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Nick Williams on Westside Radio - Does Self-Help Really Help?

POOJA DHIMAN: Today’s show is about self-help in business. Now a bit of background. The self-help industry is big business in the UK and in The States and some businessmen and women swear their success is down to things like the secret, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, the law of attraction, and I want to know, can you really just visualise what you wanna be and it becomes a reality?

POOJA DHIMAN: Does self-help really help, and if it can help you what should you be doing? Now to help answer these questions, I have got life coach Lola Fayemi of Urban Spirit in the studio, who has been on the show before, and I have also got Nick Williams in the studio. Nick runs a business called Inspired Entrepreneur, which helps people discover their calling and turn their passions into successful inspired businesses. I am going to find out what Nick does and I will be asking him for some real-life examples of how self-help has helped people in business. In the second half of this show I am going to be talking to Lola and Nick about things like the law of attraction, the secret, rich dad poor dad, and just asking him you know what all this stuff is about, does it really work and if it does work, what should you be doing to try and make yourself more successful? So anyway, as mentioned, kicking off with Nick.

POOJA DHIMAN: Nick, how are you doing?

NICK WILLIAMS: Very good, good morning. How are you?

POOJA DHIMAN: Hello, welcome to the show. Now you run a business called Inspired Entrepreneur. First just tell me what it is.

NICK WILLIAMS: Well I have had a passion myself for many years for helping people discover the work that they would love to do, I call it the work they were born to do, and what I found over the years, I have been doing this for about 18 years now, is many people who find what they love to do, they want to turn into their own little business and maybe leave their job, so the business I run now called Inspired Entrepreneur is helping people find that sense of calling and then take that idea and turn it into a business that they would love to run.

POOJA DHIMAN: Right, so it could be anything?

NICK WILLIAMS: Yeah.

POOJA DHIMAN: Anything you are passionate about, you can turn into a business.

NICK WILLIAMS: Yeah.

POOJA DHIMAN: How do you take them from having an idea to actually it being a business?

NICK WILLIAMS: Well that is a good question because for many people they can have an idea for their whole life and never actually try it out, so one of the things that I would really encourage people to do is I help them take their idea, formulate it into something that they can deliver. You know so if you wanna be in catering, it is like okay well let us think about what that could look like if it is ultimately going to be a shop or a restaurant, but I would say what is the easiest version of trying it out, so I would say well you know get a stall at a fair or something like that where you are doing catering or go and work in a restaurant, get some experience and then for many people the biggest step is moving from having a salary to being entrepreneurial and then their income entrepreneurial. So one of the things I get them to do is to lower that bar and get their first bit of entrepreneurial income in as soon as possible, so it proves the concept, it gives them some money in the bank and it makes them realise it can work and then it is about leveraging it to get more clients. It is really lower the bar and start small and then grow big.

POOJA DHIMAN: Yes, because you do think I have got a business idea and you imagine it being from day one quite huge don’t you.

NICK WILLIAMS: Yeah, if I had a pound for every person I met who had a huge business idea that they had never taken the first step on, I would be very rich.

POOJA DHIMAN: Yes exactly, so what sort of things have you seen people do and what have you helped them achieve?

NICK WILLIAMS: All sorts of different things. One woman who I worked with over a number of years, she was a nurse in the NHS and now she is the UK and becoming one of the world’s top smoking cessation nurse trainers. She has written a book published by Virgin Publishing, so she now helps thousands of people throughout the world give up smoking, so she is doing an amazing job. Other extremes, somebody who used to work in recruitment now is a clown and a massage therapist.

POOJA DHIMAN: Really!

NICK WILLIAMS: She lives in Ibiza and has a great life, goes round the world making people laugh and being humorous.

POOJA DHIMAN: So hang on, she came to you and said I have got this passion for being a clown.

NICK WILLIAMS: Yes.

POOJA DHIMAN: Really. But how do you know what your passion is? I mean how do you know you like being a clown for example?

NICK WILLIAMS: Well again I would encourage her to try it out and what she did was, she actually went to see Cirque de Soleil many years ago when she was still in recruitment at the Albert Hall and she watched them and went, “that is me, that is what I wanna do”. So she then enrolled on a clown training course with a guy called Didier Danthois, and she felt like she had come home to herself and that was it. So she trained in it and little by little she has taken her clowning into the NHS, she has done it in hospices, all sorts of different places for children, even on the tube sometimes.

POOJA DHIMAN: So you literally can turn anything into a business, anything that is a passion?

