Transcript
Intro:
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teams…teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Today, we are going to do something a little bit different. And the reason we are going to do something a little bit different is because I have the world’s greatest courage coach sitting right next to me now, Laban Ditchburn. And we’re actually at my house, and it is very rare, and for those who have been a guest or those who know me, it’s very, very rare that we actually have guests at my home to do a podcast recording and can be face to face. But Laban’s driven up to see me and spend some time with us today, so I’m really grateful. So because of that, I think that given we’re face to face, we’re going to take this opportunity to freestyle. And when you’re working with a courage coach and one as good as Laban is, I think being able to back yourselves in to freestyle around topics and look, loosely speaking, we are going to talk around the world of coaching and mentoring and support and why everyone in this world needs to make sure they’ve got the right people around them to provide the right levers of support. That’s that broad topic. But we’re going to run off the seat of our pants today. So it’s going to be a good episode. Because for me, when you actually can bring minds together without any scripts, without any broad structures they’ve got to follow, you can often get the best out of them. So before we do so, Laban, welcome to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast. Those who can’t see us, that’s a shake of the hands… we just shook hands.
Laban Ditchburn:
We shook hands, by the way, Ben, thanks so much for having me in your beautiful home, by the way.
Ben Wright:
Beautiful partway through renovations which may interrupt the podcast at any time home.
Laban Ditchburn:
It’s more the love and the energy you can sense around the place. It’s a home, it’s not a house.
Ben Wright:
It certainly is. We’re not going anywhere. Speaking of love and energy, Laban, you have gone through some very interesting periods in your life and you’re very open with these periods around addiction, whether that be gambling or alcohol, periods around health challenges. Right? You’ve had some significant ones there yourself. Even if we talk about body transformation, right, from periods of being bigger than you should be, carrying more weight than you should be, to periods where you’re super fit and running ultra marathons and equivalents. Right? So, and then on top of that, I’d actually say through professional journeys as well. To be a courage coach takes some transformations in itself because it at times can be a niche industry. And when I say at times, that means depending on who you’re dealing with and when you’re dealing with them. So I love talking with people who have such a great depth of background and have had to show real grit in what they’ve needed to achieve in their life and had some challenges. So I think you’re a perfect person to be talking around the importance of surrounding yourself with help. But what I’d love to do before we get into today is tell us a little bit about your journey.
Laban Ditchburn:
I think, like a lot of people out there, I’m a child of divorce and that’s at least 50% of us. Right? At least.
Ben Wright:
Me too.
Laban Ditchburn:
Right. And it’s actually higher for the second time around. So it’s very probable that someone close to you has experienced divorce if you haven’t. And I think people really underestimate the negative impact of divorce on children. We know it’s not good and we know it’s responsible for a large negative statistics around all kinds of crime and jail. You know, all these things really negatively impacted me. And my coping mechanism from the age of three and a half upwards when it first happened was escapism. And when I first dealing with the tyranny of the dysfunction and the custody battles and those foster home visits and poverty. And poverty is very character building, but poverty mindset kind of does all the damage from a financial block point of view. It was tv and video games and I would immerse myself for months and months playing Alex the Kid. And, you know, if anyone can remember the Sega master system. And then, you know, as I got to 15, it became alcohol 17,18, Gambling. This has been New Zealand as well. And then surprisingly, my early to mid twenties drug use and then it became sex and porn and basically anything that you can get addicted to, I’d find an attraction to. And. But on the surface of it, I was very high functioning. I used to work in I.T. recruitment for a long time, and I would show up to work on time. I had a big social circle. My boss liked me. I was pretty reliable, paid my taxes and all these things. So it was very easy for me to justify that there wasn’t anything majorly going wrong. And in 2015, when I was 35, I sort of bounced along the floor of rock bottom, got myself in a few situations where I could have been killed or very nearly arrested. And, you know, for those that are more curious, the book that I wrote off the back of that goes into explicit detail about some of these stories. But I had a moment where I was basically blowing borrowed rent money on horse racing in Hong Kong when I was at home on my laptop, and I was drunk. And I called the phone number in the bottom left hand corner of the screen that I’d never seen before. And it was the gambler’s helpline. And that kick started this journey of transformation, which gave me access to the gambling psychologist, which was funded by tax losses from gambling. So it was the first time I was ever up on my gambling journey, and I got access to this amazing woman, Lee, who I saw once a week for a year. And in the first session with her, she asked me one question about the relationship I had with my mother, which at that time was unbelievably dysfunctional. And I broke down. And I remember having being listened to for the first time in my life, which was a very important thing for anyone. If you tell someone your problems, sometimes the last thing you want is for them to try and solve them, particularly when their own life’s a disaster. But, and, you know, very proud to sit next to you today in your beautiful home and share that it’s eight plus years of sobriety, longer for drugs, longer for gambling. And I think, more importantly, I have killed any desire to want to escape. So I don’t have any issues being around those things. I don’t have any issues being in a pub if I had need to be there for something, or I got married in Las Vegas and, you know, were given vouchers. I didn’t use any of this stuff. And I think when you go through an experience like that, you kind of get the tap on the shoulder from the universe saying, maybe you should talk to people who are a little bit further behind than you because you’ve got the credibility of overcoming that thing, and that makes you highly relatable to that person, and they’re more likely to know, like, and trust you. And here we are.
