Elevate Your Life Journey: The Transformative Power Of Better Questions With Elliott Connie

 

Elevate your life by mastering the art of asking better questions. This key skill can unlock potential, overcome challenges, and lead to greater fulfillment. In this episode, Elliott Connie, the acclaimed author of Change Your Questions, Change Your Future and creator of the Aha! Moments podcast, opens up about his harrowing journey from a tumultuous childhood to becoming a beacon of hope for others. Elliott shares his deeply personal story with Mitch Russo, recounting how he grew up in a volatile environment with an abusive father. His emphasis on authenticity and the power of questioning has propelled him to international recognition. Join them as they explore resilience, authenticity, and the transformative power of personal stories.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Elevate Your Life Journey: The Transformative Power Of Better Questions With Elliott Connie

Introduction

Welcome to this moment in time when you get to chill out, tune in, and extract wisdom you could use to grow your business with your first thousand clients. By the way, if you’re reading this and you are a coach, you’re going to love what I have for you. I have a software platform called ClientFol.io. It’s helped hundreds of coaches save time on admin, and get better results for their clients while generating powerful client testimonials that work for them.

By the way, if you don’t use accountability and goal tracking in your work as a coach, you’re missing out because that’s where the juice is. Now, no other platform that I’ve ever tried has these features, which is why I decided to spend four years and create it. You could try it for a dollar. Go to GetClientfolio.com and give it a spin.

Now, on to my amazing guest and his incredible journey. As with all of us, he came from a destructive background and an abusive father, leading to suicidal thoughts and depression. He decided to use that to elevate himself and work hard for years to find his way out, to use that experience to change the lives of others through his incredible work.

Our guest calls himself a hope doctor, runs a powerful global community of healers and is the creator of Aha! Moments is a daily podcast focusing readers on your strength in the state of hope and hope and the joy that comes into their lives. He’s also written a bestselling book called Change Your Questions, Change Your Future. I want to introduce you to Mr. Elliott Connie. Elliott, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

My pleasure, Elliott. What a story. We all start out the way we start out, but like most of us, if we’re in the right place and we have the right mindset, we could use how we start out as a motivation to grow into something much better. That’s clearly what you did. Why don’t you get into some of the details of a little bit of what I covered in the intro?

I was born in Chicago, and when I was young, my family moved to Boston. I consider Boston my hometown and Chicago is where my family headquarters is. My dad was an angry man. When you’re young, you assume whatever is going on in your home is going on in everyone else’s home. I didn’t know any different until I got moved to Boston and my best friend lived across the street from me, a guy named Kyle. I would hang out at Kyle’s house and I would watch the way his parents talked to him and I would watch the way his parents treated him.

I would watch the way his parents treated each other. You don’t realize you have a problem until you become aware of other scenarios where that problem does not exist and then end up desirous of that new scenario. I started feeling like I wanted a life with no anger, without being yelled at, without threat of violence. I wanted a life where I felt loved and accepted. I wanted that life, but I didn’t have it. I lived with so much anxiety and fear and abuse and pain and had no earthly idea that that was unusual.

My inability to create that, because when you’re twelve years old, you cannot create it for yourself, caused me to struggle with my mental health. I remember when I was nineteen, I decided to take my life. I looked forward to college when I was in middle school, and I don’t come from a background of tons of educated people. I heard a rumor, what felt like a rumor at the time, that if you go to college, you can live in something called a dorm room. I had never heard that before. Someone said colleges have these things called dorm rooms. I was like, “What’s a dorm room?”

They said, “A dorm room is a room where college students live and there are no parents. It’s a big old building full of college-age kids.” I was like, “Sign me up. I don’t want to go there.” All I heard was like a place without my father present. That was the light host. That was the thing I was trying to get to all through high school, like getting myself to college. I got myself to college. I played baseball and a lot of schools wanted me to go there and play baseball. Baseball was my respite, but sports, in general, were the way I kept myself out of my house.

The more practices I could go to, the less I was in my home, and I ended up getting pretty good at certain sports, baseball specifically. I was so excited because I was 17 years old and realized that I was moving out. I got to be safe now. My father, when I was going off to school, and I knew I was about to date myself, but he gave me a beeper. Those of you not born in the 1900s probably don’t remember this device. It used to be a tiny device, and you could call a number and then type in numbers that would show up on this beeper. That beeper became my father’s way of tormenting me now that I live outside of the home.

There were times he would beep me incessantly throughout the day and I would try not to respond. I will never forget one day I was out on campus doing college things and my dad paged me 10 million times and I ignored them. I don’t want to call them back. I lived about two and a half hours’ drive from my father, and I was walking back to my dorm room, and a bunch of my friends came running up to me like, “Man, what’d you do?” I was like, “I don’t know. What are you guys talking about?”