NICK WILLIAMS: Well I think there is two different things. One is if it is your calling to do something you have got to do it, otherwise you are going to be miserable. You have just got to express yourself creatively, so for me there is two things. Some things maybe should be kept as hobbies, but I am a great believer that if you have got a calling, if you have got a creative talent or a gift and you are not doing it, you aint gonna be a happy camper and you are not going to be nice to be around, because you are going to be frustrated, you are going to be miserable, you are going to be low energy and you are probably going to be quite critical of other people, because you are actually going to be quite jealous of them. So on the one hand you have got to do what you need to do, you know I have read a quote from Andrew Lloyd Webber who said if he is not creating a musical he is depressed and I heard Lynda Le Plant talking about writing and she said her friends tell her if she hasn’t written her for a while, go and write something please because you are miserable to be around, you need to write. So if you are creative, you have got to do it. And then the second bit is, do you want to turn that into a business and generate income from it, and you know I do coach some people sometimes and the truth is sometimes they would rather keep it as a hobby because it needn’t change it hugely to turn it into a business, but for many people it then takes some of the pleasure and joy out of it if they then need to earn money out of it.

POOJA DHIMAN: So how do you decide if something is just a hobby or if it should be turned into a business?

NICK WILLIAMS: Well if I can step back a bit, there is a belief that many people have and this is a belief that I find comes up over and over again is number one if you want to earn money you have got to do something you don’t particularly enjoy, number two is you can do something you love and that you really think is creative and valuable but you shouldn’t expect to earn much money out of it. I encounter those two beliefs over and over again in the UK and throughout the world where I go, it is a massive kind of disconnect that most people have, so part of what I do is teach people there is another way which is you can do something you love, you find really fantastic and valuable and you love doing it, and you can get paid for it.

POOJA DHIMAN: Yes, you can live the dream.

NICK WILLIAMS: Yes, but many people think it is either the love or the money, so for some people it is getting that vision that you can have the love and the money and for some people that is almost too much to handle, especially if they have grown up with some kind of religious upbringing that sometimes says well you shouldn’t have life too good, you are supposed to suffer. You know, you have to get beyond the suffering ethic.

POOJA DHIMAN: It is all down to conditioning isn’t it. If you believe that, it is very hard to change those beliefs.

NICK WILLIAMS: So a lot of work I do with people is helping them identify and uncover that conditioning that we have all grown up with in different cultures, in different ways, but most of it stops us in really exceeding in doing what we love.

POOJA DHIMAN: And what sort of steps could you take because some of the signs to look out for I guess if you are frustrated, if you are miserable, other things you mentioned like feeling sad. If you feel like that it means you are not doing what you should be doing. What are some of the steps you can take to maybe first find your passion and then start doing it?

NICK WILLIAMS: Well for many people that first step of finding the work they were born to do, that is what I call it and my first book was called ‘The work we were born to do’, so that is what I call that. That area of what would you love to do. I have got a programme and if people are going to mention my website, but they can go and download it themselves for free if they want to, but I talk about 9 signposts that people in my years of work that there is 9 different ways people come to it, so I can just give you a few of them if you like. The first one is kind of obvious in a way, but I just ask people what would really inspire you? You know, what would you most love to do, what in your wildest dreams would just thrill you? And for many people they don’t even know the answer to that question, because all their life they have been told not to dream and not to think too highly of themselves, so just to have somebody genuinely ask that question can sometimes be really liberating and many people go you know what, I have been dreaming about doing this since I was a kid and nobody has really taken me seriously. So sometimes it is just about taking your dreams more seriously, so the first signpost is inspiration. What I find though is when people get inspired something else usually happens quite quickly afterwards and the doubts and the fears and the anxieties start creeping in quite soon afterwards.

POOJA DHIMAN: Yes, you start thinking about reality I guess.

NICK WILLIAMS: You know when I was in the corporate world I was selling computers to Japanese banks and I thought I would love to teach people, I would love to inspire people, I would love to be much more creative, maybe there is even a book in me and I could think that for about 30 seconds and then what would happen then is that you are a computer salesman from Essex, who do you think you are to inspire anybody, you can’t even inspire yourself. You know, nobody would ever listen to you. So I call that resistance and what happens for many people as soon as they get inspired their resistance creeps in and sometimes just whacks in like a sledgehammer and what I find is that many people actually the thing they would most love to do is the thing that they have spent most of their life talking themselves out of, so often resistance is actually a pointer. The thing that you most resist is the place that you would most love to go.

POOJA DHIMAN: Yes, listen to that voice in your head when it is resisting.

NICK WILLIAMS: Because most people just live by their resistance in a way, they don’t realise there is a choice. They just think yes, that is true I can’t do it and they don’t question their own negativity.

POOJA DHIMAN: It is amazing isn’t it when you think about it how many of us just carry on and listen to this negative voice and just accept the status quo.

