¶ Exploring Thought Leadership and Influence
Welcome to One Insight . My name is Rich Litvin , I grew up in London and I now live in LA , and this is a podcast for extraordinary top performers and their coaches . You see , I've coached some of the most successful and talented people on the planet . I can see what most people cannot see and I dare to say what most people wouldn't dare to say .
And what I know about success is that on the other side of it , it can be incredibly lonely . You can feel more of an imposter the more successful you become , and when you're the most interesting person in the room , you're actually in the wrong room .
Clients who are more successful , more intelligent and wealthier than you need your support , more than they know and more than you can imagine . I coach around insight . Life looks one way , something happens and the world looks different and your entire world changes .
It can happen in an instant , and this podcast is called One Insight because a single insight can change everything In a moment . You're going to see me coaching Sarah . Sarah has been a coach for longer than me 30 years . She works with leaders of Fortune 50 companies extraordinary leader , extraordinary coach and , as always , I need to mess with her thinking .
She's interested in thought leadership . What does this mean ? Where should she go ? Does she want to go wide and create a book that's read for lots of people ? And I draw out a concept for her that I've never used before the idea of writing a book for only one person .
It was really fun to see where we got to on this , and I want you to imagine as I'm coaching her , that I'm coaching you , because we can get overwhelmed if we start to think about thought leadership and writing a book for lots of people . Imagine , as I'm coaching Sarah , I'm coaching you and your plan is to write a book for one person , your dream client .
All right , use that premise as you're listening and enjoy . Hello Sarah , hi Rich , good're listening and enjoy . Hello Sarah , hi Rich , good to be with you . Yeah , I'm looking forward to being with you , and my premise for today is let's play . I don't know where we're going to go , nor do you .
We've got an idea what we might talk about , but if you were going to get off this call in about 30 minutes or so and say , oh , that was great .
What might we have talked about ? I really admire the way you write regularly and you regularly put things out there . I have a list . I use Trello for this kind of thing . I probably have 20 different ideas of stuff for Instagram and different things .
People are always saying to me oh , I mean , like on one of the other podcasts we did or one of the other some things well , you speak French in France , you know , you learn a few bits of the language in order to operate there . It rolls off my tongue . It doesn't . It doesn't always land to me as some profound wisdom .
But then I hear other people like , oh , profound wisdom . But then I hear other people like , oh , man , that really landed with me , blah , blah . So I would like to talk about the nuances around that .
Knowing , tuning into who I'm talking to enough to realize when I've said something profound would be one , and then what to do with it if anything after that , and because I feel like , not , not , I have no aspirations really to be some mega influencer per se , but I do feel very called at the core of my being to recognize that people seem impacted and
influenced and supported and expanded by what I say , and so it's sort of that light under a bushel thing . I'm not intending to keep a light under a bushel , but it's starting to feel more and more like I am .
So I would love to walk away from this call with some sort of portal or , I say it , insight or breakthrough about moving to the next level in my own thinking of how I present my thoughts .
Okay , we can play with that . I've got news for you , though . You are an influencer , and here's why . For those of you who are watching and listening , what you don't know about Sarah is that she has been a coach longer than me 30 years before this thing was barely even called coaching .
Coaching was really used in the sporting industry barely was making it into leadership and management at that stage , and you've written a book . How long ago was that book first published ? 28 years ago , 28 years ago . So Nassim Taleb has a concept he calls a Lindy concept . The longer something is out there in the world , the longer it will be out there .
So if your book has been out for 28 years , it's going to be around for at least another 28 years Just how it works . Yeah , the problem with the word influencer is we think it means someone who's on Instagram or TikTok and , yes , that might be a phrase or a word that's in vogue right now , but you're an influencer because you are influential .
How do I know you're influential ? You've got a book that's been republished several times over 28 years and is still selling . How do I know you're influential ? Because you are a trusted advisor to the leaders of Fortune 500 plus companies . You do extraordinary work with people running multi-billion dollar corporations . They trust you .