My father had driven to the campus and was furiously looking for me and all my friends are like, “Your dad’s here and he’s pissed.” I hadn’t done anything. I was trying to be on my own and live a life. The difficult thing about that is when I realized my father had found a way to torment me outside of my home, then I no longer had a light post to look forward to. I’ve been looking forward to college to move out of the house for so long.

That was the time I was going to be peaceful and live a life without violence. Now, he has found a way to show me that that’s not true. I sunk into a very deep depression. For the next couple of years, all I could think about was taking my life. It wasn’t that I was like so depressed I wanted to die. I could see other people had different lives.

As with some of my friends in college, their families would mail them money and food and tell them how much they loved them and how proud they were of them. My life wasn’t like that. It was like if this was life, then I don’t want one. If this is what I got dealt versus what everybody else got dealt, I’d prefer to give it back. At nineteen, a super profound thing happened that changed my life and changed the direction of my life forever.

That’s quite a beginning. I’m going to try and unpack some of this because, like I said at the beginning, I think even before we jumped on together, before we started the recorder, basically, we all start out with trauma. All of us have trauma in our lives, which is how you react to trauma that defines who we are.

Parental Impact

Let’s say that there are some parents here reading this show and they might’ve felt a little pang of guilt. Hearing your story, maybe they felt as if they were that way, maybe quite not to the extent your dad was, but maybe they had unfortunately pushed their own kids a little too hard only for their own good. Of course, that’s what parents always say. It’s for your own good. What can they do now?

Now that you have made it to the other side of this, think about all the people who don’t. Think about all the people who do take their lives or all the people who are so deeply sensitive that the pain of that life you described drives them to narcotics, as it did for me. What would we say to those parents right now?

I would say apologize. Now your children are grown and they’re on the other side of it, I would say validate their experience. The most challenging thing that people have is like the enemy of healing. I want all of you guys to heal this and understand this. The enemy of healing is defensiveness. If I were to say like, let’s put myself in that situation, “Mom and Dad, when I was growing up, these things happened that hurt me. These things happen that traumatize me. These are the things that caused me to struggle.

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These are the things that I ended up having to cope with, drugs and alcohol to deal with.” When the parents get defensive, “I was doing the best I could and you weren’t the easiest child to raise,” when they behave in that way, it makes healing nearly impossible, if not actually impossible. I’m not someone who uses the word impossible very often. What you need to do is apologize and fully validate your child’s experience. It will create healing in both parties and likely create healing in the relationship itself.

That’s plain wisdom. That’s so brilliant. The enemy of healing is defensiveness. Most of us adults have had adult relationships and maybe struggled with some of them. I think what you’ve provided is one of the keys to a happier and more joyful life, which is to drop the defensiveness and truly see if you can empathize and see from another person’s point of view what they experienced dealing with it. That’s great. Elliott, the other thing I wanted to ask you about is in the opposite situation where kids are raised in a community. By the way, where in Boston were you?

Specifically, I was in the city right near Roxbury and Dorchester, but then I ended up going to high school in a place called Franklin. My mother wanted me to get a much better education. For those of you not familiar with that part of the world, if you drew a line from Boston to Providence, Franklin is the midpoint of that line.

 

I grew up in New York but moved to Boston in my early twenties and basically lived there for most of my adult life. The reason I ask is because I had a feeling listening to the story. I could tell you’re a Bostonian. It’s great. I love the tone of how you speak. Next thing I know, both of us are going to be rooting for the Red Sox any second. I know it.

The bottom line is the truth is that no matter where you were raised, what happens inside of us is the key. If you’re a parent, and the reason I keep saying that is because I don’t think I get a lot of young people reading the show. I’m assuming that most of my readers are parents. If you’re a parent and you feel as if your kids are in trouble, what Elliott shared with us is a great way to help bridge the gap and open up that communication very rapidly in some cases.  It may take a while if you’ve been defensive for a long time, but if you could find a way to make that apology and be open, you may be able to salvage that relationship.

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Elliott, now we get to the point where you pretty much changed the direction of your life. I want to finish the story because now I’m curious after your father found you. After searching for you all over the college campus, what happened next?

The violence happened, actually. It was one of the worst days of my life, to be honest with you. He took me to my mother’s house, which again was about a two-and-a-half-hour drive. While he was driving, this is something like looking back, when your father is like the authority figure over your life, there’s this thing that I now know as learned helplessness.

Even though at the time I was seventeen years old and perfectly capable of physically defending myself against an attacker, you’re conditioned to take it when it comes from your parents. As we were driving the two and a half hours, my dad was driving with one hand and punching me and yelling at me with the other hand. As you can probably imagine, I got very good at hiding what my circumstances were like through high school.

