Teaching What Matters Most: The Secret To Leadership Success With Peter Thurin

How can you get to the hearts of your audience or your customers? Knowing what they need and teaching what matters most are the keys. In this episode, Ben Baker interviews international speaker (both in person and virtual) Peter Thurin. In a previous life, he owned and operated multiple pharmacies for nearly twenty years. He was also a junior football coach and is a black belt in Taekwondo. Peter focuses on creating environments that bring the best out in people, allowing amazing things to transpire. With his years’ worth of experience, he imparts his leadership knowledge to many companies and train leaders first before training their people. Don’t miss this episode to learn how you can make people listen to you and make them want to stay long term!

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Your Brand Marketing · Teaching What Matters Most: The Secret To Leadership Success With Peter Thurin

Teaching What Matters Most: The Secret To Leadership Success With Peter Thurin

Thank you for being such an amazing audience. Thanks for week after week following in on Spotify, iTunes, iHeart. Wherever you guys like to follow, I’m there. If you find a channel that I’m not on, let me know and we’ll get it up on there as well. Subscribe wherever your favorite channel is. Send me an email at [email protected] if you have anything that you want to talk about, like, didn’t like, that you have questions on. I love responding to emails and I love connecting with people on LinkedIn. You can find me @YourBrandMarketing for LinkedIn. Let’s connect and let’s find out more about you because that’s what this show is all about. It’s a community. Let’s be a community together. With that, I want to bring on, Peter Thurin. Peter is an international speaker. He’s from Down Under. He’s incredible. He’s got a great story to tell. He’s got an amazing attitude. Peter, welcome to the show.

What a joy to be here, my friend. I’m like a kid in a toy shop. This is amazing. Thank you for having me.

Peter, you and I connected as I do with a lot of my guests on LinkedIn. We were introduced through mutual friends. We had this amazing offline conversation and then all of a sudden, I get a phone call from you. You’re from Australia. You picked up the cell phone, you jumped on WhatsApp or whatever you did, and you phoned me on my cell. It was great to have a live conversation and get to meet the person behind the LinkedIn profile. I love the fact that you reached out. That’s what made me want to have you on the show because it’s a real person. It’s a human being, and someone with some real passion behind them.

As you’ve already learned, I’d rather talk than write. I find it amusing because my standard joke at home is I get paid to talk, most of my friends would pay me to shut up. The cool thing about this is that I can hear your energy and your enthusiasm for what you do. Once we start writing, it’s two dimensional and I don’t get that same sense. I love some of the words you were using and what was important to you. What mattered to me was that our values were in sync. For me to jump on the phone is easy to do and it’s easy not to do, and most people don’t do it. One of the keys is always to differentiate yourself from everybody else. For me, it’s the way I roll because I love to hear what matters most to you and I can hear that in your voice much more powerfully than I can in written communication.

That’s true. I write a lot. I’ve written a book, I write articles all the time, I write for blog posts, etc. but you’re right. When you only write, you miss a lot in communication. All you have the ability to do is to put the thought out there and people have to take whatever you put down as the gospel truth. They don’t hear the intonation of your voice. They don’t get to see the body language. They don’t get to go back and forth. It’s not live. It’s not real-time. You miss a lot of the nuances that you get when it’s live communication. That’s why I like you, love being on stage, doing workshops, doing this show because it allows me to engage with people and have those conversations that make it real life. Tell me a little bit about it because you intimated about it. “It’s easy to do, easy not to do, your choice.” That’s your tagline. Tell me about Peter Thurin. Where did you come from and where are you now? What makes you different?

Let’s go back to where it all started. Believe it or not, I am a pharmacist by profession and I owned and operated retail pharmacies in Melbourne, Australia for twenty years. It was a different life. I came from a healthcare/caring, genuinely caring background. People matter. What we did, we grew awesome businesses by focusing on our people first and foremost. An amazing thing happened, the more I took care of my people, the more they took care of our customers. The side effect, pharmacy speak, of all of that was we grew an awesome bottom line. I wasn’t smart enough to complicate things. I got that if you took care of people, it’s amazing what you could do together. I say a little bit tongue in cheek, my greatest skillset was unlocking the door in the morning and watching my young team of people bring my businesses to life. I was captain of the cheer squad, high-fiving and chest-bumping. I have to be careful with chest bumps. Otherwise, we’ll have massive sexual harassment charges.

