Building A Bridge To Change With Kathryn "RaRa" Asaro Mayers

When we’re building change within organizations, we need to look at what success is to the people within the organization individually. How are you going to succeed as an organization, as a person, or as a leader based on the reality that’s put in front of you? On today’s podcast, Ben Baker brings on Kathryn “RaRa” Asaro Mayers, to talk about change management and how one can bridge the gap between their current reality and what their future could be. Kathryn is the Founder and CEO of THE BRIDGE, a unique educational platform that demonstrates change and positive action.

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Building A Bridge To Change With Kathryn “RaRa” Asaro Mayers

Welcome back. Thanks for being such amazing guests. Thanks for reading. Thanks for contributing. Thanks for your thoughts, your ideas, your passion. I love that my audience keeps coming back time after time suggesting possible guests, suggesting things that I should talk about, and I love what you guys do. Thank you for being part of the journey. I have Kathryn “RaRa” Asaro Mayers on the show. She is incredible. You need to be able to get a hold of this woman. Sit down, read, enjoy because we are going to have an incredible ride. We’re going to talk about change management. What does change mean and how to change effectively. Kathryn, welcome to the show

Thank you. I want you to know I drank your Kool-Aid. I am right, front, and center with what you’re doing because I feel like you’re speaking directly to me most of the time when you’re doing your show. Thank you. I’m thrilled to be here. It’s great to be here, but I don’t want to say that too premature. I want to save that for the end because I want to make sure that we deliver something for your audience and our audience to sink their teeth into, so to speak. Being a Sicilian from New York, I want to make sure that I give exactly what people are looking for.

I want to give people a little bit of a history. Before we get into the change, let’s get into you. Let’s talk about where you came from, where you are and where you’re going. Let’s talk about the bridge because the bridge truly is where we’re going to bridge into the conversation on change. Give me a little bit of a history so people have an understanding of what’s the context behind the story that we’re about to tell.

Imagine New York because that’s where I’m from. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and then imagine a young girl growing up, understanding that the world is a big place. I’ve driven back and forth from New York to Long Island to different places. I was always impressed with big structures and architecture. My family was in the paving business. Their feet were on the ground. They were grounded, no pun intended. I was always looking up at what’s above. Whenever I saw a bridge, I was mesmerized. What happened eventually, 50 years later, I named my company The Bridge. It occurred to me that every time I crossed a bridge, every time I did something in my life whether I was planting my first flowers at nine, or I was driving my first car at sixteen or getting married for the first time because I’ve been married five times or getting divorced five times.

The husband I’m with and will be for the rest of our life, I’ve married three times. Every time I did something different, I always thought about a bridge. What else would it lead to? I never stopped at, “I’m planting a flower.” It’s like, “I’m planting a flower, and what?” That was my thought process. It became a very natural thing for me to always go to the next thing, to think about something bigger. When someone was talking to me, I was thinking, “How far can that go? Let’s not talk about what you’re doing. Let’s talk about how big we could go with it.”

Eventually I opened up my company called The Bridge, amongst a few other companies, of course. I worked hard to come up with an explanation of this company because most people want to label things. They want to label is it this, is it that. They want to relate to it. Being Sicilian, I want people not to relate to it. I want them to figure it out. What is that? I want them to remember that they can’t figure it out, but I did satisfy the marketing aspect by coming up with The Bridge is a unique educational platform that demonstrates change and positive action.

I love that and I want to dive into this before we dive in the change is that I love the fact that you don’t want people to put you in a box. They don’t want you to have that definition. This is what it is. I’m with you. I want people to think of my brand is what does it mean to them? What’s the value that it means to them? How does it help them? How does it solve their problems? How does it keep them from tearing their hair out? How does it help them achieve their goals? For every one of my customers, it’s different. That’s the fun part. The fun part is that being in business is not about you. It’s about the people that you serve and it’s about helping them be better. By doing that, they’re going to you and enable you to succeed.