You cannot go to school every day in absolute tears. You get very good at putting on a mask. I learned to trust that mask. I learned that I could put on a mask and keep going. One of the lowest moments of my life is when I remember my father dropping me off at my mother’s house. My mother and father were separated at the time.

I went into my mom’s house. She took one look at me and burst into tears. Now, I don’t know what she saw. I wasn’t covered in blood or bruises. I don’t know what it was, but my mother saw something, burst into tears, and wrapped her arms around me. It was a profound moment for me. Ultimately, a couple of years later, another profound moment happened that completely changed my whole life. I haven’t been the same since.

Your mother didn’t see something unless she felt something. That’s energy-based. She walked in, and your energy was a certain, let’s call it a frequency, or there was a lack of a better term. She immediately picked up on that and knew exactly what was going on. That’s what mothers do. That’s what a mother’s abilities are. Now, you went through this process and I want to keep moving on, but I’m so curious. Did you ever make peace with your dad?

No. I’m going to say two quick things. I had decided to take my life and had peace about it. One of the scariest things when someone decides to take their life is you will see a mood escalation. They get relieved because they’ve decided to end the problem. I was literally in that space and I remember laying in my dorm room knowing I wasn’t going to live very long, much longer after that. I was nineteen years old by this time, and I had this thought. There were times in my life when I knew and I was a person of faith, and I knew God was talking to me.

As I was lying in bed thinking about my death, I started thinking about my eulogy. I started thinking about my friends going up to the podium at some church and saying, “We didn’t know Elliott was this sad. We didn’t know Elliott was this depressed. We didn’t know Elliott was this broken.” All I could think was they would blame me for my own death. I found that unacceptable. I wanted them to blame my dad. I wanted them to say, “Elliott’s dad is a jerk.” For whatever reason, that was so unacceptable. I told myself, “You have to outlive this pain so that you can tell the truth. Everybody thinks all of these flaws are yours and yours alone when they’re his.”

I’m living with the symptoms of his problem and my life changed literally in an instant because the decision to outlive the pain was the decision to live. That was my decision. Around that time, by this time, I had transferred to a school in Texas, much longer story, but my mother had to get away from my father too. He wasn’t abusive to his children. We had a family member in Texas. I transferred schools to Texas, so my mother could live close to this family member.

My father came to visit and when I got to Texas, it was the longest stretch of my life without any violence in the family. My dad came here and he took me and my two brothers to see a movie. We didn’t like the movie. Walking out of the movie theater, my dad said, “What do you think?” My older brother said, “I’ll never get those two hours back because it was a bad movie.” My father, being my father, took that personally and he said, “I came all the way here.” A huge fight broke out in the parking lot of that movie theater.

I later told my dad, “Man, I cannot have any violence in my life. It would literally kill me. You cannot be in my life unless you stop yelling at me, stop hitting me, stop cursing at me, and stop calling me names. If you can follow those four rules, I’ll be able to deal with anything else but those four rules have to be followed. He said, “F you.” I said, “That tells me you cannot follow the rules.”

I didn’t speak to him for about twenty years. My younger brother is married with two kids and lives not too far from me. My father wanted to be close to his grandchildren. My father has moved to Texas. I saw him for the first time in over twenty years at a family event. My younger brother has kids playing sports and I went to the game and there was my dad.

My father wanted to pretend like everything was fine. He came up to me to hug me and not make a scene in front of my niece and nephew, I did not respond the way I wanted to, but I hugged them back and walked away. I have a very strong feeling, like I said earlier, that defensiveness is the enemy of progress. It’s the enemy of healing. I know from a conversation with my brother that my father thinks I’ve overreacted and Elliott is difficult and all these things, but I’m very secure in who I am and the outcome has been fully worth it to me.

This is a longer intro than we normally do with any guest that we bring on the show, but I think it was important. First of all, I like the way you speak. I think you’re very articulate. You can share in a three-dimensional way what’s happening inside of you that resonates with me. More importantly, I still sincerely believe that there are a lot of people who will identify with your story in one way or another. My readers know that I basically became addicted to heroin at the age of sixteen.

It was an act of survival, like the feeling of suicide is an elevation. Basically, suicide is saving yourself. It’s salvation in a sense. It’s an elevation, as you had discussed. To me, that’s what drugs were. There was that moment when God stepped into my life and stopped me from using heroin as well.

Building A Movement

That’s a longer story. I don’t want to bore readers who’ve been through it already, but the bottom line is that these transformations that somehow originated with a higher power called what you like turned out to be the most transformational for all of us and certainly for you and me as well. Let’s get into the real meat of this.