It’s a different world, isn’t it?

It is a different world, but back then you could cheer for people respectfully and have a whole lot of fun. We grew outstanding businesses. I had small boutique pharmacies and we took on the big chains here in Australia. We knocked them off because while they were hiding behind the brand and the marketing, we were genuinely taking care of people. That was where it all started for me. Coming from a business background, I hope it gives me massive credibility speaking all around the world. Two little things that changed my business life, my professional life were, one, coaching Junior Australian rules football. I love kids and I love sports. I was coaching 6 to 12-year-old kids. I started coaching my oldest son’s junior football team.

People want to stay with companies where they believe in the mission, ambition, value statement, and organization in general. Share on X

The other thing that my older son and I started together was martial arts. I had a dream as an eight-year-old kid to have a black belt in martial arts, but I didn’t get started until I was 36 years of age. Those two things, owning retail pharmacies and a black belt in martial arts were funnily enough where my speaking career all start. We’ll talk more about that. That was the foundation that gave me, maybe the confidence. Interestingly enough, coaching junior in footy, if you think about the messaging to little kids, you’re talking about being the best that you can be which is the name of my book, be the best you can be. You’re talking about setting goals, short, mid, big picture goals. You’re talking about having fun. You’re talking about camaraderie, excellence, teamwork and leadership. Not that different from the corporate world.

Anybody who’s been a coach or a mentor in any way shape or form gets that. It’s getting the best out of people. I want to go back three steps before we get into that because the whole thing with the footy is important. You said something that was interesting, that you took care of your people and let them take care of your customers. There are many businesses that are hyper-focused on the customer that they forget about the internal customer, the employees. I am with you 100% that if you take care of your people, if you empower them, train them and give them the skillset to succeed, they will take care of you and they will take care of your customers. They will be the best advocates for your brand. I love that.

What was amazing was I was speaking at an event in Australia and there were about 1,500 people there. The MC got excited when I finished speaking and he turned to me said, “Would you mind if we threw this open to Q&A?” I love Q&A because you can’t contrive that. People asked you what matters most to them. The first gentleman, in the middle of the auditorium, he’s handed a handheld microphone, stands up and he says, “Thank you so much.” He asked me a question that I had never ever been asked before. He said, “Can I ask you what you are proudest of in all the years that you owned pharmacies?” When somebody asks a question like that, you can’t do some flippant answer. You got 1,500 people in front of you. I’ve never been asked that before. I am fiercely proud of it. What came out of my mouth that day was, “The length of time that people stayed with me, because that is not about me, that is about what we created together.”

My focus was on creating environments that brought the best out in my people. Amazing things happened. The more we took care of our people, the more they took care of our customers. We used to have meetings every single week and it wasn’t about flow charts, pie charts, graphs, and budgets. The bottom line, it was when do you perform at your best? Let’s talk about that. When are you at your best? Isn’t it beholden upon us to work, to create an environment that gives you the opportunity to perform at your best? These are the discussions we used to have ongoing. I found that optimized our success chances right across the board.

That’s leadership. In a word, what you’re defining is leadership. If we listen to our people, understand them and value them, they will be amazing advocates for us. They’ll stay. People want to stay with companies. They want to stay with companies where they believe in the mission and vision and value statement. They believe in the organization. They believe that what they do matters, they’ll stay with the company.

They believe in what they do. What they do does matter. You and I travel a lot. I’m incredibly privileged that I get to travel the world speaking. There was so much rhetoric inside conference rooms. You hear a lot of BS that people talk about and then they walk out. It’s like talking about health and well-being on stage and then you catch the person smoking cigarettes at the back of the building. They talk about caring about their people, but you watch the way that they treat their people. They don’t even give them eye contact. There’s got to be genuineness in this, otherwise it all falls apart as you and I know. I always giggle at the people that talk about how much I love my children but they’re never home for storytime. They’d rather be in the pub having three extra beers with their mates than going home for storytime. It’s what you do, not what you say as you and I are both abundantly aware.