If it isn’t that two-way partnership, if it isn’t that bridge, if it isn’t two sides of the water coming together, there is no success. I love the analogy of the bridge. First of all, both of us come from construction backgrounds. My father was in construction and commercial renovation for 45 years. I started off sweeping a job site and hauling drywall and pulling wires. I get where you’re coming from that watching the world grow and watching the world get bigger. Watching how things go from being a hole in the ground to this amazing structure and everything that goes along with it and the change that goes along with that. How you manage that change, how you inspire others, and how you bring other people along with that change is an incredible thing. That’s what I want to have us explore. Let’s talk about how The Bridge helps people change.

If someone wants to be saved, that is not what's going to happen at The Bridge. They will be helped, but not saved. Share on X

Thank you. As you were speaking, I was remembering when I was younger and I was going to my father’s very big office because he had an office. He paved roads. He would take a hole in the ground and make a road out of it. He made a bridge by paving roads using asphalt blacktop. That is a bridge as well as a steel structure that we can look up at. A bridge can mean anything to anyone, as long as they go from point A to point B. I was thinking about that. Thanks for taking me down that road. Where do you want me to start?

I think of the David Bowie song. “As time may change me, but I can’t change time.” The world is going to keep marching on. Things are going to progress. We’re right in the middle. In 2020, we’re in the world of COVID right now, but it’s not that COVID will define us. It’s a step along the journey and take it from there.

Ben, we’re in the world of eradicating polio. I’m a Rotarian. As much as we’re in COVID, we are at a monumental moment in history to have polio eradicated. Think about that. Let that sink in for a minute. I believe that we all create what we need to create. I’d like to talk about The Bridge as helping, like you said, but not saving. The Bridge is not a lifeboat. If someone wants to be saved, that is not what’s going to happen at The Bridge. They will be helped. I don’t want to be saved. I want to help myself. If there’s a damsel in distress, there’s somebody else that we can talk to. When you want to come into the bridge or cross a bridge, think about that.

Taking a walk in nature, you want to cross that. You want to do something that is a positive action and change. You don’t want to be saved because that’s a different physical state of being. I have a lot of fun with people and I have to mention this. I have a lot of fun with what you wrote on LinkedIn. I’m a whale catcher and I had to respond to that instantly because part of my core purpose, I am statement. I’m the whale you want to catch. I never met anyone who wrote, “I’m a whale catcher.” I thank you for that. That was great to verbalize that.

Let’s get into the context behind that. It’s that I love large clients. I love people that are complex. I love people that have challenging problems. I love people that have huge dynamics and they see things in a multitude of different ways and there are different opinions, different philosophies, different wants, needs, desires within the same company. Being able to amalgamate all those things, to be able to bring people together, to be able to take all those people and enable them not to believe what each other believe wholeheartedly, but enough that they can all move in the same direction.

Now they’re all going to take out of it something different. They’re all going to have their own victory that comes out of the end process. It’s being able to get them to at least understand that here’s the light at the end of the tunnel. This is what we’re marching towards. We’re not sure how we’re going to get there, but we’re going to get there together. It’s going to take all of our skills, adaptability and desires to get there. That’s where I am in the whale hunter. I love the big, complex, meaty, hairy, scary stuff.

When I came up with the core purpose on the whale you want to catch, I thought about, “Do you want to catch a whale and can you?”

How do you eat it?

LBL Kathryn | Change Management — Change Management: The Bridge is a unique educational platform that demonstrates change and positive action.

What do you do with it? One person said to me, “Do you think of yourself as a whale?” I said, “I think of myself as a woman in an elephant’s body.” That’s number one because I never forget, but catching a whale, that’s a task. People go through great lengths to watch, to see a whale. When they thought about that core purpose, I thought, “That’s a bridge.” Go ahead and find someone who says they want to catch a whale. When I thought about you writing that I’m a whale catcher, I had all these stories that go right across my mind, which is what you’re all about. People relate to something. They come up with their own story. I’m a whale catcher, what are you, a fisherman? What does that mean? Do you live on a boat?

