Robin Sieger, one of Europe's leading authorities on success, motivation and peak performance joined us at NMP Live for an exclusive interview on defining success and helping people change their mindset.
Watch the full interview or read the transcript below.
In conversation with Robin Sieger
How did you get into motivational speaking?
I originally wanted to do medicine, but I wasn’t academically gifted enough I suspect. So, I went to university to do science and realised it wasn’t for me and I dropped out because I wanted to become a comedy writer. That’s what I did, I became a comedy writer for radio and television, started a theatre company and became a stand-up comedian which is what I did until I was 28.
Then I was diagnosed with cancer, so I was in hospital and I came out of hospital and thought I want to get a job that’s probably a little more normal. So, I became a writer for Blind Date; I used to write all the questions and answers, I wasn’t meant to say that! And then I ended up becoming a producer and then to the BBC to be Head of Entertainment Development.
They sent me on a training course one day; I remember attending this training course and remembering a line by a comedian called Howie Mandel. He once said that ‘God is like Tupperware; he said the product’s great but the sales staff suck!’ I felt the same thing, I thought I could this training better and I left the BBC to set up a training company.
How do you define success?
Success is a great topic and the definition that I love, I heard it about 30 years ago, was ‘success is the gradual realisation of your goals.’ That’s it, whatever your personal goals are, upon the realisation you've been successful.
So, success isn’t an amount of money, it isn’t status, it isn’t position. If you rob a bank and make a lot of money, are you successful? If you win the lottery, are you successful? If you get a gun and hold 600 people hostage, are you powerful? If you set yourself a goal and you achieve it; when a child learns to walk for the first time, that’s success.
I think in our life we need to determine what our success looks like. That for me is what success is, the realisation gradually of your goals.
Can an individual succeed without failing first?
I came across a curious statistic, that the average child falls 240 times before it learns to walk. Yet, I imagine most British people if you ask them ‘can you speak French’ will say no and then tell you they tried twice. I think failure is just feedback. I don’t want to get too all-American, as American’s go ‘failure’s your first step to success.’
I don’t feel that way, I think failing is feedback; if what you’re doing is not working, then it will guide you to what you need to do. Is it essential? I think it’s incredibly helpful. I coach golfers in the mental game and if a golfer hits a perfect shot, they tell me they learn nothing. If they hit an imperfect shot, they learn something.
So, I think in business and in life if you just immediately succeed, like we see a lot of people have done, they can’t sustain it because they didn’t learn anything in their success, it’s in your failure. So, I think failure is essential, it’s your willingness to learn from it and not to identify with it so rather than say ‘I’m a failure, say hmm that didn’t work what can we try instead?’
Is being a winner in you DNA?
I think partly it’s in your DNA, partly but 10%. I think that if you look at a lot of people who have been successful say 50/60 years ago, their backgrounds were very similar. They came from poverty; hardship and they were determined to get out of that.
The qualities I think in winning of people that are high achievers is a very clear idea of what they want to achieve; the second thing is they have a belief, an absolutely unshakeable belief that they can do it.
We all have ambition, when we’re young we want to be pop stars, famous football players and someone says, ‘you can’t do it, you sing, play football?’. You look at players like David Beckham and Jonny Wilkinson, the rugby player, if you discover how much and how hard they worked when they were 11/12 years of age it is just off the scale.
So, I do believe you can learn to be successful or more successful. We can’t all learn to be multi-millionaires or CEO’s of corporations, there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes, but I think, personally, everyone can certainly improve their level of performance and succeed.
What can people do to change their mindset?
I think there’s three things people can do. Number one is clarity. If I say to an audience, ‘what is it you want, I imagine you want to be successful?’ But what does success look like? To a person who is agoraphobic, learning to have the courage to get outside, that’s success. So, the first thing is clarity, be clear what it is you want, what does success look like, what does happiness look like, because they are not end goals in themselves, they are biproducts.
Number two, have a plan. It really is that simple, plan what you need to do. For example, if you and I decided we wanted to climb Mount Everest with no mountaineering experience, what’s the first thing we’d do? We sit down and say well we need to get fit; we need to join a gym, we need to learn about mountaineering, we need to learn about visas, we’d work out what we need to do. If you bake a cake, you get a recipe. You get a route map in the old days to find out where you’re going. Life’s the same, most people don’t have a plan, they have a desire; a desire is not a plan.
The third thing is no fear of failure. Failure will stop you getting out of bed in the morning at its very worst, but failure will help you find excuses. I talk to salesforce a lot, I don’t think anyone was ever born with a fear of cold calling, you learn it, you learn these fears, fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, we have these fears. But if you just decide you have no fear of these things happening, your confidence grows, and your sense of commitment grows; it’s all a little recipe that comes together.
What are your main speech topics and themes?
The three themes I speak about are success, looking at what success is at a corporate level and at a personal level. This talk is the most requested presentation, based on a book I wrote called ‘Natural Born Winners’.
The second topic is peak performance, about winning, this mentality, this attitude, this mindset of winning. I work with professional golfers on the tour and it’s a very popular topic for me because I am fascinated by it.
The third one is resilience, our ability to bounce back. Business is getting harder, we’re being asked to do more with less, the timeframes are cut back, the retail sector’s been decimated, the internet’s changing the way we do business. So, this bounce-back-ability. How do we have more resilience?
So, these are the three topics I talk on and within them they’ll be leadership and teamwork. I feel as a speaker, there’s three things every audience wants: number one they want to be informed, they want to be given information that they either didn’t have or they forgot they had.