It’s amazing to me how many people say, when I’m doing workshops, “I need you to train my people how to be better leaders.” “I need to train you on how to be a better leader before I can train your people.” A lot of it is that they say, “My people have to do this and I have to teach them how to do this. The same rules don’t apply to me as an owner of a company.” If they don’t apply to you, nothing matters.

Four words, look at me first. I’m probably a fairly good starting point. That’s where it all started for me. Years of owning and operating pharmacies and now I’ve got a black belt in martial arts. I say this as a bit of a joke, I wake up one morning and decide I’m done. I’ve sold my quota of jellybeans and razor blades and I needed to find life outside the four walls of a retail pharmacy and coaching junior football at that time. I sold my pharmacies and I was coaching junior football was not a strong idea of what the next part of my journey was going to look like.

LBL Thurin | Leadership Success — Leadership Success: The more you take care of people, the more they take care of your customers.

What blew me away was that every Sunday, I had more and more moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas coming to the football to listen to me talk to their kids. I thought, “There’s something going on here.” That was the starting point of my speaking life. I took a bet one day and went in and I spoke on stage and the feedback was quite extraordinary. It got me a little bit off guard and t started to evolve. One led to two led to three and then word of mouth started to become an invaluable part of my growth as a speaker, and now I’m speaking to you. This is the pinnacle.

If I was the pinnacle of your career, we both are going downhill from here. This is an amazing conversation, but I look at this as a starting point. I look at your career and I see you taking off like a rocket.

We got to talk about easy to do, easy not to do. Once I phoned you and you put the hand of friendship out in collaboration and said, “Let’s sit down and talk and see what we can do together.” Most people wouldn’t have done that. It’s easy to do, easy not to do. Most people in this world choose easy not to do. I love the fact that you took hold of this opportunity and said, “Let’s sit down, talk, maybe share our message, and maybe our community can drive some value and benefit out of listening to you and me.”

I get into people’s faces, you and I have spoken about this, “It’s not what you know, it’s what you do with what you know.” Listening to you and me speak, don’t leave great stuff behind in a conference room. You have listened to that podcast, but what did you do with that? Doing nothing is a choice too. Do that one thing as a result of listening to you and me that will move you in the direction of a goal that you say is important to you. The people who are with us on this show, it will be time well spent. It’s always about doing, which is a strong part of my philosophy and I know yours too.

I was listening to a couple of your times on stage, a couple of your videos, and what impresses me and what a lot of speakers don’t do is talk about the follow-up and the follow-through. We can get up on stage and whether it’s 200, 500, 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 people, whatever it is, you can motivate them for 45 minutes to an hour. You can get them to stand up, clap, put both hands in the air and shout and they get all excited, but three days later, where are they? A week later, a month later, two months later, where are they? Have they taken action? Have they moved their life forward from there?

I love the fact that not only do you do the motivational speaking, but you also do the coaching, mentoring and consulting afterward for the next 3, 6, 9 months, a year. Whatever it is, to make sure that you put people’s feet to the fire, hold them be accountable and help them create long-term habits. That to me is far more important than exciting somebody for that hour that you’re up on stage. It’s how do you change people’s lives in the long-term?

There are two components. One, there’s the company that has the event. They need to get a commercial return on investment. Going to an event and going, “Rah, rah, rah,” is warm and fuzzy, but it doesn’t change behaviors. To your point, it’s gone in a moment. It’s fabulous while you’re there. I’ve been to conferences where people stand on chairs and sway from side to side and sing songs, we’ve all been there. I can tell you, the two most popular conference songs are Simply the Best by Tina Turner, and We Are The Champions by Queen has come back since Bohemian Rhapsody. I walk out of the conference room and I do nothing.

The whole point about my programs is it keeps people focused post the event, builds momentum, creates accountability and achieves outcomes. We need to be outcome-driven. It’s not about what you say you’re going to do at the conference, but going shoulder to shoulder and working with companies, people, organizations to bring to life the promises that they made at a conference. That’s what we do. My attitude isn’t, “You go and do this,” it’s, “Let’s go and do this together.”