To what degree do people take that? People want to create a story that they understand and you and I both have a similar perspective on I don’t want to give the answer to the story. I want that to be the creation. I know everything that has to happen in terms of change for me. I know that. That’s what I’m good at. When it comes to you what has to happen, but think of yourself as an Olympic gold medalist. You still have somebody that’s going to help you get there because you’re focusing on your skill. You are a great whale catcher. You’re a great swimmer. You’re a great man and company that teaches people how to create their own podcasts. Yet there needs to be someone else there to make sure that all those loose ends don’t start unraveling and frazzle you. I think of the bridge as the part or the parts that are necessary to face as opposed to avoid.

None of us can do anything alone. We’re all on this journey together. We’re all on this journey called life, business, marriage, or raising kids or whatever. None of us do this in a vacuum. None of us have all the answers. None of us have all the skills. None of us have all the ideas and thoughts and whatever we need to be able to accomplish something. We have to rely on other people. We have to sit there and say, “These are my strengths. These are the things that I do well. These are the things that I’m bad at,” and be able to embrace both and not beat ourselves up for the things like, “I can’t paint. I can’t code out a web. I can’t do photography well. I’m not a good accountant.” Who cares?

There are people out there, that’s their jam. That’s what they love to do. Those are the things that get them up in the morning. Make those your friends, make those the people that are part of the journey with you and take them along on the journey. As the expression goes, we’re all stronger together. When we’re trying to create change, I have an expression that I use whenever I’m doing, change management for companies. It’s leave no person behind. When you come with the philosophy of leave no person behind, these are the people that need to be on the boat. Make sure everybody’s in the boat. Make sure nobody falls out of the boat. Make sure nobody drowns. When you do that, the journey isn’t as sweet. When you all arrive at the next shore together and you all survive the storm together, you’re stronger because of it.

That makes me think about the team and who we choose because it’s important to know who we’re going to put in our lifeboat or who we’re going to put in our ship or who we’re going to put in our plane. If we chose these people, then we’re committed to them and they’re committed to us. Leave no one behind, yet make sure that those people are people that are committed to you as well as you to them or us to them so that we have some synergy, some common denominator. If we’re building something fantastic and I’m your right-hand man, so to speak, but yet I’m not cutting it. We have to put me in another position and take someone else to do that. We cannot be nervous about saying, “Ben, at this moment, you’d be better in the front of the boat than the back of the boat.”

We have to be able to take that initiative and make an observation and take a look at what’s around us. We have to listen to the unspoken word as well as the spoken word, listen to our intuition. We were talking about this before we started. We’re talking about how you use your intuition when you speak to your clients about what they need because you can provide solutions based on the situation at hand. It’s not cut and dry. This is what it is. This is step one. This is step two. When you come from a background of construction, think about a house. Think about paving the road. It’s not, “This is the first step and that’s the second step.” You know what the end result is, but somehow, some way, you have to be able to constantly assess and adjust and adapt so that this construction isn’t a destruction.

It is constructing. It’s putting together, constructing a story, constructing a podcast, constructing going from point A to point B. I like to talk about The Bridge concepts and what people come out with. Basically, we take a concept and we convert that to an insanely profitable deliverable. Someone said to me, “Does that mean it’s business-related?” I said, “Absolutely not.” Why does a profitable deliverable have to be about business, why can’t it be about a stay at home mom? Why can’t it be about buying a house? Why can’t it be about your time and not wasting it? Why does it have to be a 6 or 7-figure income person? That’s what they do. Why cannot an insanely profitable deliverable be something right in your own kitchen?

To me, that comes down to leadership. The whole thing that you’ve talked about, it comes down to leadership, vision, inspiration, communication. Great leaders understand, first and foremost, what they need to do to inspire other people. What do they need to do to get the best out of people? They understand the people that they’re trying to motivate. They understand what’s important to them. What are the things that they’re good at? What are the things they’re bad at? What are the things that get them up in the morning and what are the things that frustrate them? When you can understand that as a leader, you can sit there and say, “Let’s put the right people in the right position to be able to succeed.” I know stories of a woman, she’s an executive assistant to the president.