And not only do they trust you , they trust you with decades of wisdom around strategy , logistics , management and leadership , but they also trust you as you've leaned in the last few years to understanding and teaching what intuition is and how you can use intuition as a leader true , that okay that's as long as we need to hear it reflected back to it yeah , yeah
, no , I really appreciate that .
Yes , that's , that is all true , and I would even add a portion of that is that they also trust me with their families . I very often almost always , meet their families and interview their families about them , and it's not unusual to get calls four or five years down the road saying you know my daughter's having this and so with her career .
Would you talk with her too ? And my son's thinking of this and I'd love him to hear a different voice than mine about this , would you ? So I count that as an enormous trust piece .
It's huge . You have at least two generations so far of people working with you and that's a testament to the trust . Okay , there's a piece around how old must I be ? But behind that there's the depth of trust that someone would refer you to their own family member .
Yeah .
Really powerful , so you are hugely influential . Now the question I have for you is what do you want to do with that ? Because there's a few things you could do with that . You could say you know what . It's time to stop being a best kept secret . I'd like to go wide . I'd like to be more widely known .
I've got some really valuable stuff that could go out beyond just me . Or you could go deep . You could become known by a handful of people . You could start to say to all of your clients hey , I'm starting to do second generation coaching .
I now work with the sons and daughters of highly successful leaders to help them transition to becoming as successful themselves as their parents are . Wow , who does that ? That's interesting , right ? Yeah , that is interesting .
I don't know that that's my path , but it's an interesting idea to think about .
So if you're listening and watching , you would have seen Sarah go kind of quiet , look around because she's beginning to take that one in . Look , I'd never heard of that before we made it up in conversation . It may not be the direction you go , but before people ever go wide , I always like to point them to possibilities to go deep .
Yeah , my experience has been often the deeper that you go , the wider you'll go . Anyway , we've been word of mouth wide rather than trying . And you can look for $250,000 . I can help you get onto the New York Times bestseller list and it's just . There's a going rate . There's certain things that you do .
You can play that game if you want to , and I couldn't do it myself , I would refer you to somebody . But I know people who know people , and that's the game some people play . I know a guy . Yeah , I know a man . So for you , let's continue to look in a different direction for a moment .
What if going deep meant that you have a book that only has 100 copies printed , so that anyone you talk to about the work that you do you can say listen , I have a book that I would like you to read . In fact , I only want you to read chapter three and there's only six chapters . It's a 60-page book .
The kind of leaders you work with it's got to be tiny . And you say I've only got 73 copies left . I will not give it to you like a gift . This is not Christmas . If you commit to reading chapter three , it'd be my honor to give it to you .
But there are only 73 copies left , so I'm not giving them away . This is my legacy project and I got 73 to to give away before I leave this planet . Would you like to be one of the readers ?
yeah , I that that has more juice to it . For me it's intriguing , right , it's interesting . It's like , oh , I mean , imagine me on the other side of that . Someone says that to you wow , you've only written a published 100 copies and I would get one of them . Yeah , I'd commit to reading that book .
Yeah , yeah , in fact we have a dear friend who did that . It wasn't a leadership book , it was a novel , but he had like leather bound golden graved I mean gorgeous , and we feel so privileged to have that and and we're excited to read it and thankfully it was really good . So yeah , that's really interesting .
So the question then becomes who's the dream reader ? Who would I love to read this book ? Who , if they read this book , it would change everything for them . They just don't know they need it yet .
Yeah .
Who's it for ?
For me it would certainly be really high flame CEOs of big companies . So probably the psychometric rather than the whatever the demographic would be people .
I'm going to go a different direction for a second . I'm going to pause you . So , if you're listening what Sarah just said , she wanted to talk about psychographic or demographic . What that means Demographic is oh , it's for leaders of Fortune 500 companies , so it's a business owner scaling from $1 million to $5 million . There's a demographic .