Everything in life is a choice between easy to do and easy not to do it. Share on X

I want to go back to the beginning a little bit here because my philosophy in life is all-around easy to do, easy not to do. Honestly, I believe that everything in life, in fact, is a choice between easy to do and easy not to do. Choosing easy to do means focusing on what you can do rather than what you can’t do. It’s the first step to achieving anything in your life, but it’s also the second step and the third step. You get the picture.

What I’ve learned is the best people, the best companies, the best organizations, the best franchises in the world learn to find it easy to do the things that others find easy not to do. That includes asking, “How do we take this forward?” One of the things that you and I spoke about is the power of the questions, and companies need to ask better questions. How do I maintain momentum? How can I bring this to life? What I do then is that I find out what matters most to those organizations. What is most important to them? Break it down via the easy to do philosophy and show them how it works. It’s not complicated.

What I’m hearing here, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that when you’re working with people, and I have a similar philosophy if we are going the same way, you need to understand what are the objectives of the company that you’re working for before you get on the stage.

No question. It’s a respect issue. People go on stage and roll out some generic presentation. They’ve done no homework on the company. It’s critical. In the days when I owned pharmacies, if you were going to come in and speak to my people inside my pharmacies, at least show me some respect, at least get some sense of what matters most to me. Aspirationally, what am I trying to achieve? Who is my competition? What are they doing? You can tailor your messages so that they are specific and relevant to where I’m at. It isn’t what you want to roll at in that session. It’s understanding where I’m at the customer is. Aspirationally, where do I aspire to be? What can we do together to push in that direction? This is what I look like now. What will I look like as a result of having you on stage? I begin with the end in mind. Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits are powerful. Seek first to understand and then to be understood. I understand from the people who I’m speaking to, what is it that they would love to walk away with from this session? What matters most to them? What are their objectives?

I always ask, “What is success look like to you? What is your individual success?” Everybody’s got a different definition of success. Your definition is different from mine and different from a lot of my readers. If you understand what your definition of success is and if somebody asks you what your definition of success is, you have a far better chance of achieving it than going for some generic speaker or consultant or coach that comes in who has a program. The programs are wonderful.

Somebody asked me what my rate card was. I said, “I don’t have a rate card. I come in and I’ll sit there and let’s talk about what you need. What’s your budget? What are your objectives? What do you need your people to understand long-term, then we’ll figure out what it’s going to cost?” I don’t get people who come in with a cookie-cutter, “I’m going to go on stage. I know exactly every single movement, every single word, every single nuance, I know from beginning to end. If it meets you, great. If it doesn’t meet you, great. I’m getting paid regardless.” It doesn’t make any sense to me.

I’m shoulder to shoulder with you on that. For me, I work with people to get them in the game. To get them in the game, I’ve got to know what game it is they want to get into. I enable them to rise to the challenge. Let’s work out what their challenges are. The last part for me there is moving from routine to remarkable. When I talk about remarkable, I talk about their success, how they define success. What outcomes, to your point, are critical or integral to their success? These are their definitions. My programs and inverted commas are quarterly face-to-faces and then I hold people accountable. That’s what I do. It’s been an amazing success for companies that I’ve worked with and for me. I’m about getting face-to-face.

For me, there’s nothing like eyeballing somebody as opposed to a cookie-cutter approach is nonsense. To take some module off the shelf thinking that one size fits all is outrageous. I want you to treat me that what I do is completely different from everybody else. I am special. You’ve drill down to work out what matters most to me and that you can fit my needs and that together we can go shoulder to shoulder to bring my goals, my dreams, my aspirations to life. I’m with you with this you know. I’m going with you. You got to have the courage to get into the game. You got to rise to the challenge. These are the keynotes that I’m asked most frequently. They’re the titles. Get in the game. Rise to the challenge. Be remarkable. Often, it’s a combination of all three.

They work well together. I want to do a deep dive into, “Easy to do, easy not to do, your choice,” because I love this. You’ve intimated about it a couple of times, you’ve referred to it a couple of times, but let’s get into this. Easy to do, easy not to do, because you’re right. Everybody has things in their life. They have choices, either you do it or you don’t do it.