She was the vice president of marketing for the same company. She went from being the vice-president of marketing to the executive assistant. She loves where she is now. She realized what her true superpower is. She is the power behind the power. She has her fingers in everything. She’s amazing at the politics. She’s amazing at that thing. Most people, it’s like, “You went from being a vice president of marketing and you’re an executive assistant.” Think of what a great executive assistant is. They are almost a second in charge. It’s understanding that this person was better served in this position and that’s where their superpower is. That’s where they’re going to shine compared to where they were absolutely miserable, and take the talents of that person and enable them to succeed.

It's important to know who we're going to put in our lifeboat. Make sure those people are committed to you as well as you to them. Share on X

When we’re building change within organizations, that’s the first thing that we needed to look at. You’re right. What does success look to the people within the boat individually? It’s not just, “We, as a company, are looking to do this.” That’s an overall arching thing. The question is, as you were saying, how do we get there? How do we get from A to B? There are 100 different ways to build a road or there are 100 different ways to succeed. How are you going to succeed as an organization, as a person, as a leader, whatever, based on the reality that’s put in front of you?

One of the things that I focused on, what would someone say that they came out with if they dove into becoming what I call an ambassador. To me, the word clients is used all the time. I coined the word ambassador. The example that you gave of that woman is a prime example of how I would describe my ambassadors learned how to empathetically negotiate and think about being empathetic with yourself. Here you are in this position, but how to empathetically negotiate needs to have how to do that with yourself. Therefore, it might mean to take a lateral, move a step to the left, to step back, step forward. It may mean to take a pause because negotiating and taking the bridge doesn’t mean we go from a $1 to $100, to $1,000, to $10,000 to $100,000 to $1 million.

It could mean for someone to be able to take a deep breath, to get home, to be with their family. Success is different for each person. That woman, in particular, made her choice. Some people think that they’re sabotaging or self-sabotaging and people do. They think they’re failing because they thought they were going to do this. Now they’re doing that. That’s part of the whole journey. There’s no robot here. There is no ideal way to take step one. There are seven-step programs for many things, but in life, how many steps would you say we’re going to take in the course of our lifetime and they’re not wrong. They are what they are. We need to be aware about that. If we’re not aware, then that’s a phase that we’re not aware of. That’s fine.

That’s what it is. It is what it has to be. When you talk about like this woman and stories and what people do, and when you’re coaching them and you’re talking to them, that’s where a bridge is important. You could coach someone for a year, but there might be a point in that where a bridge would come up and you’d be like, “I’m not too sure about that.” You would address that bridge and then go right back to your coaching. There’s a moment in time. It’s like dancing. You must dance, Ben. I remember The Hustle. I used to teach The Hustle. I did that with my first husband. That was the era. We used to do these dances and spins. When things were good, a little lift and a little throwing up in the air and stuff, not throwing up, but the body.

The disco ball was on. In dancing, there are steps. Sometimes you miss a step, but you don’t go, “I missed a step.” You keep going. There’s a step. Maybe the spin was perfect. What do you do? You keep at it. You keep spinning. You make sure your hair doesn’t stick to your lipstick and hit your partner in the face. You make sure that the shoes are flexible enough. You make sure that you don’t have a wardrobe malfunction, but you do the dance. Look at the tango. There are many different dances. I’m not relating only to the older ones, but there are ways that those dances go where they look good and people can say, “We nailed it.” They’re still beautiful if they’re done with something out of step. That would be a bridge.

To build on that, sometimes there’s perfection in the imperfection. It’s the fact that people keep going instead of stopping in the middle of the dance and say, “I messed up.” Ninety-eight percent of the people may not even notice that you messed up.

Nobody knows what’s supposed to happen. Only you do. It’s like presenting. Who knows what we’re supposed to say?

A perfect example is I do keynotes around the world. I gave the same keynote address 40 times. Not once was it exactly the same. The basic tenets were the same, the stories might’ve been similar, but did I tell the same story in the same way? Did I walk out on the stage? Do I go left first and then go right first? Did I raise my right hand and then raised my left hand? You go with the flow. You have to sit there and say what’s important. The important is, are we going to get to where we need to go? If we need to be a little bit flexible here, a little different here. If we stumbled a little bit so we have to present a little bit stronger in the end, then that’s what you do. It’s the people that can be resilient. It’s the people that can sit there and be adaptable. Those are the people that are going to survive and thrive long-term. Most people dealing with change are scared to change. They’re terrified of it. They’re terrified of the unknown. They’re terrified of, “I could fail.” We all fail in the end because we all die.

