It helps me a lot. It means the numbers go up and numbers going up are my favourite thing. and it also means you won't miss these wonderful conversations. Similarly, if you like shows like this, you will love the Personal Brand Business Roadmap, nearly, nearly 70 pages now of everything you need to start, scale, or fix your expert business. Just visit the link in the show notes or amplifyme.agency/roadmap. So this week I am thrilled to be joined by Ben Robbins. Ben is one of the people over the last year that surprised me in ways I wasn't expecting, and a conversation that I keep returning to for reasons that we may or may not discuss today. But Ben, welcome to the show. Thank you, Bob. It's a pleasure to be here. And you obviously had tremendously low expectations before meeting me. You can pass them. No, not at all. I think, so for the listener's benefit, Ben is somebody who's impressed me a lot. And I think what I wanted to come to here is I meet a lot of coaches, and I mean a lot of coaches, and a lot of them I wouldn't hire. But when I met Ben, my assumptions of a flash young kid who wants to be a coach and who, who does he think he is— within about 5 minutes, I was thinking, goodness me, I want to hire this guy, which doesn't happen very often. So really I guess that's where I'm coming from. I'm trying to think of diplomatic ways to say these things without saying other things that are more confidential. But it was a delight to meet you, Ben. Well, thank you very much. It was also a pleasure to meet you as well, Bob, which is obviously why we're here now. So it's incredible. So for the listener, I think it would be useful for people to understand your background a little bit. You've had a really interesting career and you come to coaching actually from a very interesting perspective. Can you maybe tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, look, I think from my perspective, I've, as you kind of alluded to, I've had a very varied career. I've worked at both startups and multinational organisations, and for me, I was really at the forefront of something. So when I started as the first UK employee of an Amazon consultancy, for lack of a better word, people didn't really know what Amazon was at the time, which is pretty crazy to say now. And we, we had the pleasure of working with some of the world's biggest brands. Think P&G, Unilever, Sony, etc., right? And I was at the forefront of kind of articulating to them how they should think about this thing and why e-commerce was going to be this thing that, while wasn't massive to their P&L right now, was going to fundamentally change everything. And from that point on, I kind of moved through a number of different organisations, latterly leading Amir for a global consultancy, growing that to a little over £15 million, a team of 20+ spread throughout Europe, mainly centred in London but spread throughout Europe. And it was phenomenal, right? It was, it was the greatest learning base that I could be. And when people say, okay, you've made the transition from coaching or from that to coaching, I say, no, I think you've got this backwards. To me, leadership and coaching are synonymous terms. And so in my mind, I've been coaching my entire career. I've been coaching the people that I've led to understand what motivates them, what can make them better, what are the blind spots that they're seeing. For when I worked with more latterly Google or Meta, I didn't see it that I was working— although it was quite exciting to say those names, it wasn't that I was working with them, it was the people that were sat in the seat. How can I get them promoted? How can I get the best out of them? How can I really understand the motivations that they want to understand so that I can articulate the journey that we're going on in the best possible way? And so for me, stepping into this more formal coaching environment, right, has been a breeze in many ways. Now, there's obviously a lot of things that you have to learn, but in terms of actually everything that I've been doing was kind of formulating for this I think the question that everybody's probably asking is a wonderful corporate career trajectory there. There was no reason for you to sidestep into coaching. In many respects, people might look at that and think that could be judged a retrograde step. But I sense there's probably a very solid reasoning there for you, and I'm really interested to know what that is. Well, I bloody hope it's solid reasoning. I thought enough about it. Look, I think there's a number of different sides to it. Many people, when I go on a podcast or when I explain it to someone for the first time, they think you must have hated the corporate world. And that isn't further from the truth, right? If you ask me now, I had in my perception, certainly in Europe, the best e-commerce role that existed. I had a team that I'd pretty much handpicked. I worked with the biggest and the coolest clients, and we were growing at a substantial rate. I don't think— I don't know of anybody that was growing faster than us, and on a pretty significant base. It wasn't as if we were nobodies, right? And so I certainly didn't step out of it thinking, okay, well, I want to move away from that. That's something I didn't like. I loved parts of it, and it afforded me a wonderful lifestyle and my partner and I a wonderful life. But as I said, what I began to realize— and look, I'll be honest with you, I had some health things that kind of gave me a little nudge as well. But what I began to realise was that I loved parts of it. I loved the team. I loved getting the most out of the team. I loved the