Ben Wright:
Yeah. Wow. We talk about not wanting to escape or wanting to be present in your current life. I can always tell when I meet people for the first time how their drive is working for them. By the look in their eyes. It’s nondescript. But when you look at people and you can see in their eyes, you can see that little. I call it a little razzle dazzle. A little bit of sizzle, a little bit of sparkling their eye. You know that people are either living a life or doing what they want to be doing or to a version of it, right? Everyone’s different. I can certainly see that in you now. Right? You’ve got the cheeky smile, happy man. Met your partner and your mother in law today as well.
Laban Ditchburn:
Wife and mother in law.
Ben Wright:
Wife and mother in law. So you can see that there’s a lot of happiness around in your life. So, first of all, congratulations for working through that. When we’re on the topic of help, I think there’s something there that as leaders, we can often underestimate, and that’s around when we have a problem, it’s not always about solving it. Often a problem shared is a problem halved. And as leaders, we sometimes can underestimate that being there for our people to just listen. I’ve had a bad day. I’ve had issues with the customer. I’m having troubles with back of house admin within the business, whatever it may be, can often be enough to set that person on the right track that they need to go down to solve that problem themselves. So we don’t always have to be problem solvers, but sometimes the help we can be offering is to just listen and ask just one question. In your case, it was relationship with your mother. Sounds like that was a bit of a breakthrough there for you. Now, we don’t need to ask that necessarily when we have our people coming into our office with a problem, but, you know, questions are all different, but certainly is a version of help. I think that’s a really terrific place to start. A problem shared is a problem halved, and asking the right questions at the right time can be really impactful to people. Great, so let’s keep going. I cut you off there.
Laban Ditchburn:
No, not at all. I think in context to that relationship with my mother, one of the massive catalysts from the bulk of the transformation was forgiveness of self and then forgiveness of others. Forgiveness of mum and dad for what they did to me. You know what I mean? And I don’t know if you’re listening to this, you’re watching this, and you are holding a grudge towards someone for something they did. And it might have been the worst thing on planet Earth. And trust me, I know some people that have gone through some stuff, including my wife. What we don’t realise is that when we hold on to that, you know, people have heard this quote before, but if you haven’t, it’s like poisoning yourself and hoping the other person dies. And they say that love in the universe is basically the antidote to all misery. And you don’t have to be friends with them, you don’t have to spend any time with them. But learning how to forgive is one of the most powerful catalysts to an addiction recovery journey, in my humble opinion, and from conversations I’ve had, and that’s kind of the topic of the stuff they talk about, people go, world’s best courage coach. Are you teaching courage? I suppose that’s part of it. But, like, really what I think I’m best at is creating a space, kind of like you’re talking about exactly what you’re talking about, where it’s a judgement free zone, where people can see possibility for themselves. And they borrow, initially, courage from me, courage from you, business advice from you, something else from me, until they have vindicated it through their own n=equals one experience. And they go, hey, that does work. And that’s how you and I form a friendship.