What about the fear of succeeding?

What about the fear of success? You’re right. There are always fears out there, but what we need to realize is the world keeps going and we have two choices. We can either go with the flow. We can either sit there and say, “How do I need to reinvent myself or redo my thinking in order to adapt to what’s come up?” I can cling to the past desperately and be left behind. There are too many people, especially now that are clinging to the past. “If this will all blow over and my world can go back exactly the way it was.” It never will. We need as people, as leaders, as visionaries to realize that change is messy. Change is something that is unknown. It’s unpredictable, but it’s going to happen whether we like it or not. We need to be willing to at least embrace it and sit there and have the mentality of, where do we go from here?

I love that analogy, the picture that you’re painting because this happened. It happened to me. It happened in a way that became big. In 2013, I was on stage. I was winning an award for gratitude. There was a tie and I meet this woman onstage. Her name is Laurie Delk. We had this instant connection. We walked off the stage to the bottom of the steps and we created a company called Gratitude Girls. Here we are doing online shows every single month with audio and video, listening, sharing with people and an audience about gratitude. From that, after a few years, we decided to open up a product that we could sell. We did years of community work for that. That was changed that we stepped into. It happened again. It didn’t stop there.

A month later, the same year, 2013, Dr. Energy, who you met, you were on our podcast. We opened up Dr. Energy. Dr. Joe Piazza was in my bridge. Joe was talking about what he wanted to do in his vision. From that, we opened up a company called Fun and Powerful Presenters. We took a two-year break from that change. We said, “Let’s rebrand.” We came right back with the same business, meant to be. We changed the name to BU Network. While we’re in that change again, one day we said, “We should do a podcast. You talk about feeling using your intuition. Now Dr. Energy, as I’ve named him, and I run a weekly podcast interviewing great people like yourself who’ve come on to our show and spoken with us and having great conversations. The change is there. The bridge shows up and a business was born, but it was there. It was in us. We stepped into it. We leaned into it. You know the amount of work that it takes to open a podcast and tour.

People think it’s easy. As anybody says, it’s like writing a book. I keep telling people, “Anybody can write a book. Anybody can start a book. Anybody can sit there and grab a piece of paper and create a table of contents and the first 150 words. Ninety-nine percent of people never complete the book. Ninety-five of the people never get beyond podcast episode number ten because it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of effort. It’s a lot of dedication.

It’s like putting together a platform like you’re doing for people to listen, to hear something, to deliver something to our audience that they could maybe not relate to. You and I are both from the same school. We don’t want you to be able to paint the picture. We want you to figure it out. We want you to come and chase us. We want you to hear what we’re going to say next. Get on the edge of your seat. We want people to say, “What are they going to say next?” Not, “I know what they’re going to say,” because I believe that being entertained is as much fun in education as it is in understanding the formula. There is no formula in life. It’s to keep going. You said it. Keep going. Don’t stop.

I see people that stop themselves and they say, “I’m failing. I have no direction.” Fine. If that’s what you want. It is what it is. If you say it is, then if you say you, can you say you can’t, then you’re right. There was no getting in front of that. If someone says they’re failing and they have no direction, I hold space for them failing and holding that space until they feel ready to step out of it. There’s no reason to convince someone of anything because that’s what they need to do. Support and hold space. If someone says, “This is great. I hold space.” If they say, “I’m failing, I made a mistake,” I hold space because that’s the lesson. The lesson is there. It’s to hold that for them.