growth. I loved the hustle and bustle of it. But I didn't need the e-commerce guys anymore. What I needed was to be able to do that leadership, as we've talked about already, with the people in front of me and to be a sparring partner for the people that I work with. And I have the pleasure of working with incredible people that are in many cases far smarter than me or far more experts in their business than me, certainly. And we challenge the assumptions that we have. We pull out the things that they've been too close to see. Like a phrase that I like that I've mercilessly stolen from someone, I'm not quite sure who, Bob, is that many people are They're inside the bottle trying to read the label. Well, I'm outside it, so I can point to what that means for them. And so, yeah, it may look like a retrograde skip. I have very grand ambitions for this, as I'm sure you can imagine. But no, I have great pleasure in the people that I meet, the variety of the people that I meet, and actually being able to do more of what I love every day rather than having to just always do it in the kind of the guise of e-commerce or consulting So one of the things that I often find with people who are experts in something, and you have an awful lot of experience of leading capable people, and I think that translates wonderfully into coaching because people recognise when somebody gets it. And I think that's almost certainly something that allows you to meet the people that you meet as a peer rather than as somebody who's coming up from downstairs as the help, so to speak. Yeah. But one of the things that you'll notice about a craftsman, I think is the phrase I'm going to use here, is the moment they're faced with somebody or something, very, very quickly they can see what the problem is, where somebody else may have been trying to work out this challenge for a decade, perhaps. And you probably know within a few minutes this is where we need to play. And in doing this, you probably find that there are patterns and these patterns repeat. What are the most consistent patterns that you find yourself drawn to that we can learn from? I think there's two that I will say, right? And sorry for diverting it already, but there's two. The first thing I would say is that we are conditioned in society in the way that we've been brought up that more is always the answer. Okay, I need to add more to solve this problem. In many, many cases, what I find is actually we're doing a lot of things, and when we actually take a step back and question, are those things taking us where we want to go? Are they the highest priorities for me? And look, I work with a lot of founders, business owners. Are you uniquely qualified to be doing that thing? For a founder or a business owner, I want you to spend your time on the thing that you are uniquely brilliant at. If we steal a phrase like your zone of genius, right? So actually removing everything that inhibits you doing that, I think in many cases is super, super valuable. And then the other side of it is we tend to make assumptions about what the actual problem is, or we stop too early on what the problem is. And so what I actually spend a lot of time doing is digging. Not just for your motivations, for what the actual problem is, but for actually really what's underneath it all. And I make it very concrete. I spoke to a guy last week who's in the upcoming podcast that I mentioned where they bring a problem. And for him, this is a phenomenal entrepreneur. He's— he works in the real estate industry. He's got a $300 million a year business, right? So I'll be honest, you question sometimes whether you can lace this guy's shoes. But the thing that you realise and the thing that he came with was, I want to take my business. I want the sellers. I have 60 sellers. I want to take it to 85. So he came in talking about tactics. I want to— should I put more money through Indeed? Should I try LinkedIn recruiting? No. The thing that we uncovered after going through a lot of that was actually there were other things that you hadn't done. You haven't articulated why you are uniquely qualified to get these sellers in, why they should back and trust you after any of the other competition. What could you be doing in a slightly different way to alleviate some of their concerns? After that conversation, he realised that no seller works with him for a year and then is not making six figures at the end of the year. No one. Now, to me, that's a pretty compelling message as to why you should go and work for someone, right? And so all of these things And that's not all of it. I'll save some of it for the podcast. Like, you, you realise that actually it wasn't just a great way to get people in, it was a great reason. He talks about this amazing mission to want to solve the hunger crisis for juniors and for seniors in his state. It's a wonderful reason for people to want to join his organisation. It's a wonderful reason that they want to stay in the organisation. It also would grow his business fantastically because it's a wonderful reason to want to sell his sell your house through him. And so I've taken a little bit longer to explain that, Bob, than you probably want. But it's, it's realising that the, the presenting problem and the true problem are often slightly disconnected. And coming back to being inside the bottle, it helps to have someone like me to point out exactly how you can connect them up. I think you identified an interesting question there, which was motivation and One of the things that I recognise is that if people don't really know why they do what they do, it's very difficult for them to really