People say to you, “I want to get fit and healthy.” That’s great and important. For those people who have played no sports since they left school, it’s a challenge. Let’s break it down into easy to do, easy not to do. Two sit-ups and two push-ups, do you believe it’s within the realms of your capability and a stretch to do two sit-ups and two push-ups? Yes or no?

I hope so, yes.

If you’re going, “I’d love to play this game with you, but why did you have to choose such a huge number?” let’s get in the game. Let’s have the courage to get in the game. Tomorrow morning, when the alarm goes off at 5:45 AM, we jump out of bed, hit the floor, two sit-ups and two push-ups. I’m in the game. The amazing thing about two sit-ups and two push-ups on day one is that it turns into three sit-ups and three push-ups by Tuesday of next week, then it turns into five sit-ups and five push-ups. It becomes more fun than that because now your family sees you on the floor doing sit-ups and push-ups, then they’re doing it with you. It starts to build momentum and we start to have a whole lot of fun. It’s not one effort of 1,000 push-ups, because you couldn’t do it until you’d hurt yourself.

This is the key, small steps taken consistently over time leads to massive achievement. No different from a relationship with your boy, Robbie. You can tell me how much you love him and spend all day at work. I’m not sensing that what you’re saying to me is quite on the level if you’re not getting home to have meal time with him, get to his sporting events. Start out with one. One turns into two, turns into three and so on. People say they want to be financially secure or financially free or never to have to worry about money. Aspirationally, I understand that. Maybe break it down. Start off with ringing your financial advisor, “Can I sit down and talk to you about my finances?” There’s always a get into the game, and that’s the easy to do step.

I had a dream as an eight-year-old boy to achieve a black belt in martial arts. I did nothing about it until I turned 36. The epiphany, “I’ve got to get into the game.” What’s easy to do? Book my first lesson. Once I had my first lesson, I walked differently. The excitement starts to build, the momentum builds, and you start to push in the direction of your big picture goal. It’s a philosophy in life and it keeps me honest. I challenged an audience on stage one day, Ben. I threw out the question, “When was the last time that you and your partner went out on a date? No kids, no parents, no pets, no friends, just you and your partner went out on a date.” As this was coming out of my mouth, I was thinking to myself on stage, “You are a fraud. When was the last time you did it?”

This was in a place in Australia called Port Douglas. It’s a 4-hour flight from where I live. I wasn’t flying home until tomorrow, but I came on stage that day. I rang my wife and my favorite little Italian restaurant and made a booking for the following night when I got home, then I rang my wife, her name is Sharon. I said, “Tomorrow night, you and I are going out for dinner. I want you to hear what I’m saying, no friends, no family, nobody, you and me.” To which my wife responded, “What have you done?”

“Who are you? What did you do with my husband?”

It's the small steps taken consistently over time that leads to massive achievement. Share on X

We giggle about that and that was a long time ago. The beautiful thing about easy to do, easy not to do is that it keeps me honest. Small steps are taken consistently over time, which leads to massive achievement. Working with the most successful organizations around the planet, the most extraordinary thing started to happen. I’ve been talking about easy to do, easy not to do for many years. I’ve repositioned and rebranded because that’s what resonates powerfully with people all around the world. Presidents of companies, CEOs of companies, and junior people within organizations are where I get much feedback on an ongoing basis. My whole philosophy in life is all-around easy to do, easy not to do.

The easy to do, I get. It’s step-by-step. It’s how do you eat an elephant? One step at a time. One bite at a time is how you eat an elephant. You don’t run a marathon on your first day out. To do anything well takes time, effort, dedication, and all that, I understand that. My thing is easy not to do because too many people out there making excuses. I don’t think that easy not to do is about making excuses. It’s more, and you’ll have to explain this to me, do we concentrate on the stuff that’s unimportant to us? Do we waste our time spending effort, time and energy on things that don’t matter and is that the easy not to do? Are we not focusing on the things that we should be focusing on in the first place?