Even though that was very meaty, many people read this show because it’s a business show and we talk about sales and growth and elevation. What I want to do is you become a therapist, which is amazing. You helped a lot of people. That’s not the interesting part to me, but the interesting part is that you built a global community. We’ve all written books, I have four published books, but the bottom line is that you’ve taken that material and turned it into a movement. That’s what I want to know more about. Start with the evolution of that movement, and let’s go forward with it.

I’m glad that I do lots of podcasts and interviews, and I’ve been on large platforms and all kinds of things. I like the conversation we’re having so far because I don’t think you can separate the business initiatives from the personal journey. Your story is your brand and you have to authentically lean into your story. Sometimes it’s hard. I’m going to guess Mitch. We’ve never actually talked about it, but I’m going to guess. It wasn’t always easy for you to openly say something like, “When I was sixteen, I used heroin.”

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In the same way that it hasn’t always been openly easy for me to say, I spent much the younger part of my life depressed and struggling with suicidality and being beaten by my father. They’re not things that come easily to roll off the tongue. Your story is your brand, and your story or your trauma will usually lead you to your purpose. When I realized that I had made the choice to live, at the time, I was a Marine Biology major, and the only reason I chose a major was because in order to be in college, you have to pick a major, and I picked Marine Biology because I loved the ocean.

It was literally that straightforward and simple for me. If you like the ocean, got to pick a major. Now, I had a much higher purpose, and I wanted to help people on the same journey. For me, I learned that when I had a purpose, my pain didn’t hurt. I learned that when I was in service, it didn’t hurt. Now, being in service gave my journey context. I went to graduate school obsessed with like, I want to learn how to help people heal. I was sad that I wasn’t learning that in graduate school.

Some of you who don’t have a master’s degree in a helping profession like counseling or family therapy or whatever might be surprised to know that we are not taught how to create healing in graduate school. We’re taught how to diagnose and assess. I wanted something more than that. When I graduated, I immediately was like, I want to do this very specific type of therapy that is known as a solution to a brief therapy. It’s about galvanizing people’s strengths and turning their hope into the thing that creates change in their lives.

I wanted to teach every psychotherapist that I could how to do that. I wasn’t thinking about building a global brand, having a seven-figure business, or writing books. I was thinking, I don’t think people know how powerful hope is. It was a small, literally two and a half pages of my whole graduate experience. To me, it was the most important two and a half pages. I was like, I don’t think people know how powerful that is. I started thinking about like, “How do I get this message in front of as many psychotherapists and helping professionals as I could?”

That led me to do what, at the time, was insane. People don’t come from where I come from and write books. That’s ridiculous. It doesn’t. Now, my newest book is my sixth, but I have decided to do the first book. I mean, people don’t write books. That was the beginning is like, I’m writing this book because I wanted to get this message out into the world. I wanted people to know that hope is an incredibly powerful thing. When you put words to it, it creates change. In fact, it can not create change.

Those of you reading, this is a business podcast, so lots of people are probably hoping that they 10x their business or scale their business bigger or reach a thousand clients, as you say. If you start asking yourself questions, like if you acknowledge, I hope to reach 1,000 clients with my product or service. You start thinking, what would I notice that would let myself know that that hope was becoming true? You literally train your brain to start looking for the signs that it’s happening and you can not change. It’s impossible.

That was the beginning of me growing that global message because the books took me global. My very first speaking engagement was in Bath, UK. My first major speaking engagement, I should say was in Bath, UK. Someone had read my book and said, “We want you to come here and do the keynote.” I had never done that before, but because that was in line with spreading my message, I agreed to do it.

That was when I learned I was pretty good on the stage and the people who hired me said, “You are good at this and people have been booking me ever since to be on stages.” My goal was never to be what I ultimately became. My goal was to reach as many people as possible. The secondary consequence of that was having a global brand in a seven-figure business.

That’s always the way it works. I’ve never seen anybody, even in my own life. I want to tell you one quick story. By the way, readers, the book that Elliott was describing was called Change Your Questions, Change Your Future. He gave you an example of how one question can change your future when he talked about hope. You also mentioned that I was probably afraid to tell people about my experience. Do I keep that a secret from the age of 16 to the age of 58? The reason was that I was terrified that Tony Robbins was going to find out.

Tony and myself went into a business partnership with one other person, Chet Holmes. Chet knew because he was my very dear friend, and I used to say to Chet, “Don’t ever tell Tony about my past.” He said, “Okay.” One day, we were sitting around and Tony, myself, Chet, and one other person were talking and he related an experience and I felt like he knew me well enough now to know who I was. I said that to him and I described what happened in more detail. It shocked me that he almost broke down and cried and said, “You should have told me before it would have changed everything.”