put their back into it and to make the sacrifices or sort of go through the 7 fires of hell that are sometimes required in order for them to get to where they want to be. And I'm interested, because I think this is probably a big component for you personally, what it is that motivates you with coaching. Because you have been fairly successful in a fairly short space of time, and that's actually fairly rare. And I think it's important for people listening to understand why you do what you do. And that's a question I ask a lot of people, right? We can get to that later. But for me, I probably made Google an awful lot of money. I probably made much better And yes, as I said in the, at the beginning of this, I took delight in the fact that we got a lot of people promoted, right? They started in one role by working with us, by picking us as the horse to back. We managed to grow their business as such that they would have got elevated into different roles, different positions. And that was amazing. But again, I really wanted to truncate that. I love working with business owners and founders because they're just, A, really interesting people to talk to. No conversation is the same. You can see the spark in their eyes as they talk about what they're working on, and that if you make a change for them, it's not just making a change for the business they work in, it makes a tangible difference for them. And so when I thought about where I wanted to take the next chapter of my life, it was really about how can I have more of that, and how can I actually make a tangible impact in people's lives. And the way that I can do that in the closest way possible is really what I want to step into. So what's interesting there is a lot of people come to coaching out of a need to generate an income, whereas you pivoted into coaching because that's where I sense the greatest joy was. There's something we were speaking about before recording I think you'd said there was something you were particularly proud of and then questioned, oh, should I be talking about being proud? And a lot of the time people misinterpret pride for joy. For me, that's probably become the greatest compass. Once you get out of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you get to choose what motivates you. It's a really interesting thing where people go because some people, they just want they just want more. It's acquisitiveness, whereas others have assumed— and I guess this is your thread— that a greater acquisition is what they should be going for. But sometimes that's the wrong thing. And I think it's a real sense of maturity that you did pivot for joy rather than pivot for accumulation, if you see what I mean. Yes, I completely agree. And, and now you've mentioned that, it makes me think of a book that I can't remember the title of, but it was written by a Harvard professor. I'm not sure if he still is. Clayton, someone Clayton. Can I look it up and we can— Absolutely. Because I want to know. Yes, it's a theme for me at the moment. I was blessed that in, in my first full-time role, right, I was gifted a book by my my manager, and it was by Clayton Christensen called How to Measure a Life, right? And it was a subtle brag from my manager because he did his MBA at Harvard and he'd been coached by this— or I mean, taught by this guy. But it, it very early on had me thinking about things that perhaps you aren't often blessed to think about at that stage. And he talked about how he had graduated and there were phenomenally talented people that had graduated with him and how he would talk, he would go back to the graduation class and I guess they do it in the States where every 5 years or so you meet everybody and you kind of congregate again and you would see that there were these people that had earned a tremendous amount of money, but they were on their third marriage. Or he talked about one of the graduating class was involved in the Enron crisis, right, where they made a whole heap of terrible mistakes and the motivation being really money. And he talks about this scorecard. We very often measure our life by the scorecard of money or prestige or anything like that. But actually the things that you can't buy are going home to a happy home or being fulfilled at the end of the day. And I don't want to get it too, too woo-woo too early on, right? But it really made me think, okay, well, actually, if I was going to create that life, what would that look like? Now, it took me over a decade to think about actually doing it, Bob, right? So maybe I was a slow pupil, but it made me think that actually there's more to life than just this. And I chased the money for a long time, so don't get me wrong. But the thing that then tipped it was actually my partner Madhuri. She said to me at one point, we were doing very, very well financially. I've talked about it in different aspects. How much I was earning and the kind of people that I was working with and things like that. She said, if you are this successful doing something that you, you love but you don't love fully, imagine how successful you'll be at something that you do. And I never quite stopped thinking about it, right? And I actually still don't stop thinking about it to this day because again, the advice that I give to people is, is really what are you uniquely qualified? I ask myself that fairly regularly, what can I do that makes me distinct? And so again, a long answer to get to the point that I actually think the two are far more interlinked than we tend to think. That actually, when you are fulfilled and excited to do what you're doing, the people opposite you tend to be pretty