Because what people don’t know is that even though I’ve been doing this for officially four and a half years, I need help too. And when Ben and I got together, I was in a very, I’m not gonna say dark, because there was no mental health component, but I was in a bleak place. And we spent a month together, five weeks a session a week for 45 minutes, and you created space for me. You were firm with me, but you were kind. And off the back of that, three months later, I’ve generated more business in the last three months than the previous twelve months. I am not using force for anything. Clients, health, opportunities are flowing into my life. And I’m not going to say that you are wholly responsible for that, because if you were, then you’re wholly responsible if it goes the opposite. Right? But the impact that you had on my life during that time was very profound, and I wanted to acknowledge you publicly for that. And I wasn’t. Well, I didn’t tell Ben that I was going to talk about this.
Ben Wright:
I had no idea this was coming, so.
Laban Ditchburn:
And you and I are very different in our approaches to different things, but that structure that you gave me, gave me the space to figure out a few things. And one of those things was meditation, something that I’ve been told. You didn’t even necessarily told me to meditate, but I’ve been told by so many coaches, Laban, you gotta meditate, you gotta meditate, you gotta meditate. And no one really sat down and explained why, not in any way that I understood. And I watched this Joe Dispenza rewired docu series, and he was talking about the left and right brain coming out of coherence. And I realised that the last four and a half years, actually, the last six years, I’ve been in fight or flight mode. I’ve had 20 miscarriages with my wife in a row. I nearly went bankrupt four times in 2019. We left Australia during the middle of the pandemic to get away from the tyranny of what was happening in Victoria. No shit. Things were stressful, and it was that regular meditation, and I was using silver mine method, which is what Joe Dispenza used when he first broke his body. And I’ve been doing it religiously at least once a day, and it has been an absolute game changer because my brain’s incoherent, my cortisol levels are dropping down, I’m losing weight, my body shape’s changing. I don’t have major food cravings anymore.
I’m way, I’m a better husband, I’m a better uncle, like, I’m a better coach. And when I came to you, I wasn’t able to be any of those things because I was in fight or flight mode and I was trying to force things to happen, and it just didn’t work. So thank you very much from the bottom of my little boy heart for that. That was a game changer.
Ben Wright:
First of all Laban, thank you very much for those kind words. I didn’t expect that it’s not planned in part of what we’re talking about, and I’m going to very quickly gloss over the me in that and start to talk back to the you in that. But I think for me, the meditation piece you’re talking about, and we didn’t speak about meditation. It’s not something that I typically will talk about, but I do talk about creating space to reset the body, and that’s to just lower your baseline level back down to one that allows the room or the moment or the world to get 100% Laban or 100% Ben. And for you, it sounds like meditation is what’s working for you at this point in time to be able to crystallise that moment to work, but also being able to have, when we talk about help, being able to, as leaders, have the time when we can slow down with our team, not be task driven, not be worried about what we have to right now at this moment to make sales or to make numbers or to do whatever we need to do to run our job or our lives. But we’re actually taking the moment to say, do you know what? Let’s just have a think about how we behave, how we act, what the world means to us at the moment, what my professional life means to us at the moment. And just by doing that, it allows the brain to shift into a slightly different gear and start to think about what the situation needs from you at the moment. That’s a quote from Cameron Schwab, by the way, who is coming up in a couple of podcasts. Time. Fantastic. Cameron’s a guy I’d love you to meet one day.
Laban Ditchburn:
Awesome.
Ben Wright:
So it sounds like for you, that that help has allowed you to find the time and calm baseline that you need to work out what your people that you help need from you next.
Laban Ditchburn:
Without a doubt. And I think, you know, you mentioned I’m a long distance runner. When we left in 2021, we end up in Mexico, in Playa Del Carmen, which is hotter and more humid than Noosa or Sunshine coast. And the roads there weren’t conducive to running. And then we ended up back and forth, road tripping to the state. So I fell out of routine with running. Running was my meditative state up until 2021. Wasn’t intentional. I didn’t kind of realise, but I would have these brilliant ideas when I was running. And when you rang long enough, you know, you would hope that ideas come, you know, when you’re running for 20 hours nonstop. But, like, I realised that the meditation was the missing link. It’s not the be all and end all, but it was the final puzzle piece for me, because really, fundamentally, all other areas of my life were fantastic. The relationship is amazing. Health, you know, better than 99.99%, still not, you know, in line with what I want it to be. And I was like, why am I having so many issues around attracting the wrong people into my life for wrong business? And, and then as soon as I brought the left and right brain back into coherence again, and this isn’t a woo woo thing. This has been studied extensively. Anyone that’s followed any Joe Dispenza stuff have been doing mris on this stuff for years. And however you get into that meditative state, whether it be meditation or swimming or yelling at your wife, whatever it is, like, that’s when all the ideas come. And then I would be halfway through meditation, and I would stop it, and I would ring someone because of an idea, and it would create something magnificent. And it’s just happened time and time and time and time again. And when anything that comes to knock me off centre I just drop back into one of those meditations. I did one before I came here. Not because I felt like I needed to, but it was like, why wouldn’t I? Do you know what I mean?