I said, “You mean you would have fired me?” He said, “No, it would have made me see your true humanity and what you’ve overcome to be who you are today.” The reason I’m bringing this up is because I want people to understand that your pain, your trauma, and your ruin are your future if you use it properly the way you and I have done. For me, after I became clear of hard narcotics, I discovered my true purpose too, which ultimately, in the many ways that I’ve done it, is to help others.

Initially, when I started my company, I was only 28 years old and my first goal was I want to be rich. I want to start a company and sell for a bazillion dollars and all that. That changed. That changed eighteen months into having a business. Sure, I still wanted to grow the business and all, but my first real mission was how do I take this ragtag group of people who joined me on this mission on pure faith and a paycheck and elevate them? How can I make them better? How can I turn them into the leaders that I need to take this company way out to the next level?

Going Global

That was the beginning of my unraveling of the bright, bright future that I’ve been able to create and I’m sure it’s yours as well. Let’s get back to the story, so you went and spoke on stage, you went to Bath, England and I’ve been to Bath. It’s an interesting place, for sure. If you love Indian food, boy, England is the place to go. The Indian restaurants in the UK are amazing. What happened from there? How did people find out about you? Again, let’s go back to the purpose of the show. How do readers take what they’re doing, mobilize it, and get it out there so that others can follow?

I’ll take something from your story to make that point. What happened with me is I started taking stages and people kept booking me and I had to grow into my authenticity. I had to start dressing in a way that was comfortable for me instead of trying to wear the uniform of a professional in the mental health field. I had to deal with a lot of racism. I’m an African American man and I was in a lot of spaces where there weren’t a lot of people that looked like me and there were definitely responses to that.

I was very, very different in the way that I walked, talked, acted, and the way I thought about healing. I had to truly lean into my authenticity to be able to do that. Even in your story, Mitch, I love that you eventually get close enough to Tony Robbins that you feel comfortable telling him about your past and Tony Robbins, rather than firing you or dissolving the partnership, says, “I wish you had told me before.” The biggest point I want readers to get is if you want to get your message out into the world, you have to own that message.

If we lived in a reality where Tony heard your background and decided to sever ties with you, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have told him. That means Tony is illuminating. He’s not the right person for who you actually are. Once you start owning your authenticity, you’re going to repel the wrong people and you’re going to attract the right people. It just so happens in this story that Tony was congruent to the right people. I don’t want anybody to hear that and think, “Then he shouldn’t have told him if Tony fired him.” That’s not the point.

 

You have to own your story because it is your story and your story is your brand. If you guys want to reach more people, if readers want to reach more people, it starts with being your true authentic self. We now live in a world with infinite ways to share your message with other people. There’s podcasting, there’s social media content, there’s YouTube channels. Literally, you can publish books. Years ago, the only way to get your message out into the world was to write a book. In today’s world, that’s not true. You can get your message out into the world totally for free using your own social media platforms, but people resonate with authenticity.

People resonate with the real you. I first want you to fall in love with you and your journey and your story, regardless of how messy it is, how difficult it is, and how risky and scary it is because that’s the message you will then be taking to your audience. People aren’t buying whatever you’re selling, whether it’s a product or a service, whether you’re coaching, whatever it might be. On some level, they’re buying into you. It’s much easier to do when you are showing them who you truly are.

It’s an interesting point to make because even my daughter, for example, I married an alcoholic and that meant that for fourteen years I struggled with her alcoholism. It was for me, that the only true solution was to enroll myself in Al-Anon and learn how to help myself. Initially, before Al-Anon, I thought my entire purpose was to get her sober. I quickly learned in Al-Anon that my only mission is to take care of myself and my child.

Eventually, that broke the family to pieces because of alcoholism. As I know, alcoholism is done for many, many families. Here’s the part of the story I wanted to share. One day, my daughter came to me and said, “Why did I have to be born into this family? How come I have to feel this way because of what happened in my family?”

I said to her, and this is way before I even fully understood this concept like you so perfectly articulated, I said, “Honey, this is part of who you are. All of us have this in our past at one level or another, and our goal is not to suffer from it, but to use it to elevate ourselves from it to something far greater in resonance with your feelings about your past.”

She listened quietly, she didn’t say a word, and then she went on to do what she does today, which is leveraging a lot of what she went through as well. It’s such a powerful concept, Elliott, and you are showing readers how to make people connect much more powerfully with you by sharing who you are.

Turning Passion Into Business

You started to do this. What was the mechanism? I don’t mean the social media channel, but now people are reading your book, they invite you to keynotes, and you’re becoming slowly, I’m sure like all of us, a little bit more popular, a little more well-known. When the business thought came into your mind, “I could do something with this, maybe monetize it, maybe didn’t even use that word, cover my expenses was the word you started with.” How did you get to that point?