excited too. Yeah. And the virtuous benefit in this case is the side benefit rather than the main focus, is that financially you tend to do pretty wonderfully too. Yeah, I think the old— I can't remember if it was Zig Ziglar, but something along the lines of, you can have anything in the world that you want if you can just help enough other people get what they want. And I think the nice thing about your work is actually it's the question of what do they want becomes the precursor to the work, because a lot of people don't actually know. What I liked about your description there is If you look at how an artist works, they don't suddenly just start doing a 20-foot sculpture, but they begin with a little bit of play. They begin with sketches, and over time the vision emerges. And our lives are exactly the same. Our businesses are the same. Most people sit down at the table and think, okay, this is what I'm going to do, and then they go off and do it, and then they wonder why it doesn't feel fulfilling. It's because they didn't give the vision time to emerge. And I think the whole component of vision, to your point about assumptions, we all assume that if we're going to do X, then X always looks like it's done like this. That doesn't have to be the case. There's your way. And I kind of, I lost my thread a little bit there, but I think a lot of people, if they would sit back, But if they would take a breath and think, if I could do anything and I was really going to love it, I was going to enjoy it, give myself time to play imaginatively and with a bit of fantasy, that can then crystallise down into vision. Most people try to push into vision from the pragmatic and it doesn't really work. That was where I was trying to get to. Well, you did it very well. Thank you. And it makes me think of two things, right? So you brought up the sculpture, and I always think of that when someone talks about a sculpture. I think about Michelangelo. How did you go about creating David? Well, I didn't know where David was. I just removed from the marble everything that wasn't David, right? Yeah. And I often think that we often think that we have to create things, that we have to go and do more. Actually, I think that the In many ways, the way that I like to think about is actually it's paring it back and in many cases remembering what made it so brilliant. Right. And just being— doing that repeatedly is a great thing. So can you come from that frame I think is useful. And yes, the motivation is super important and like I don't want to keep on bringing up the podcast, but it allows me to talk about people more openly because I also want to be very confidential about things. I spoke to a lady last or last week or a few weeks ago now. And she— I was asking her what her motivations were and she was saying, I want to make multiple revenue streams. And I said, that's great, we can, we can help you with that. But I don't think, at least not in my instance, I don't know whether it's the case for you, Bob. I don't wake up excited every day to have multiple revenue streams, right? Smells like complexity to me. Exactly. She negated it somewhat by saying that they wanted No, it would be passive. And that sounds a little bit more alluring, right? But what does the money actually mean to you? Because unless you can— unless for me, at least the way that I see it, unless you can get really tactical or practical perhaps about what that actually does for your life. And what that opened for her is that she had elderly parents and a disabled brother. The actual motivation came through, right? And then from that perspective, and obviously the desire to have a great relationship and a great life with her husband. From that perspective, then you have an opportunity to create the business that you want, to talk about the things that you want to change and why you want to change them. But to me, unless you really get to the true motivation, not just a dollar amount in your bank account, it becomes a little bit more difficult perhaps to, to know why you're doing things and to do the— go through, as you talked about, do the hard yards to make it happen, or to know why you're perhaps changing direction, even if it means kind of a downward turn or whatever in the interim. So one thing that I keep returning to again and again is that the opportunity in the average expert business typically comes from the people around you. And I think statistically, something like 60% of opportunity in the expert business— and the coach kind of sits right in the heart of that— will come through your existing network. And then there's something like 20% generated through content, a little bit through outreach, and then ads are marginal on the end. What does that look like for you? And I guess, how do you approach cultivating and nurturing relationships? Yes, so look, I, I had the benefit of a decade-long career that I had cultivated a number of different relationships there, right? And I happened to work in a relatively niche industry that grew, and so that I had contacts there. And that was really— I'll be honest, as soon as I started talking about this, I'd already had some clients already before leaving, but it was never necessarily a viable path that I wanted to pursue. As soon as I started talking about what I was doing, people got excited and said, Ben, I always wanted to work with you on these sorts of things. And so let's have that conversation, right? So as you say, a large part of it came through the existing network. I obviously had a relatively untapped network on LinkedIn. So as soon as I started talking a little bit about my ideas there, that I