NICK WILLIAMS: Most of us have just inherited that from sometimes our family, sometimes teachers, the media, that just says the world is a tough place, you are lucky to get by, don’t dream too much just stay in your box.

POOJA DHIMAN: And it is fear I think, a lot of people are scared so they don’t wanna do anything.

NICK WILLIAMS: It is fear but it often comes out much more rationally. It is oh there is a credit crunch, now is not the right time to start a business, when the truth is what is inside you is always more powerful than what is outside you.

POOJA DHIMAN: Right, so not to worry about external things, not to be practical would you say?

NICK WILLIAMS: Not to be in denial, of course the material world is important but I believe there is something inside every human being that is bigger than fear if you like, so I know businesses that flourish in recessions because they are just inspired and creative and passionate about what they do.

POOJA DHIMAN: So as long as there is that inspiration behind that and that passion, you need something that is going to push it forward.

NICK WILLIAMS: Yes, then I think then you hook into something in yourself or you tap into something in yourself that is much greater and one of the things I talk about is I think many people their whole life have been taught to what I call starve their inspiration and feed their resistance, so it is like we feed our fears and tell ourselves not to get excited or passionate, and I think for many of us what we have to do is start turning that around and learning to feed our inspiration and starve our resistance.

POOJA DHIMAN: It sounds great but it is quite abstract.

NICK WILLIAMS: It is almost like a recovery programme, it is almost like an addiction, I think we are on the whole so addicted to negativity, you just listen to the news and you go oh it is terrible isn’t it, and I am not saying things aren’t terrible but it is almost like we are trained to feel helpless, we are trained to feel afraid, we are trained just to stay small, so it is almost like an addiction we have to give up to start saying well maybe that is not the truth, maybe there is something in me that is greater than my fear, maybe I have got more talent than I realised I had, maybe I am capable of more than my teachers and my parents ever told me I was capable of. So it is not to defy them and to prove them wrong, but it is to realise that how people may have given us an identity maybe very limiting. You know if we grew up believing we were stupid, we will act dumb, but we may be highly intelligent just believing we are stupid.

POOJA DHIMAN: Yes, and it affects our performance.

NICK WILLIAMS: Yes, so we just don’t go for things, and I think it takes a lot of courage really to go for your dreams, probably one of the biggest things most of us are afraid of is failure. We are afraid to look stupid, we are afraid to have friends saying I told you so, I knew it wouldn’t work out, so it takes courage to follow your dreams and fall down sometimes and get up and funnily enough I think it takes courage to fail and it takes courage to succeed.

POOJA DHIMAN: It is interesting because when you think about pushing forward, going for your dream, declaring to everybody, this is what I am going to do and then still failing, that is quite scary, knowing that you went for it.

NICK WILLIAMS: But the truth is I think many people fail their way to success. You know I have probably got more things wrong than I have got right, but I think Winston Churchill once said success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. (laughter).

POOJA DHIMAN: I have heard that one before on the show actually.

NICK WILLIAMS: So it is that kind of idea which is get used to the idea of things not working out because they won’t always work out, but just because they don’t work out once doesn’t mean they are not going to work out.

POOJA DHIMAN: Don’t let that put you off.

NICK WILLIAMS: I would say you have to find that thing in you that is bigger than the fear.

POOJA DHIMAN: So going back to the signposts, you go to I think the second one.

NICK WILLIAMS: Yes, just the second one. I will give you a couple more. The third one would be, I call it in your shadow life and what I mean by that is often we are in the creative area that we want to be involved in, but we never quite have the courage to put our own creativity at the centre of our lives, so you might be an artist who wants to exhibit her own art and you go and work in an art gallery, so you are surrounded by art and you are surrounded by artists but you never quite put your own creativity at the centre of your life, or you might want to write a book and you end up working in a bookstore so you meet authors and you are surrounded by words, but you never quite write your own book. I find for a lot of people they are actually on the edge of the area that they want to be involved in but what they are afraid of doing is putting their own creativity right at the centre of their life, and I call that hiding out really. So one of the things that often I encourage people to do is I call it turning up, just turn up more. You know show up in your life more, because most of us are hiding out in our life, that psychologists called you and talked about a lived life and an unlived life that most of us have got the life we are living but I think inside every human being there is so much life that we are not living and now success may now come from just living some of that life that so far we have repressed and denied ourselves. So sometimes it is just our enthusiasm or our talent, because often at school we are told don’t show off, you are just trying to be a show-off, when actually what we are is just really talented and we really shine but our shining gets squashed.

POOJA DHIMAN: That is really interesting actually, because that does happen in school and it puts people off and they get shy and they don’t want to push forward with those things, that does happen to a lot of people.