Ben Wright:
Yeah. So what I’m hearing from you is that life was good, but there was something still missing that was allowing you to show up as the person you needed to be in your role as a courage coach. And that was then the result of that was that you weren’t quite attracting the right people that you wanted to be working with.
Laban Ditchburn:
Wrong clients. And it was. If anyone’s read doctor David Hawkins book “Power Versus Force”, I was using force versus power, and now it’s magnetising. So I’m not actually actively seeking business. It’s coming to me, like, I’ll give you an example. And my wife’s a hypnotherapist, clinical, qualified hypnotherapist. And her and I worked together as purpose partners for life. I do the one on one courage, more practical stuff, and then she helps remove a lot of the subconscious blocks, and we are way more powerful together. And, you know, we just recently signed on a lady to work together for three months that I met at a recovery centre in Kawana. Like, got chatting to her. She’s, like, 78. Came around for dinner.
Ben Wright:
And by recovery, we should say. You mean health and fitness recovery.
Laban Ditchburn:
Yeah, like compression legs. She had a hip replacement when she was, like, 70, and now she hikes the himalayas and stuff. Super, super inspiring lady. And we’re very aligned, you know, with. With lots of different ideas. Like, there was no intent to try and sign her up, and she asked Anna about working with her and I, and then, like, where does that even come from? Yeah, there’s no Google Ads. There’s no Facebook things. There’s no damn. There’s no. Do you know what I mean? Like, it was just effortless. Didn’t need a website, even though we got these things. And I think that’s the way it should be when you’re in alignment and in integrity with what you’re doing.
Ben Wright:
Okay, so there’s two things I want to dive in on here with some little bit of commentary around. The first one is, and again, I relate everything here back to leaders, and I do everything I can to simplify the complex. That’s my tagline that sits. Ben will simplify the complexity. And the piece that’s landing out at me here is that as people, but we’re specifically talking about leaders today, we need to find the right balance in our lives. And I spend a lot of time with anyone I work with, teams or individuals, talking about having the right approach to health and fitness. If you’re a leader and you want people to follow you, you need to show up in ways from a health and fitness point of view that are going to encourage them to live their right life.
So for us, as leaders, we need to make sure we are finding that balance. And whether it be meditation in your instance or exercise in my instance, is a really big piece balanced with how I eat. Like, I’m constantly looking at new things. Our builders here, renovating at the moment, have got me onto turmeric, ginger, lemon and honey tea. Now, I am a black and white hard skills type of guy, right? If someone said, I see Ben Wright drinking that, they’d have a bit of a chuckle, right? But we’ve got into it, and I love it.
So, for me, that little bit of experimentation around food is one of the parts that grounds me, having time with my daughter, having time with my family, right? But my key driver is exercise. And everyone has something that’s a little bit different for them that grounds them and allows them to bring 100% Ben, or 100% of themselves to the situation. So, as leaders, I really encourage, and it sounds like Laban, and you do as well, is to find those key activities that are going to give you balance. That’s number one. We’ve explored that in a little bit of detail.
Number two is you spoke, you used the word magnetic. And I think we’ve heard. I certainly have heard magnetic abundance and magnetic attraction and those words, and they are buzzwords. But I think there’s a meaning behind them that I think is far more practical. And for me, it’s about when you’re creating value, and you can create value as a person or as a leader for me, in a couple of different ways. One is there’s the obvious around your knowledge. In this instance, I think you use the word power because knowledge is a subset of power, right. When people meet with you and you’re able to articulate what you offer, how you add value to them, how you can improve outcomes in their lives. The second piece for me around value is when you meet people, and there’s the unspoken relationship that can form, and salespeople in particular need to be very good at this. You need to be able to meet someone, boom, you’ve got that instant relationship. Because if you can do that, people will have some curiosity. They’ll lean in. I’m leaning into Laban now, they’ll lean into you and they’ll want to be part of your lives.