guess shook a few trees and that came through that way. And yes, I have also got business through ads, business through other social media avenues. I'm blessed that I've turned off my ads and it hasn't made a huge difference to my my business, right? And we talked about at the beginning of this, like, for me, social media is a growing channel, right? It's an avenue that I continue to grow, but it's, it's really coming back to that— what kind of— what we've talked about already, the authenticity piece, doing it my way, doing it in the way that feels congruent for me, doing the YouTube, etc., in a way that makes sense. And that is an area that I'm seeing people resonate with and people pick up from, and that's how I think about it. To answer the second part of your question in terms of nurturing, I, yeah, I, I'm a, I am a person that has always liked, and there's probably people that would agree or disagree with me, to manage my life through my calendar, right? I'm a person that loves to have zero emails in my inbox. And so I, the way that I manage it is I will have 3 months out, I will have a meeting that says, I will send a message to whoever it is, or I will send an email to myself to remind myself at a certain point that it's something that I need to do. And so I do it very probably in a roundabout way, but that's how I think about it. It won't work for everyone, but that's how I think about it. I think the way I would sum that up is obviously you have a bit of a system. It's not like a mass nurture campaign or anything like that. It's much more intentional. But what shines through everything you're describing there is the people who tend to thrive fix an obvious and expensive problem for, for people that recognise that you are credible in addressing that problem, and then making yourself available. And that makes it very easy for people to approach you because there's clarity there, but it also makes you very referable because again, there's clarity there. And I think a lot of people hedge in who they're for, and a lot of people hedge in who they are, and they hedge in the way they communicate, how they bring value to people. You don't, and I think that's why things happen more readily for you. One of the things that really makes me sad is people coming to coaching and advising and failing to thrive, not because they don't have the skills and ability, but because they didn't make a commitment to a problem that was big enough for people to be willing to put their hand in their pocket to fix it. And without sort of over-egging the pudding, you very clearly do, but in a very credible way. I think there are there are probably lots of people who could do the work that you do, but they wouldn't have the credentialed track record and a community of people around you that nod their head and say, yeah, he's a good guy, which I think is a very powerful thing. But I do feel like that element of intention of paying attention to and caring for the network around you is what really works. And I think there's one thing I've been paying attention to a lot. I think I've repeated myself on that a lot today, but if you strip back referrals, if you think about who I recommend for people for things, you could take away all the transactional reasons. They don't matter to me. I'm not going to refer them. And What you described there is a systematic process of mattering to people, but very particular special people. And that then creates a bit of a flywheel effect. Taking that online and mattering to people at scale, that's where the magic really happens. And I think that's what you're beginning to tap into now through that authenticity layer and being really clear about who you are and why that matters and not holding back, which is what I think a lot of people do. If you— if your content comes from a place of generosity, and that's what you're describing in the podcast, then the universe tends to reciprocate. So yeah, I really, really like it. To be fair, and for the listener, I think nobody's ever perfect, nothing's ever perfect. Where in your business do you experience frustration or friction? Well, it's funny that you asked the question that I was going to lead into anyway, right, Bob? Like For me, and it's wonderful that you see it as authenticity and that I'm solving large problems, right? But I do wrangle with it regularly. Like, am I being enough myself? Am I being congruent with how I want to build things? And we talked about, like, as I say, I was fortunate that I built the business really off a network, right? And for people that already knew me. And then yes, I was fortunate that I had— I picked up from there. And then latterly, as I've started to think about social media, it hasn't been something that I've needed to do, but it's something that I know that is important. And as I continue to take my business to the next phase, I wanted to do, and I fell into the trap of listening to people on how to do that. And when I started my, my YouTube, right, which is actually very funny because it was— I titled it Intentional Living. Because I believe that the intentionality piece is very, very important. And we can talk about that in a second as well, maybe. But I began to realise that, yes, this might work, right? But it wasn't how I wanted to do it. It wasn't how I coach. I don't tell people these are the 5 tricks. I don't tell people that this is how you should run your business or how you should think about your business. I want you to run your business in the way that is congruent and efficient for you, irrespective of how I think it. I will push and I will probe and I will challenge to the end of