It’s given people the ability to move beyond. As I tell people, it says, “Treading water is not drowning. If you’re treading water, you’re not drowning. Your head is still above the water. You’re still in control. You’re still able to sit there. You may be resting. You may not be going anywhere. You may be stuck at the service looking around to figure out what’s next, but your head is not below the water and you’re not sucking in saltwater or whatever.” We need to realize that there are times in our life where we’re going to tread water. There are times in our life where you’re right, we may take a step backwards, but it might be something that we need in order to make those three steps forward. To be able to kick back, evaluate where we are, evaluate what’s happened to us, figure out the lessons that we learned, figure out what needs to happen moving forward and build a strategy to take that next leap.

Being entertained is as much fun in education as it is in understanding the formula. Share on X

You’re never out until you stop. When you stop trying, when you stop moving forward, when you stop caring, that’s when you lose. Even if you fail, even if, God forbid, you have a company and it goes under. The question is, what did you learn along the way? How are you going to take those lessons and become a better person, a better boss, a better whatever, moving forward when you rise again? If you didn’t learn anything from it, you’ve truly failed.

When you were talking about water, I was thinking about this. I have something against the term, go with the flow because imagine you’re swimming and water is getting in your nose and your mouth and the flow is bringing you down to the bottom. The flow at that point is sinking. You didn’t say go with the flow. I was thinking when sometimes people say, “I go with the flow.” I think, “Really?” If you dropped your five-carat diamond bracelet down the toilet and you go with the flow, is that what you go with? If you get water in your nose and your mouth, and you’re in the middle of the ocean and you start sinking, is that the flow you want to go with? I have this thing about going with the flow.

I’m Sicilian. I like to control. There’s no reason I should hide that. I like to control what goes on in my world. When I don’t control, I’m going to surrender because I said I am. I need to know when that’s going to happen, but I’d like to have all but that negates it. I like to have all these other experiences, but I don’t want the water to go in my nose, in my mouth, and start hitting bottom saying, “I guess this is what I should be doing.” I like to control and understand. Maybe I should pay a little bit more attention. As I tell my little girls, because I’m a grandma of seven, “When you’re swimming, stick your butt up a little bit because you will float.” There are different ways to teach swimming and I’m not going to get into the whole kids thing. When you don’t want someone to sink, you teach them a technique that will stop them from going down and even for ourselves, besides the life jacket. I need to know how you came up with, and I love that this is what you say that I’m a whale catcher. How did you come up with that statement that you went and boldly put it on LinkedIn so we could all go and read that?

I go to Vegas on a fairly regular basis. I do keynotes. I go to trade shows, whatever. I love Vegas. I truly do. It is a completely different world. It’s my Disneyland. I’m not a huge gambler but I enjoy it. At 1:00 in the morning, I come off the blackjack table and I did all right. I’m walking through the casino and there’s this roped off craps table with four large gentlemen. You have to understand, I’m 6’2”, 250 pounds. I’m telling you, there are four large gentlemen on every single corner of this rope. There’s a single guy in the center playing craps by himself.

I realized the chips that he’s playing don’t fit in the hub. I go up to one of the pit bosses who I happened to know, and I said, “What’s the story?” He says, “It’s one of our whales. He’s up about $250,000. He could be up. He could be down. He can have whatever he wants.” This guy heard me. He goes, “Do you want to play craps?” I said, “I can’t play at your level.” He says, “I don’t care.” He says, “I’m looking for a little company.” I sat there playing craps with him for 30 minutes on his money. I could hold my own on the craps table. It’s not my game of choice, but I can certainly hold my own on a craps table. This guy was throwing at every hand what I paid for my house.

I mentioned it to him. We had this nice short 45-minute conversation, but I realized that there are people at a completely different level. There are people that think differently. There are people that are exposed to different things that money means different things, relationships mean different things. It opened up my eyes to realize that these are the people that are fascinating to me. It’s not the money. The money is not one thing. It’s what do they do with their money? How do they get there? Cory Warfield was on my show. You and I have mentioned it. Cory wants to buy a nice car.

I’m not going to mention the type. I’m not going to mention what it costs, but it’s way more money than I’d ever spent on a car. He can afford it. I can’t. His attitude is, “Before I can spend that amount of money on a car, I need to have the equivalent amount of money that I can donate to a charity,” and he will. He’ll say, “If I buy this car, there’s got to be that same amount of money dollar for dollar that I’m going to donate to a charity.” That’s what I love. It’s people who think at that level. People who are always thinking bigger things or people that are always thinking about what if or what could be. How do I take what I know and be able not only to help myself but to help others along the way?