The second thing is they want to be inspired, they want to be emotionally engaged in the talk sufficiently that they take the information and go ‘you know I can do that; I'm going to try that.’
The third thing they want is to be entertained. You want to be entertained in which way that you have a great emotional memory. If you laugh a lot throughout a presentation you remember it. I believe in any speech you give the audience, if you’re lucky, will remember two things but they’ll probably remember one. I’m never sure what that one thing is, and I call it the golden thread and the first question I ask any bookers is ‘what’s the takeaway?’ So that’s my approach and thoughts on it.
What types of audience do you typically address?
I tend to be often asked to do the corporate talk and it will be for the whole company at their annual shindig. In big companies it tends to be the salesforce or people who are customer-facing. Often, I get asked to look at the R&D teams or the marketing team, the people behind the scenes who don’t have client contact.
I'm not a specialist in that I talk about a very particular part of business; I talk about the mindset of how we think, feel and how that impacts on how we perform and produce. I talk a lot about the impact of attitudes, about self-belief and a lot of it is based on child psychology by Piaget. 98% of four-year-old children have high self-esteem, it’s fantastic; by the age of 18 it’s less than 1%, so what happens?
Salesforce are my favourite audience because they are very hungry to learn but I tend to work with marketing teams and a lot of associations.
Where are you best placed to speak within a conference?
To my clients I say ‘use me as your best weapon on the day’ and I often say I'm very happy to speak after lunch because people say no-one wants to speak after lunch because everyone’s still tired but I say that they might need energising. What I’ve had the ability to do is to raise the emotional energy in the room to get people very engaged and get them thinking.
I like to speak at the beginning of the conference to get people set up to learn and to pay attention and I can make points that the other speakers can back reference. I talk about very key things; I talk about the importance of believing you can and confidence; I talk about not having this fear of failure; I talk about the importance of purpose and passion, having a passion for what you're trying to do. I talk about the importance of celebrating small successes on a daily, weekly basis not waiting for some big things to happen.
When you make those points the future speakers can then back reference what I said as an opening speaker. So, I much prefer to be the opening speaker or the after-lunch speaker. I'm happy to be the closing speaker if they want it go out with a bang because I haven't been at the conference for one or two or three days and what I don’t want to do is close a conference and contradict something that might have been said.
What are your key takeaway messages?
I think the key takeaway message is the past does not determine the future. We all have memories. It’s interesting, painful memories are more poignant and better recalled than happy memories. You’ll remember a tragic incident or an accident or a heartbreak more readily than you remember a success. So, when you look to the future it is more natural to recall the failures you’ve had in the past and use that as your model for the future.
The key takeaway for me is stay mindful, stay in the present; the other thing is every elephant is broken down into bite sizes so your goals can be done as the same. The other thing is to recognise that as people we’re much more emotional than we are logical.
I use an example that I ask audiences around the world to put their hand up if they can give me the name of the person who cuts their hair and everywhere, apart from China, 80% of the audience do that. I think in China they cut their hair at home or maybe don’t put their hand up! But in most first world or European countries, 80% of people give you the name of the person that cuts their hair. You then ask them ‘is this person the best hairdresser in the world?’, they go ‘no’, ‘are they the cheapest?’, ‘well no’, ‘are they the closest to your home.’, ‘no’, ‘or the closest to your office?’, ‘no’, ‘well why do you go and see them?’ They go ‘I like them.’
So, the power of relationships, of trust, because if you don’t have a relationship built on trust, because we trust our hairdresser, you’ve simply got a transaction. We can transact anywhere; when I buy something, I want a supplier; there’s lots of suppliers who can transact with me, but I’ll do business with the one I trust.
So, we need to build up trust in all our relationships with all our clients.
There’s a phenomenal American author and speaker called Jeffrey Gitomer who said that 81% of first transactions take place between the 7th and 9th point of contact. It’s just about persevering and maintaining relationships so my takeaway is about the emotional stuff that really makes a big difference.
What’s the most inspiring reaction you’ve had following a speech?
I can think of two examples. One was in 2001, I did the IBM conference in Las Vegas and it was 6,500 people and I was just talking about something that was very relevant to all of us, the topic of winning. About a month later I got an email from a woman who just said that as a result of that talk she said she'd never felt so connected to a feeling that her life could change. I always remember that because I'm not in the business of changing lives, I’m in the business of doing the best I can so I was very touched by that.
The second time was when I was giving a talk in Bangalore in India and I was at an Institute to give this talk. There was a woman at the back of the room and she came up to me, very shy, and said ‘I just wanted to come and see you, I live 200 miles away but I heard you were giving this talk so I came to see you.’ I said, ‘well thank you for coming to see me’ and she said, ‘because of your book I didn’t commit suicide.’ I was just overwhelmed. She said she was at a book shop and ‘I saw your book and the book was called ‘You can change your life anytime you want’ and I was very unhappily married and I didn’t know what was going on and I read this book.’ And I said, ‘you were ready not to commit suicide and my book was just fortuitous.’ She said, ‘Well I just wanted to thank you.’
That was the two biggest. I think as a speaker you get used to people saying they enjoy the talk, but I don’t do it for the applause. I really don’t. I do twelve talks a year pro bono, I do free talks for schools, charities, not-for-profit organisations. I’ll spend 40 minutes with a taxi driver who’s going through a hard time.
I really care that people can recognise that they can make a change.
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