the world, right? But I don't tell you how to do it. And a classic example, right? I had someone the other day who their goal was to work 14 hours a day. They said, if we strip things out of your life, what would you be doing? I'd still be working 14 hours a day. I'd just been working on higher priority things. Not how I want to live my life. But all power to you if that's how you want us to create it for you. And so I constantly have this question of how can I do it the best way? How can I articulate myself clearer? How can I get people to resonate more? And the conclusion that I keep on coming to, very similar to what we discussed at the top, is the only way that I can get people to resonate with things is if I tell my storey in the most transparent way possible. And hope and trust that people are going to see themselves in it and say, well, actually, this Ben guy doesn't seem like he's a shark or a charlatan. This makes a lot of sense. And he's, he's walked in my shoes, right? And the credibility piece is important— not important, but at least I think it shows that I get it. I've been there. I've sat in your seat to a large degree, and I understand where you're, where you're coming from. I think the one thing for me from a social media perspective, and I see this mistake made all the time even by apparent professionals, is if you make it about yourself, you'll often struggle. If you make it about the other person, you will probably have their full attention because people are skimming social media and you need to speak to the subconscious before the conscious brain will pay attention. The subconscious has one priority over everything, and that's itself. So the opening paragraphs of any post, if you make it about the other person and you try and generate a strong feeling, yes, you'll generally— and you make it clear who this is for, which is a big ask in 3 lines, but it'll typically work well. I think you do do this quite well. I think the other thing is recall. And I think this is where a lot of people fall down, that again, people are moving through social media so quickly that if you're trying to depend on an infographic to create a connection with people, you're on a hiding to nothing. Your face is the best interface because it lights up very specific neuron clusters. And the moment they see your face, oh, there's my friend Ben, mission accomplished at that point. If you can compound that with clarity about what you do, clarity about who you do it for, and why people should care, that for me is the basic meat and potatoes. And that's one thing I have noticed that you do either intentionally or instinctively, but it works. Because when I see a Ben Robbins post, oh, there's Ben. And that compounds, and it compounds significantly over time. To the point where, like I think it's probably working for you, you get a call from somebody on the other side of the world that was referred by somebody on the other side of the world. You've never heard of either of them, but it's through this clarity and the recall that does it, not through cleverness and not through artifice. It's creating that sense of a genuine connection. Yeah, look, I will not profess to be a social media expert in any way. I'm a little bit more professional in LinkedIn, but not particularly anywhere else. I'm just trying to work out the best way possible for me to express it. And as you say that, I think you've articulated it far better than I could, so I won't repeat it. But what it made me think of is when you were saying about what's important to them is— I don't know whether you ever read the book How to Win Friends and Influence People. Oh, many, many years ago. One line that I remember from that book is the sweetest word in any language is the person's name. Right. And so I— you can't call people out by name when it comes to social media, but calling out, I think, what is important to them, I have found to be a useful way to do it. We have time for a funny storey. So I pay attention to patterns and I know earlier you didn't want to get woo, but this is properly woo. Twice I heard on a podcast that the CIA did an experiment to try and work out what this feeling that somebody's watching me is actually about, if it's a real thing. And they spent tens of millions of dollars on this and worked out, yeah, it's a real thing. And what they discovered was there are environmental factors, but that only accounted for a small proportion of the feeling that there was what they decided was a very obvious quantum effect. Through paying direct attention to somebody, there was an element of entanglement that they just somehow detected through the, the unified whatever. And it got me thinking, there's something important here. And it came up in another podcast I was listening to, and I thought, okay, I need to pay attention to this. And what I came to was, if the CIA can train people to avoid detection by avoiding direct attention, Can we turn that around and can we achieve attention by paying really clear attention? And when you come to quantum physics, there is no time, there is no space. And so when we sit down to create a piece of content, if we have an avatar for our ideal client in mind— and I don't mean like a written avatar, an actual person in mind The resulting content does something. I can't say what, but for me it's been money in the bank. Okay. Which is a very weird thing to describe, but it works. So anyone listening, you can have that. But it's much more worth it. I'll have it as well, that sounds very good. But speaking to this thing is, if it's talking about the problems people have, if it's naming them, if they can