Then there's a psychographic the mindset of , oh , these are leaders who have always dreamed big , these are leaders who take rapid action , and that's a great next step
¶ Creating Personalized Bespoke Leadership Books
. But I want to go even deeper . Okay , we're only allowed to write this book for one person , for one person , the person who , oh my god , if they read this , it would change everything .
There could be somebody you know , it could be a current client because someone you don't yet know , but I want to write a book that , if they read this , would change their world well , they're sort of celebrity figures who , I hesitate to say , to say aloud on a recorded thing .
And and there are a couple of CEOs and while I firmly believe and operate from the belief that nothing is broken right , there's nothing wrong high levels , male and female , who I see still working so hard to accomplish what they've already got , yeah , and making the people around them freaking miserable because they're still scrambling for something that they don't need
to prove anymore . They don't , you know , they certainly don't need more money . They're scrambling for a legacy and are in danger of undoing what they've accomplished in that sort of last gasp , frantic effort . I mean , we're seeing it writ large in the US political system . I won't say more than that .
But there are people who are less front pagey than I know and know of , who are wearing themselves out at a time when they could be setting an entirely different kind of model for the people around them .
Marshall Goldsmith wrote a book called what Got you here Won't Get you there . I think it's a brilliant title . It's actually a book for middle managers to help them be better , but the title is the premise that you're talking about Exactly .
You are in the danger of destroying your legacy as a leader by hanging on too long , and everything that helped you get as successful as you are today is exactly what's going to hold you back and drive your company into irrelevance or into chaos or into danger , and you can help right . Yep yeah , I can , I believe it .
It's an important book and it needs to be read by certain people . If there was one person who you could think of , who's a leader of a company like that you don't say the name out loud , but can you think of one person like that ? Oh yeah , they so need to read this book . Yeah , what if you wrote the book for that person ?
60 book , five chapters , really simple , five chapter titles that capture the thoughts in their head that they think oh my God , I didn't know , anybody knew that .
Yeah , I can imagine that . So are you asking me to come up with some chapter titles right now ?
No , no , no . I want to see if that feels like an exciting project . You see , what comes next is , once you've written the book , 95% will be the same , but maybe you change it for the next person Once it's been written . It's easy to print a single book . There's companies that will help you do that . So maybe this is not a hundred copies of a book .
This is one book and it's personalized for every person that you write it to .
Yeah , I mean I could see shifting maybe the order of chapters , or I can't see rewriting it for every single person .
No , I don't think you'll need to . I think it might be . The only thing that's different is the introduction and the introductions in this book . It has their name , yeah , and you talk about them in person . And so they get this book , just like your friends gave you a book that's leather bound , looks beautiful .
And they open up and chapter one says hey , fred , I wrote this book for you , but it's not a handwritten card put into the book , it's chapter one .
Yeah , yeah , that's really cool , that's really cool .
So once you've written the book , everything else becomes simple and you'll know . You're like oh you know what , chapter three is not so relevant for this one . I'll take it out . This one's only going to have four chapters . Oh , you know what ?
I'm going to write a different chapter for this person , but it's going to be a three page chapter and it's not difficult because I know them . Yeah , you're going to write a book that might end up being a hundred copies , but every single person gets a different one .
Yeah , sort of the neverending book or something . Yeah .
Yeah , it's the anti-Amazon bestseller . You know like no one can get this book unless you choose to write it for them personally , right ? And if anyone sees it , they say can I get a copy of that ? That looks really fascinating . No , I wrote that for John . What do you mean ? Yeah , I write books for one person at a time what do you mean ?
Yeah , I write books for one person at a time . Yeah , well , just that in itself is a fascinating idea , right , and ? And not to be mercenary about it , but it's , but it would be an intriguing . Uh , you know . Come on to a potential client .
You should be mercenary about it . You're a business owner . You want to have clients . There's a purpose to this book is to enroll clients . This is the most enrolling concept I've ever heard of . Yeah , you'd write a book just for me . Yeah , you wrote a book just for one of your clients . Oh yeah , that's what I do . Yeah .