Laban Ditchburn:
Without a doubt.
Ben Wright:
And that approach, and I had it yesterday. I cold called someone who’s quite senior in the renewables industry and she took a meeting with me and I asked her why she took the meeting. She said, there was just something about you, Ben. I normally wouldn’t, but I agreed to. And we ended up talking about my daughter and her granddaughters and I think we spent 5% of the meeting on business, but that was all that we needed. And fronting up with the best version of yourself as a leader as frequently as you can. It’s never going to be every day, it’s never going to be every moment of every day. But the more you front up in that best version of yourself, the more engagement you are simply going to get from those around you, because you’re giving off that energy, that curiosity, that inner drive. And I think that’s the impactful piece I’m taking from whether you meet them at a health and fitness recovery centre in Kawana or a formal networking event at the Paris end of town, it doesn’t matter as long as you’re bringing your best self. That’s where, in your case, your three months of business has dwarfed what you earned in the last twelve months, because you got that right. So really powerful. Laban, I really liked that. Thank you.
So we’re coming towards a close today as we leave. This is a hard question, right, because I think you’re going to have lots of answers to this. But if you were to share something that you would say right now for you would be the most impactful thing that you would recommend a leader do to get the best out of themselves, what would that be?
Laban Ditchburn:
The obvious answer is to meditate. But I’m not going to answer with that. The second answer, which you probably don’t expect, is I, full disclosure, don’t really have any relationship with religion, but I become very, very spiritual and I become a ferocious learner around the quantum field and I don’t understand how it works, just like you don’t know how electricity works, but you know that if you turn the switch, it comes on. And maybe if you’re an electrician, maybe you know, but I’m not talking to the sparkies out there. If you’re not utilising quantum entanglement and the quantum field to get what you need and what you want in your life, you are making your life a thousand times harder than it should be. And you may not agree with it and I don’t care, but that doesn’t matter. I have witnessed too many miracles after miracles after miracles for the mathematical probability of that being a fluke to be impossible.
Ben Wright:
So simplify that as something that people could do right now that is within their reach. That isn’t going to need significant, maybe miracles we talk about, but something that people could do right now to get in line with their purpose. Would that be where we’re going here?
Laban Ditchburn:
Yeah. One of the most mainstream documentaries that came out 20 years ago this year was The Secret. And you might have seen it in your periphery, had lots of the OG speakers and Doctor John Demartini featured in it, who I recently interviewed as well. Brian Tracy. Doctor Brian Tracy was in there, Jack Canfield from Chicken Soup for the Soul was in there, and Doctor Joe Vitale, if you haven’t heard of these people, that’s okay, but watch that and it will give you an insight about what I’m talking about at a much more introductory level. Because I remember watching it years and years ago and I wasn’t quite ready for it. And I watch it now with a new set of eyes and I’m like, I get it now, I get it. It’s like whenever you rewatch a movie 20 years later and you just watch it like the Matrix through a very different lens and you don’t need to believe it, but just start exploring it and see what fun and opportunity you can create from it. And I promise you, your life will be infinitely better as a result. You don’t have to trust a single word I say. Go and figure it out for yourself. But that’s my encouragement to you today.
Ben Wright:
All right, great. So it’s called The Secret. Find your sense of purpose. There’s some quantum… Quantum fields.
Laban Ditchburn:
Well, quantum entanglement and quantum mechanics. It all kind of ties in. And I’m not going to sit here and pretend like I understand it all, but I’ve seen it in action.
Ben Wright:
So I’m going to summarise it, being really curious and open to learning new things and understanding where your life could lead. Nice way to end and quite a different podcast episode for us today, but one that I’m grateful to have spent some time with you on Laban. So thank you very much. For those who want to find you, where can they find more about you?
Laban Ditchburn:
Two ways. You can just Google Laban and Ditchburn and whatever your search engine comes back. There’s only one Laban and Ditchburn on planet Earth. Or if you need something a bit more specific, just go to labanditchburn.com. It’s got links to all my stuff, the book and podcast and whatever else you need.
Ben Wright:
Perfect. Excellent. Well, Laban, thank you very much for today. It’s been a pleasure.
Laban Ditchburn:
Appreciate you Ben.
Ben Wright:
For everyone listening, keep living in a world of possibility and you’ll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.