sit up and go, oh, that's me, you've— everything else is really a bonus because, oh, that's me, oh, that's Ben, this is how I feel. Repeat, repeat, repeat. My goodness, my light's gone a bit weird. What's next for Ben? What are you working on at the moment? I know you mentioned to me earlier you had a webinar coming up. It'd be lovely to know about that, but more broadly, what's the plan, Ben? So look, my plan has always been very obvious, right? I want to have a greater impact in more and more people's lives, right? So I started this very much one-on-one. I want to continue to do that. I want to toy around with ways that I can do that to more people, right? So whether that's in a group setting or otherwise. The one thing that I've challenged myself to think about is I will only do a group session if I can find a way of making it more impactful than one-on-one. So I think the audience that's in that room is very, very important. But yeah, anyway, so that's something I'm toying around with is the next phase. The webinar, obviously the webinar changes from— I do every 2 weeks, so that changes from every 2, uh, 4 night to fortnight. Right. So I won't talk about too openly what that is because I don't want someone to turn up excited to attend it and then realise that it's something slightly different. But it's really what I've learned from speaking to people in those 2 weeks, what has been pertinent, what has helped people, the questions that I've asked that have kind of changed things for people. And yeah, I think that's the predominant side of things, really. I just— and I guess for my record, I'm I'm going to the University of Cambridge to do an advanced executive coaching course. So I don't do that because I feel like I necessarily need to learn more necessarily, but I'm a big practicer and believer in putting— challenging yourself, always be learning. And they take on around 15 people or so each year. And so I want to put myself in those rooms where the quality of what I'm doing gets really, really challenged. And so, yeah, those are the 3 major things that I'm thinking about at the moment. I do admire the going back to school. I wouldn't have the patience for that. The very idea of that being on my calendar would send me into a proper tailspin. So yeah, I really admire it. Why do you say that? Well, there comes the coaching. Because so much would have to be put on hold. Frankly, I would have to make an awful lot of decisions. But yeah, so we need to pivot into the 3 things. Ben, as amplifiers. Yes. These are 3 things listeners can go and do. The books they can read, podcasts they can listen to, your favourite apps, your favourite sandwich. There are no rules. What is amplifier number 1? I don't have a favourite sandwich, but I do enjoy plenty of them. I'm a big foodie. But anyway, like, there's— look, I don't know whether they're rules. They're ways that I would think about things. So, things that I have used that have been useful in my time. I think the first one we've already discussed. I spend a lot of time talking about subtraction before addition, right? So, I think it's apt that as we're thinking about things that people can utilise, the first thing that I would I would do is not add something, but look at what you could remove that would actually get you closer to your goal. What is the inhibitor that's getting in the way, and how can you peel back some layers perhaps to, as we said, be a little bit more authentic version of you, right? So that's the first one. The second one again ties to the motivation piece that we've talked about, Bob. So I often ask people some variation of this. What is your— how would you design your ideal ordinary Tuesday? Or how would you design your ideal average week? Right. I want it to be just the average. Nothing spectacular. Because if I ask someone what would be spectacular, very often they'll tell me that I'd like to be drinking piña coladas in Tahiti. Thank you very much. Not super practical for us to work on. But when we think about, okay, what do I want my Tuesday to look like? It brings us back to the far smaller things, right? Maybe it's with your partner, spending time the first part of the morning with your partner or taking your kids to school or going for a walk, right? It's this. This is what I do within my business. These are the things that I would focus on. These are the things that would energise me. And I think it then frames the conversation far more than, okay, we're going to take your business so IPOs to, okay, well, actually, how can we build your business and your life at the same time. How can we make sure that you're doing this for an incredibly long time and thrilled to be doing it? And then I will give you a book because I've already mentioned a couple of books, uh, to you, but I'm a big reader. I like to take other people's ideas and from different fields as well and see how they can probe my thinking. One that I really enjoyed actually was The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. I don't know whether you've read this one, Bob. I have never even heard of it. Ah, which is a treat. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. I can send it to you after the show. But yes, please. Do you know Naval Ravikant at all? I've never heard the name before, which I find peculiar. So I believe— look, don't I'm not his disciple or anything like that. I don't know a huge amount about him, but from what I can understand, he was kind of an investor, business owner in Silicon Valley, and he got a little bit older and now he's kind of seen as the philosopher of Silicon Valley. Right. And he spends a lot of time thinking about things. And the thing that's actually quite nice about the Almanack is that he did not compile it. Someone else compiled it for him. Without actually Naval knowing at all and told the copy. So it's quite a true representation of his thinking. And look, I don't claim to know all of his stuff or agree with all of it, but there's several things in there like that I found very thought-provoking, really, about like, okay, if you were going to set yourself an hourly rate and he talks about— I'll make up the numbers because I don't know exactly. He talks about, when I was much younger, I set my hourly rate as $5,000 an hour. And when I told people that, they thought I was utterly insane because I was earning nowhere near that. But what it created was some level of filter as to what I accepted in my life. And so it wasn't a trade-off. So while I'm doing nothing, I'll go and do this. It was, well, is that worth $5,000? Yes, spending time with my family is worth $5,000. I've bought the wrong size clothing, going standing in line and returning that— not good for the environment, I'm not condoning that— but he talks about not returning it and just throwing it away because it wasn't worth his time. And being ruthless about actually what made that benchmark, I just found a very interesting observation. And I haven't fully lived it, but I think it's those sorts of things that you can apply in different ways and can probe you and make you think about different things I found very, very useful. I'm going to run through them all briefly. I think the subtraction— one of the things I noticed after 350— I think this might be interview 350, now I think of it. Oh, wow. Is the most successful people I've met typically achieve it through elimination, not through addition. And abundance through elimination tends to be the most fulfilling route. Everything else just leads to complexity and burnout. So I absolutely echo that. How would you design your ideal week or day? There's an awful lot of assumptions that when you started talking about that, I started thinking time blocking. I started thinking productivity and effectiveness. I did not think about fulfilment and joy and happiness and sustainability. I'm actually going to go away and look at that. We have so many assumptions about how we should be using our time that are almost certainly wrong. And what you described there about the hourly rate, for example, it was a very good lens. And I think one of the things that I noticed is, so when you ask somebody what kind of car they drive, they tell you, and then you say, I bet when you got that car, you saw that car everywhere you go. Absolutely. That's the reticular activating system coming into play. This kind of filter we can use to activate the reticular activating system. So we'd start probably to spot opportunities we'd never seen before. It's not just about what we ignore, but it's also perhaps about what we bring into our world, which is really interesting. I'm very intrigued by this almanack. I'm going to buy that today. Yes, you'll enjoy, you'll enjoy it. Another thing that I, as we were talking it through, that he says that I think I am very aligned with is that I believe, and I don't want to bastardise his quotes, but it's something along the lines of, if you're rich and unhappy, that's on you, right? Yeah. Like, ultimately, his definition of success is that you have all of the monetary rewards that you want, but you're doing it in a way that actually is joyful to you, like is enjoyable to you. And he again talks about these things that the highest rewards that you can get is, is basically peace of mind and a happy household. Those things, those things that you cannot buy with money, those are the highest signs in his perception of success. And I tend to ascribe to that quite a lot. It's like if you escape Maslow's hierarchy of needs by building a prison, You haven't escaped. Yes. The point, I guess, is to reach this self-actualization, which I think a lot of people, they just get so bundled up in the wool on the way out that they never accomplish. That's a really useful observation. Ben, I have had a lot of fun. If people want to get closer to you, if they want to find out more about you, how can they do that? What's your favourite way for them to do that? Well, as we mentioned, Bob, and it's been a pleasure talking to you, so thank you. Ever so much for having me on the show. The best way to do that, you'll find everything on my website, but specifically the things that I'm working on or thinking about will be at ben-robbins.com/links. That's where you'll find the most up-to-date things, where you can connect with me and we can get in touch here. And what's the podcast called if they want to go looking for it? So not yet to launch, but they will be launched by the time we've had, uh, many podcasts recorded. It will be going live next week. It's called Owner's Trap. So I like that. Yes. Well, again, thank you very much, Ben. Thank you for home, for listening. That does bring us to the end of another episode. If you've enjoyed this, you will love the Personal Brand Business Roadmap. I keep saying 50, but I think it's more like 70 pages of everything you need to start, scale, and fix your expert business. 100% Updated last week, all new. Just visit the link in the show notes or visit amplifyme.agency/program. Again, before you go, take a breath before you go find this next thing to do. Leave me a review, 5-star reviews wherever you go. Spotify, Apple Podcasts, 5, count them. Will make my day. Again, thanks at home for listening. Ben, thank you for your time. You have been awesome. Thank you, Bob.