Often, there are things that we should not be doing. We should be choosing not to do that. Go back to what you said. When you speak to people initially or speak to organizations, it’s finding out what matters most to them. What I do is I sit down with people, “Let’s talk about what matters most to you.” I would say that most people, health and fitness are fairly important. Physical, mental, spiritual, health and fitness are important to most people. Let’s put that down. What’s next? My family, let’s write that down. Be honest with me, does your family matter? Let’s write that down. Friends? Let’s write that down. Finances? Let’s write that down. Having fun, your lifestyle? Let’s write that down. Community work? Let’s write that down. Let’s get a sense of it. If these are other things that matter, then if I’m working with you, I’m going to make sure that if you tell me that your kids matter, that you will get home for storytime with your kids. If you told me that health and fitness matters, I’m being harsh and overgeneralizing here, but often it’s the unhealthiest people that have got all the hash browns and the bacon. They’ll tell me that health and fitness matters. Clearly, their actions dictate that they don’t.

Let’s go for a walk around the park and have a chat about this. The starting point to you said, it’s a respect issue. Let’s sit down together and get real clarity as to what matters most to you, then it becomes beholden upon us to use the easy to do, easy not to do philosophy to bring that to life. Most people, when the alarm goes off 5:45, I’m going to challenge you to do two sit-ups and two push-ups, “I’m tired this morning. I don’t feel like it.” Snooze button goes and I’m back to sleep. Instead of going to bed at 10:00 PM and that extra bottle of wine and it’s now midnight, “I don’t feel like getting up in the morning.” My whole plan around choosing easy to do, a fitter and healthier version of myself is now put off for another day and another day. I’m now choosing easy not to do as opposed to choosing easy to do. Keep in mind, it is a choice.

Even listening to you and me speak, our communities will listen to this and doing nothing is also a choice. What I would love to say happen is one step into a game that matters to you. It might be, “I want to speak fluent Italian.” I’ve never spoken Italian before so I’d find that challenging. What’s easy to do, easy not to do? Three words a day. One in the morning, one at lunchtime, two words, you’ll be exhausted. Take the afternoon off. Don’t learn another word until you go to bed that night. There are three words. Five days a week, fifteen words a week, that’s 750 words a year. Easy to do, easy not to do.

A cute easy to do, easy not to do story. This beautiful human being, I’m privileged sometimes I’m picked up when I speak. I have a man who takes me to the airport and picks me up and we’ve become friends. He and I are the same age. One of the key differences between him and myself is that his tummy is slightly larger than my tummy. He drives for a living. When I get in the car with him, let’s call him John for the sake of the story. John turns and looks at me and then he looks down at his tummy and our conversation always begins the same way. He always says to me, “How come you’ve got that tummy and I’ve got this tummy?”

The point is he sits down and drives all day. He has about six clients a day. He’s normally 15 to 20 minutes early before he picks up each client. He chooses to sit in the car outside the house. I said, “John, let’s call it three clients a day. If you got out of the car and went for a 10-minute walk, that’s 30 minutes exercise. Seven days a week, that’s 210 minutes a week. That’s 10,920 minutes of exercise in a year. That’s 182 hours of exercise by choosing easy to do. Up until now you’ve chosen easy not to do, and you get to choose.” He tells me he hasn’t got time to exercise. It’s breaking it down using easy to do, easy not to do. He would have 182 hours of exercise a year by focusing on easy to do, if his health and well-being truly matters to him. It’s his choice.

It’s not lying to yourself. The only person you’re lying to is yourself. Either something is important to you or it’s not. Either you want to do something or you don’t. If you don’t want to do something, don’t tell yourself that that’s something that’s important to you. If you think that that’s something that’s not important to your company, why are you saying that it is? You’re not being authentic in one way, shape or form.

The only way that I can inspire somebody to become a better version of themselves is, first and foremost, focusing on what matters most to them. To your point, that’s when they have to be honest. Let’s sit down, give great clarity as to what does matters most to you, whether it’s an individual, whether it’s an organization, small business, medium, large business, and let’s focus on that. My role from an ongoing perspective is quarterly face-to-face, but there’s real accountability where I will be in your face. Be careful what you say to me because I will hold you to it. There’s no wriggle room. If it’s important to you, it’s important to me. I will do everything within my power to work with you, to bring that to life.