It’s interesting. That’s a good question. For me, it was always about getting my message out into the world and it graduated. For example, my first desire to help people heal was when I graduated and became a psychotherapist. I set up a therapy practice. I found that unbelievably unsatisfying because I could only help people who were to drive to my physical location. I was like, “I want to reach more people.” I wrote my first book. I’m like, “I want to reach more people.”

By that time, I was being invited on stages all over the world to give lectures, but that created a massive financial strain on me because in the field of psychotherapy, you don’t get paid $100,000 per speaking gig and also, when you’re getting started you don’t get paid that stuff. I had a pretty successful therapy practice in order for me to go do the lecture in Denmark or in London and or wherever I was going I had to shut down my therapy practice. Go to the place. Even if they would cover my travel, I’m still doing it at a financial loss significant financial loss in it.

It was stressful. I didn’t feel like I was reaching everybody because now, in order to learn my message about solution-focused brief therapy, you had to come to the event where I was speaking. I met a guy named Bill, who’s now a close friend of mine, and he was super important. He was talking to me. He told me a story about Wayne Gretzky. He said, “Wayne Gretzky had the best business advice.” I was like, “?” He told me something Wayne Gretzky said and he said, “Wayne Gretzky was not the biggest, not the fastest, not the most skilled hockey player, but he was the best.” Somebody asked him, “How did you become the best hockey player?”

He said, “I would watch the hockey games that the older people were playing growing up in Canada.” He said, “I noticed everyone was skating to the puck so I taught myself, instead of skating to the puck, I taught myself to skate to where the puck was going to be.” That put him ahead of everybody. Bill was telling me, “Elliott, the world is going online. You should figure out a way to put your content online.” This was probably around 2015 or so. I got my YouTube channel and I started putting a weekly video blog on my YouTube channel.

I started making courses and making them available online. I cannot stress this enough. When you are your authentic self and you do things that feel true to you, you will end up in the right place at the right time. It’s a very hard thing to explain, but I started sharing it because I wanted my content online because the world was becoming more digital. I wasn’t even thinking about monetizing it per se. I was aware that I’ve got to make money and all those things.

When you are your authentic self and simply do what feels true to you, you will end up in the right place at the right time. Share on X

I started making these courses and was having very mediocre outcomes. We’d make a sale here and there and I would read a book by these great online marketers and get hopeful but never achieve the outcomes that these great online marketers achieved. The most remarkable thing. While all that was happening, the entire field started revolting against me, this black man doing these out-of-the-box things. It is one thing to be different and another thing to do differently. I was both. I was different and doing different. People were criticizing me badly.

I had been spending the previous four years making a bunch of online content with very mediocre success and then COVID happened. I’ll never forget when COVID happened. I got sad and depressed because all my clients canceled and all my speaking gigs canceled and I went from making a few hundred thousand dollars a year to zero because everything canceled. I remember sitting in my house and we’ve got these online courses on my website and we’d set up these things called funnels to drive traffic to those websites, to those offers. 2 or 3 days into the shutdown, I got an order and it was $97. Somebody bought a course for $97.

I thought, “ I got a much bigger problem than $97.” Later that same day, I got another order for $97. Later that same day, I got a third. This was the first time we’d ever made three sales in one day. It took that third sale to bonk me over the head to realize the whole world went online. I’ve got a bunch of content online. What if I take that $300 and instead of spending it on something, what if I spend it on Facebook ads and drive more traffic to my offers? Within a month, we had made something like $36,000 for my online offers.

The next month, we had our first six-figure month. We’ve been having six-figure months ever since. I share that story not to brag or show off or anything, but had I not been true to myself, I’m going to make content by sharing my message on the platforms available to me at no cost. I continue doing it for four years without massive success. Had I not done that, I wouldn’t have had the structure in place to take advantage of the whole world going online and turning my company overnight into a seven-figure company.

A lot of us were changed by COVID, and, unfortunately, some in a bad way. One of the things I wanted to talk about, which is something very important that I learned as a young man and it stuck with me after a mentor explained it to me. I want to share it with the audience as well. When you are rising in power, when your boat is floating upstream for the first time, you become the enemy and you’ll be receiving what they call haters.

When the haters come out, you’re on the right track. It’s very, very, very hard for people to hear this at the beginning of this stage. I was literally like you. I was attacked as my software company, which I started literally in a garage, selling a $99 product. Once we reached national status and were like you, we generated $250,000, $300,000 a month in sales for our little software product. That’s when the attacks began.