That to me are the whales that I want to be part of. It’s not the people that are all about, “Look at me. Look how wonderful I am. Look how much money I have.” I could care less about people like that. It’s the people that are generous with their time, their energy, the experience that they have and they’re looking to make the world a better place.” They’re going to do the fun things that they want to do in the meantime, but they realize that this is a distraction. What the real thing is the relationship for the people along the way. Those are the whales that I truly know are hunting.

Thank you for sharing that. Look at that experience that you had standing walking over to that crap table and accepting the conversation with that gentleman. Saying yes to it, not being afraid, not worrying, “It’s his money, not mine.” Stepping right into it. This is your story.

It’s not what defines me, but it’s part of my DNA. COVID will never define me, but what it will do is it will become part of my brand story. It will be part of who I am. The lessons that I learned through COVID will be with me forever. The lessons that I learned at that craps table are lessons I learned forever. The lessons that I learned what I was twenty by doing stupid things and figuring it out and licking my wounds and moving beyond them are part of what makes me who I am. It’s realizing that change happens. It’s realizing that we are the amalgamation of our experiences, the people that we meet and the way that the lessons that we learned because of it make us richer people.

I’ll share a story that my husband and I always talk together, which is great. That’s the marriage that we have. We talk about how at peace we are. We’re experience seekers. We like to have experiences. He’s an adventurous man. He can tell you stories about when he was in the jungle and how he’s traveled. I’m not going to tell you his story. He’ll tell it one time. We talk about how at peace we are with all the things that we said yes to. We say, yes. We take action. We could be sitting down to dinner and if I say, “What would you think about?” he’s like, “Sure, let’s go.” We don’t shut the world off. We don’t turn the possibilities off.

Not to say that we’re flighty. I don’t want to give that impression. The impression is that we are excited that we say yes and have said yes that we’re not worrying or wondering what’s going to be like, or how we create our own adventure every single day. Mid-COVID. This is a hard story to tell. We moved from being within minutes to our entire family to being 115 kilometers away because we knew that we were not in the right place. We couldn’t help our family. We couldn’t see them. We were in a beautiful luxury building that was on lockdown. We knew that our mental health, our physical, our spiritual being was not being served. We got up and we moved to a farmhouse in Niagara on the Lake. Some of the reactions that we got from the people that love us was, “How could you do that? How could you leave your family?” I wanted to answer, “I need the sanity so that I could be a human being.” When you feel like you are not serving yourself, you need to take action. We took a look at COVID. The month of March, April, May, we moved.

It’s knowing that about yourself. Kathryn, we could talk forever. You and I could make this a three-hour conversation and we will do this offline, but I wanted to ask you one question. We’ll make sure that everybody knows how to get in touch with you. I have one question I ask every guest before I let them out the door. When you leave a meeting, get off the phone, get out of the meeting, get in your car and drive away, what’s the one thing you want people to think about you when you’re not there?

That they are glad and happy that they met me because I changed something for the positive in their life. That I enhanced their life as a result of that meeting, I gave them something beyond their wildest dreams that they could never have imagined. No matter what expectations they had, I gave them more.

Kathryn, thank you for being the person that you are. Thank you for being inspiring. Thank you for your passion. I love the stories. Thank you for being on the show.

Ben, you’re welcome. Thank you for inviting me and for the friendship that we have. I look forward to hanging out with you.

About Kathryn “RaRa” Asaro Mayers

Kathryn was born in Brooklyn, New York in the late 50’s during the early days of the Rat Pack. Growing up in a strict Sicilian Italian family you can imagine the family commitment and values that were practised in the Asaro home. The entrepreneur in Kathryn emerged at a very early age, it was all she could think about. Following in the family asphalt business was not an option.

People and behaviour fascinated Kathryn where she became an expert in real estate acquisitions and the psychology of human behaviour.

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