NICK WILLIAMS: I was quite touched I suppose, because you can look at it from a number of levels but looking at say Britain’s Got Talent, part of me was really touched and really proud of that thinking yes, there is so much talent in people but on the whole we don’t get encouraged to bring it out, we get encouraged to squash it or told that we are showing off if we want to show what we are capable of.

POOJA DHIMAN: Well also the other thing is reality kicks in. I mean what we call reality, which is there are bills to pay, I have got a job to do, I have got responsibilities, I haven’t got time to be doing whatever, tap-dancing etc.

NICK WILLIAMS: And you know that is another signpost as I say so many people have a dream but what they then say to themselves is, ‘but who would ever pay me to do that’. It comes back to that idea that you either work for love or money, so most people think a dream is something you do as a hobby and you are never going to get paid for it and you have to just earn your living doing something you don’t particularly enjoy. So for many people even the idea that they could take their passion and create a living from it, is almost like a brand new idea because nobody has ever said that to them before.

POOJA DHIMAN: But you can, you have seen the evidence.

NICK WILLIAMS: I am the evidence, I have seen the evidence, I helped create the evidence, I know thousands of people that have made their living doing something that they are passionate about and is meaningful to them and I think another thing about being an inspired entrepreneur is I have almost come up with a new definition because we all like The Apprentice kind of thing because it is good television, but you think that if that is being entrepreneurial I don’t relate to that or depending on where you grew up, Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, you know in that 1980’s film about greed is good and that kind of stuff or being like Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses, being a bit dodgy or Arthur Dailey in Minder, that kind of idea that if you are an entrepreneur you are either greedy or dodgy and I think that many inspired entrepreneurs are actually what they love doing is helping other people, they actually want to create a business that serves their community or just makes a difference enriches the lives of others and for many of us the word entrepreneurial and caring don’t go together.

POOJA DHIMAN: That is really true, that is really really true. I have had people on the show who actually they do something they are really passionate about and when I say to them I want to interview you because you are an entrepreneur they say I don’t really see myself as an entrepreneur.

NICK WILLIAMS: No, so part of what I am doing in a way is this business that we are just launching now, the inspired entrepreneur is almost like a new definition of what it means to be an entrepreneur, so it is not about being greedy, it is not about being dodgy, it is about somebody who loves doing something and wants to enrich the lives of other people and doing that through a business rather than doing it through a charity or a not-for-profit organisation.

POOJA DHIMAN: And do you help with all the aspects of setting up a business as well?

NICK WILLIAMS: We give a lot of advice, some of the very practical stuff, but then there is other stuff you have got to do like registering with tax authorities and things like that, but we are not so much about the mechanics of it because in a way that is just hygiene stuff, you have got to put it in place, it has got to be there, but once it is there it is done, you don’t run your business because you love doing accounts, you run your business because you love doing something and you just have to do accounts and book-keeping because that is how you stay legal.

POOJA DHIMAN: Have you had any instances where people have taken your advice, found their passion, taken all the steps and then still failed?

NICK WILLIAMS: Yes, failed initially or just got caught in fear, so yes there is never any guarantees. The only guarantees are ever in us, if we don’t give up on ourselves, then we will keep going but yes, there is never any guarantees of success. I have failed many times as I said.

POOJA DHIMAN: Have you ever had people who have just completely given up and gone you know what I am just going to go back to what I was doing because this is just not for me or it is too risky?

NICK WILLIAMS: Yes sometimes people have gone backwards and in a way that might be good, so they tried something out, they tried it out small time and actually realised it wasn’t for them, so it is very wise to test things out small and either succeed small so you can grow it or fail small so you can learn or actually go I am actually glad I tried this out, it is really not for me. I am an advocate of being entrepreneurial but I don’t believe everybody should be. I think there are as many people who probably shouldn’t be entrepreneurial that are probably better off in a job, but what I am passionate about is helping the people who have an entrepreneurial heart and spirit and then helping that blossom if you like.

POOJA DHIMAN: Fantastic. Now your website is....?

NICK WILLIAMS: www.inspired-entrepreneur.com.

POOJA DHIMAN: So who would you say your service is mostly aimed at?

NICK WILLIAMS: Two major groups. People that are either disillusioned about the world of work and want to discover what it is that they would love to do, there is a free programme on the website that you can download, it is like an hour of video and an hour of audio, so you can get that for free and just listen to it. And the other group is of people that want to find what they want to do and then other people that want to turn that into a business or already have a business and want to grow it. So they are the major groups.

POOJA DHIMAN: So there you go. If you fall into one of those groups, look on www.inspired-entrepreneur.com You are listening to Pooja on the Business Show and that was the voice of Nick Williams who runs this business Inspired Entrepreneur. Helping people really find their passions and then pursue those and then creating businesses out of those. Now we are talking today about self-help in business and I think this area of ...