I went to a mentor who I’ll describe only as a lifesaver of a guy I leaned on a little too heavily sometimes, but he explained this whole theory to me and says the reason is now because you’re becoming a threat. The more successful you are, the more people you will threaten until you reach a threshold, and that threshold will come, but you must persist. You must break through that wall and get to the other side. I’m sure, without even asking, you’re now on that other side as I was after I broke through that wall.

First of all, I agree with everything you said. They don’t hate the mediocre. They hate the great ones. I think you’re 100% right. When you start having haters, that’s a sign to you that you are elevating but the other thing that I find interesting is the haters never go away. You continue to elevate to the point where you cannot hear them. You literally cannot hear them. They’re not relevant.

Haters never go away. You just continue to elevate to the point where you can't hear them. Share on X

There’s another point I want to make here and it applies to you as well. Something that you’ve done well, whether you intended to or not. As you say, as the haters go away, what you then begin to do, Elliott, is you’re creating what I would call a culture. This culture is basically the tone, the emotional tone of your community. That tone dictates who gets heard and who doesn’t. In my world, when I build certification programs for my clients, one of the first things we do is figure out what the ideal culture should be. Now, here’s the downfall that most people go through when they think about culture.

They think it sort of morphs into being on a natural basis almost automatically and by itself. Most people who allow that to happen do not have success with it because they don’t control how it works. When you figure out that culture is a literal matter of the vision of the owner of the company, the mission of the CEO combined with a simple set of rules that lay on the core foundation of the objective of the company, then only the right people will be in that room. When someone who enters is not the right person, the culture will self-correct. That’s what culture is from a conceptual standpoint. You probably created that without even realizing it. Maybe you did, which is even better.

No, I did realize it because I come from a sports background. I’m aware of how culture can influence output. When I started building my team, the culture I created in my company was important to me. I want my employees to know that I value them as people. We talk about their hobbies. It’s funny, I had no idea you were going to ask about culture, but it’s something very important to me. When I started having that success in 2020, that financial success, I needed to hire more staff. we needed to keep up with what was happening.

Somebody told me about this woman named Helen, who I later learned is literally the most creative human. Her artistic abilities are unbelievable. When they introduced her to me, they showed me her Instagram page. She does something called a webcomic where she draws this comic by hand and puts images from the webcomic on Instagram. I sat down and interviewed Helen and I asked her about this webcomic. At the time, Helen was like 24, let’s say, and she told me she’s been doing this webcomic since she was like 10. She’s been doing this for a very long time.

It’s such a passionate project for her. When I decided to hire her, I said, “I’m going to hire you, but under one condition. You have to continue doing your webcomic because that’s such an important part of who you are. If I start looking at your Instagram and I start seeing you haven’t posted on your webcomic since June of 1983, I’m going to feel like this job is taking away an important part of you. I actually want this job to feed the important parts of you.” One of the things I’m proud of, this is her fourth year working for me. I think January will be year four.

She has continued to do her webcomic and is thriving in the webcomic world. She’s got websites and accolades, and people know her as successful. I’m very proud of that because I want the job to feed my employees. The thing I tell people when I coach businesses is I cannot stand when people treat their employees badly or they keep their employees in a stressful environment. You should never ever forget the fact I’m about to tell you. One day, I decided to turn my purpose into my business.

Now, it wasn’t an overt decision; it happened over the course of time. Essentially, without that difficult childhood and all those things, I wouldn’t have the business I have now. I decided to turn my purpose into this business. Every single employee who works for me wakes up every day to work on my dream. I feel very strongly that I have a duty to make sure that I turn their job into their dream job because they wake up every day and give my dream their best effort. I have to give my best effort to make this job their dream job. That’s the only way that business needs to work.

I’ll relate another story about some of the things that we did in the past that worked well. Encourage people to take a page out of Elliott’s book, and anything I say of value would be great to hear, too. The thing we used to do when we got to know people in the companies would say to them, “This isn’t going to be the rest of your life. What do you want to do?”

People would many times say, “I want to start my own company.” I said, “Great. What is it that you would want to do?” They would go through their story and tell us what, and what you could see the right ones when you ask that question, would light up and get super excited and share their deepest feelings about who they want to be and how they want to get there. One of the things I would say to them is I say, “Don’t ever forget that because you work here.

I’ll go one further and tell you that if you ever decide to leave and create this company that you are dreaming about, you let me know I might be an investor. I might be able to help you get your own company started, particularly if I believe that it’s in alignment with who you are, then I would be completely behind it.” That’s before I understood everything we’re talking about now. I knew instinctively that if they didn’t have passion for it, it would never succeed.

I think that’s right. You cannot kill a person’s passion and then expect them to behave passionately. It doesn’t work.