Let’s bring this thing all together. You speak around the world, your clients are around the world, the message that you give is worldwide. How do people get in touch with you? More and more people need to see you on stage. They need to have the experience that you can provide and be able to teach their people how to be better at what they do. What’s the best way for people to get in touch with you?

Probably the website, PeterThurin.com and LinkedIn. There’s a whole bunch of stuff there, Peter Thurin. Easy to do, easy not to do. There is precious about me. If I can live by this philosophy so can you. I’m not an elite athlete, a gold medalist. Ordinary people, they’re breaking down using the force to be doing extraordinary things. What I do on stage is to share my stories and my successes and my failures. When I forget to embrace easy to do, easy not to do, and to your point earlier, it’s about doing or not doing. You either do or you don’t. Should’ve, could’ve, would’ve doesn’t count. You either did or you didn’t. You’re either in the game or you’re not. It’s getting in the game, rising to the challenge and being remarkable.

I say on stage a lot that good intentions will never ever get the job done. You have to do something. For me, the starting point with my relationships with companies has been that initial keynote, getting on stage and then the discussion around how do we maintain momentum? How do we keep people focused? How do we hold people to account? How do we achieve the outcome that you say are important to you? Let’s get on stage. Let’s experience each other. If I do nothing on stage, I promise you one thing. I will create motion and have a whole lot of fun at the same time too, my friend.

I’m a big believer that ordinary people do extraordinary things and you are one of those. You are ordinary people doing extraordinary things, Peter. One last question, this is a question I ask everybody. When you get off the stage or you leave a meeting and you get in your car and you drive away, what’s the one thing you want people to think about when you’re not in the room?

If there were two words that matter most, it’s about choice and doing. As you and I know, you haven’t truly decided unless you’ve done something about the message. I don’t get to control the event but how I respond is my choice. Make the decision and do. I promise you, you will walk a whole lot different once you get into the game. For a message perspective, it’s about, “I have the choice, but I must do.” I asked a gentleman one day, he’s a consultant here in Australia that created a huge amount of work for me. He kept putting me forward and putting me forward. I sat with him one day and I said, “Why do you keep putting me forward?” His response to me, “I would have on my tombstone, forgive me if this sounds a bit self-indulgent and arrogant, I don’t mean it that way, ‘Because you genuinely care.’” I would take that any day of the week, Ben, to be remembered that that guy genuinely cared is for me powerful and cool. It’s around choice and doing the message. If people thought this guy genuinely cared, I’d take it.

Pete, thank you for genuinely caring about my audience and giving such great nuggets, such great information and sharing your wisdom with us. Thank you for being one of my guests. I am privileged to have you on the show.

I feel incredibly privileged to have this opportunity. Thank you.

About Peter Thurin

Peter Thurin spent more than 20 years owning, building and selling successful businesses but it was a simple phone call that led to an epiphany about life and what he wanted out of it. Ever since he was a boy, Peter had wanted to be a black belt in martial arts. It was a dream, but an unfulfilled one. At 36 years of age, Peter made the decision to finally pursue that dream by making a simple phone call to his local Taekwondo school to arrange his first lesson. It was easy to do, but for 36 years it had also been easy not to do.

That was the epiphany.

Now a 3rd Dan Black Belt, Peter sees everything in life as a choice between ‘easy to do’ and ‘easy not to do’. Just like he did in pursuing his own dream, Peter now helps people focus on what they CAN DO rather than what they can’t. He helps people from all over the world with the inspiration, enthusiasm, and determination they need to rise to the challenge.

Peter’s story is not one of extraordinary achievement, but it is a story of achievement. It’s a story of what ordinary people can achieve when they focus on what matters to them and, starting with small steps, build the momentum they need to reach their goals.

As Peter says, “big-picture goals can be so daunting that often people don’t have the courage to get into the game. I say ‘It’s OK to feel awkward, it’s OK to feel uncomfortable, but don’t allow those feelings to prevent you from making a start. So, what’s the one thing you need to do to make a start? Let’s go and do that together. Let’s get excited!’

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