I could do that . I could do that , yeah , yeah . And that does doesn't preclude some of the other wide stuff that I could do . Some of that may show up in in some wider tidbits on well , either on Instagram or even just a collection of of thoughts .
But if you're on Instagram , sarah , I think you should do it because you have fun and it's purely for fun . I don't think your clients are there . Once in a while somebody might find you , but people , even the CEO . There are CEOs who go on Instagram , but they do it for fun .
They're not looking for business concepts , so they come across something that's interesting , but that's for fun . Maybe on LinkedIn , maybe if you choose to go there . But you keep talking about this . You talk about hey , this morning I wrote a new book . Yeah , you see , I only write one book at a time for one person .
And you use that as the premise because it's deeply intriguing to people , yeah , yeah , and even with some photos of a finished copy , kind of thing .
I wrote my fifth book this morning . Oh , they're not published . You can't buy them on Amazon . I write them for one person at a time . This one was for the leader of a Fortune 50 company , the last one's for an entrepreneur who's about to sell their business .
I love that idea . That's a really , really cool idea . That's a really cool idea . I've got one particular . It's a group of clients . I've worked with their team , but I've also worked .
It was a group of founders and over the course of our time together , their company has grown and multiplied many times and so forth , and we're wrapping up our fifth year together and that would be a really cool kind of a Christmas gift as a corporate a book to the corporate entity .
Here's what I've seen , here's where you were when we started and here's what I've noticed .
That's great , so not just a book for an individual . Sometimes it'd be a book for the organization .
Yeah , yeah .
That's very cool For the team itself . Yeah , that's really cool the thing about this . So two things always fascinate me how to build a word of mouth business and how to do things that are bespoke , tailor-made , so unique for an individual .
And if you create that book and there was a special edition just for the CEO and other editions for the senior team and maybe the CEO's version was a bit more like this there's chapter four , and five at the back are just for you . No one else will ever read those chapters . They've got chapters one to three .
That's the kind of thing that when you're talking to someone , how do you buy a gift for someone who's got everything they ever needed ? Well , you make it bespoke , you make it so unique that they tell people about it . And the next time he's talking to a peer and a colleague at the golf course or this high-flying CEO , she's talking to her friends .
They say you won't believe what the consultant who works for me bought me . She got me a book , but it wasn't from Amazon . She wrote me this book just for me , and there's another version for my entire senior team , just for our organization .
There's another version for my entire senior team , just for our organization . That almost brings me to tears . That's really beautiful . That's
¶ Building Lasting Connections Through Leadership Coaching
really beautiful . And yeah , I mean so I mean ongoing clients . I have clients who've retired and you know , and as a retirement gift , you know , to write them a book about them for their next chapter .
You wrote a book about them and then at some point said to them hey , this might be a few months later , it's not the same time . Hey , as you know , build my business by word of mouth . I have space for one client right now .
Is there a leader you know you used to work with , maybe one of your adult children , someone who could really benefit from this kind of work ? Yeah , there is .
Send them my way yeah and yeah and I do . I do that because I I mean , I stay in touch with people . For years . Whenever I go to europe , one of my retired clients and his wife always come and meet us and travel with us for a couple days and and stuff , and yeah , and that's yeah , so I do . I do a lot of that , naturally , but this is like .
This is like turning up the dial in a really potent way that very few other people would do , very few other people could do the way I could do it .
Absolutely .
I love that .
And with that , so for those of you who are watching and listening , I coach for one insight . It's the title of this podcast and when I work , the kind of people I work with and they've got their insight , they're good to go Like . Are you already ? Mind is spinning .
I'm like shut up . I got a book to write Exactly .
I just wanted to let people know why I can say we're good to go , because I can see it in your eyes .
Yeah , yeah .
Thanks , Sarah .
That's really nice .
Thank you , this was great For most of human history . It wasn't called coaching , it was called leadership , and it's what I love to do to coach people , to lead people and to mess with people's thinking . If you'd like more of this , or if you'd like to learn more about our community of extraordinary top performers , go to richlitvincom .
Forward slash one insight , One Insight .