As you said, people show up every day to work on your dream. If you neglect theirs, they’ll neglect yours. It’s that simple.

In the back of my mind, because Helen is so unbelievably talented, do I have some sort of a fear that Disney or Pixar is going to see her and pluck her away? Of course. If that were to happen, like you said, which I love the way you said, maybe I’d be her first investor, but I would certainly be her biggest cheerleader and the worst thing isn’t her leaving. The worst thing would be me killing her passion and her love for art.

Company Growth Challenges

Elliott, one of the things that we talk about here on this show is that the goal is always to evolve the company and get it from 100 clients to 200 or whatever the metrics might be from 100,000 a year to a million dollars a year. You hit milestones, you hit roadblocks, you hit ceilings, you hit potholes all along the way, and then you get to this point where you have a completely different set of problems. Are you there and what do those problems look like for you?

Absolutely. I laugh because you always think that if I go from one milestone to the next, then I’m removing the problem. That’s actually not true. You’re going to have the newer problems, like your problems graduate with you. I’ll give you a perfect example. We built our business to the point where we’re making multiple six figures a month, which is unheard of for a psychotherapist.

We had a contractor working for us to manage our social media advertising, and that contractor got hacked. As a result of that hack, the hacker got access to all of their clients’ material. They took over my Facebook page and stole about $200,000 or so from my bank account. We couldn’t run any advertisements into our offers for about four months because we did most of that through social media, and these people took over our social media accounts and kicked us out.

This is going to sound like a ridiculous thing, but it certainly was something I thought about. In order for someone to steal a quarter million dollars from me, I first had to have a quarter million dollars. In order for someone to ruin my multi-six figure a-month business, I first have to have a multi-six figure. Your problems get to the level of your business. I now have staff I have to manage and customer service needs.

The customer service needs when you’re making $10,000 a month versus when you’re making $150,000 a month, the customer service needs are completely different. They’re night and day. I ended up having to hire a CEO and put her in charge of the business because I’m now working on TV projects and podcasting. Someone has to be there to do operationally the day-to-day stuff. Your problems don’t get solved. They come with you in a bigger and grander way.

It’s so true. I grew from 0 to $10 million to $30 million. I want to point out my language here. I said, I grew. The company was the one making all that money. I had to grow into that. I could not be who I was when I started that company in a garage and I’m now running a 300-person company. I could not be that same person. The only reason it probably didn’t reach 1,000 employees and $100 million was because of me.

The whole point is that if your business is your vehicle or growth and elevation of who you are as a human being and an individual, then you will get the most out of that experience. Now, the owners of businesses, I’m sure every reader can relate, never get the vacation that they need because they’re always basically weighed down by the problems of the company.

In my life and business, by the time I reached about year seven in my software, I was able to take 3 and 4-week European trips and leave my business alone with a check-in phone call every few days, and I still have that business. I came back after almost a month away. People said, “Go away for another month. We had the best month we ever had.” I love that. This has been a great conversation, Elliott.

I want to say how much I appreciate you and the work that you’re doing. Readers, what I want you to do right now is I want you to go and sign up to listen to Elliott on his daily show, Aha! Moments, because I got to tell you, it’s going to change your life. He’s brilliant at what he does. I think all his books, I haven’t read all of his books, but I have read parts of Change Your Questions, Change Your Future, and I was impressed. I’m a very big believer in using inquiry to evolve yourself, your family, and your business, and Elliott’s mastered that too. Pay attention to this man. He has some great things for you. Elliott, can you tell us the name of your website?

ElliottConnie.com. I would love for people to visit my website. If you’re a coach or a helping professional, I’ve tons of free resources there that you can sign up for or if you’re someone that needs a little inspiration, sign up to follow my daily podcast. Also, buy the book. I promise it’ll change your life. There’s nothing more powerful in this world you can do other than ask questions. Questions are the most powerful thing in the world. If you can train yourself to ask the most useful questions, you will change your entire life.

 

Elliott, I have to ask you a personal question here. How did I do? Did I ask good questions?

You did great. You did well. To be honest with you, this is one of my favorite interviews. I do lots of these interviews and this was great.

Good, I’m glad to hear that. It’s one of my favorites, too. Thank you again, Elliott, for being on the show, and readers, don’t forget what we talked about. I may be over-presumptuous here, but I think we had an important conversation. See some of the mechanics of how you can change your own life using some of the things that Elliott shared. Thank you, Elliott. We will talk again soon.

Thanks. I appreciate it.

 

Important Links

• Elliott Connie
• ClientFol.io
• GetClientfolio.com
• Aha! Moments
• Change Your Questions, Change Your Future
• VEABusiness.com/Mitch

 

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