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Welcome to the Sales Lead Dog podcast hosted by CRM technology and sales process expert Christopher Smith.
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Talking with sales leaders that have separated themselves from the rest of the pack.
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Listen to find out how the best of the best achieved success with their team and CRM technology.
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And remember, unless you were the lead dog, the view never changes.
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Welcome to Sales Lead Dog.
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Today is a special episode of Sales Lead Dog.
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I’m really excited to have as my guest today, Robert Pope.
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Robert is the VP of business applications for PAX 8.
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Robert, welcome to Sales Lead Dog.
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Hello.
0:45
Welcome.
0:46
Thank you very much.
0:46
Nice to meet you.
0:47
Yeah, reason why this is a special episode is we’re not going to talk about sales leadership today.
0:54
We’re going to talk about something that I think is very germane to I’d really to everybody.
1:03
It’s about, you know what, what do you do?
1:07
How do you cope with something in your life, either professionally, personally, whatever that may be.
1:13
When something comes out of left field out of the blue that you were not expecting, that fundamentally alters your life either short term, long term, whatever it is.
1:26
But how do you cope with that?
1:27
How do you deal with that?
1:28
How do you maintain perspective?
1:30
How do you keep moving forward?
1:32
And so that’s our topic for today.
1:35
So just to kind of set the stage for this, Robert, why don’t we begin with your childhood and how it really formed your framework for how you live your life?
1:48
Yeah, So thank you.
1:49
I was born and bet from the UK, born in a little village, loving parents.
1:55
I’ve got no complaints in my childhood.
1:57
There’s no sort of *** story or like kind of bad things happen to me or anything like that.
2:01
We weren’t particularly well off, but we also weren’t poor.
2:05
So I had to kind of a very solid family life.
2:12
And fundamentally, all of my focus was on generally going fast on anything with wheels.
2:20
And I crashed a lot of things, broke a lot of things I did stuff that kids would do.
2:26
And particularly in the year that I grew up in, the kind of the big things we spent a lot of time with was watching films.
2:34
And it was at the point where you can watch my Netflix, you have to go to the cinema.
2:39
And if you wanted to watch TV, you have to watch it.
2:42
When it was on, you couldn’t just decide to sit down and watch it.
2:44
So, you know, we used to watch TV shows like, and I’m sure many of the people, hopefully I’m not going to age too many people, but on this podcast are used to watching things like Magnum Pi and The A-Team and Knight Rider and those kind of things and more.
2:59
The biggest one for me was always Dukes of Hazzard, the good old boys.
3:04
And to the point where actually I went to see one of the cars once when I was a kid and I was so excited.
3:10
And then you realise actually that there’s, there’s 50 or so of those cars and they wrote off loads of them in every single episode.
3:16
Which kind of slightly ruined it.
3:17
Because I always just thought there was one special car that was strong and could and could jump the river and, and land on the other side and be perfectly OK.
3:25
Which clearly, but I had a very good childhood.
3:29
I, I also, I think learned a lot about the kind of thing as you grow up as the kind of things you want to do as a kid, you know, people I always wanted to be, you know, a Ferrari test driver or, or a professional mountain biker or anything really other than where I’ve ended up.
3:49
But I think when you’re that age, you just don’t quite get there.
3:52
You don’t know what the big world has.
3:54
And having kids of my own now and as they, they’ve grown up and gone from being, wanting to be a fireman or an astronaut or whatever it is.
4:02
And they actually then really go into something.
4:04
A lot of my focus at that, those ages, those early ages, and I didn’t really realise it at the time, I had a great deal of interest in Economics and Business.
4:16
But actually economics, I used to pick out my share tips in a newspaper.
4:20
It was called The Times in the UK.
4:23
And you could basically you had a way of selecting shares.
4:26
You didn’t use real money, but you used to get, my dad used to get the paper every day and I would write, write them down and work out how much money I’d lost because I was pretty terrible at it.
4:37
But it gave me that implication of of kind of how the world works.
4:41
I was always keen to understand how things work.
4:44
How can I make them go faster?
4:46
Yeah.
4:47
And you also have a tremendous track record as an entrepreneur at building companies and and driving growth.
4:57
Yeah, I think they, a lot of that does come back to that mindset of going faster.
5:03
I I raced mountain bikes a lot.
5:06
I was somebody who was always trying to go faster, do more and get places in a in a hurry.
5:14
And I had the, I was very fortunate my career.
5:17
I worked with a meta guy and he was actually a big mountain biker, which was part of the connection, A guy called Piers Linney, who is what was, should I say at that point.
5:28
This is going back 1015 years ago.
5:31
He was a dragon on Dragon’s Den and which is the US equivalent of Shark Tank.
5:37
So he’d been a very high flying venture capitalist and lawyer as part of his background.
5:44
I worked for him for five years.
5:46
He invested and was on the TV show and invested in companies that that came onto the show and pitched their idea as to what they wanted to be, which led to some very strange business meetings because I went to work for him and worked together building an MSP that at the time was called Outsourcery, which was really a start up, a very well funded start up that grew very quickly delivering what was at the time originally linked.
6:14
And then it became Skype for Business, which you know everybody all know as Teams.
6:18
And we built that business very quickly.
6:20
It grew exponentially and and then we sold to Vodafone who are a big tell via a number of different areas.
6:29
And at which point I also moved to Microsoft where I moved into the Dynamics world, did five years at Microsoft in the UK, really focused on Dynamics in SMB, which again was kind of giving me a different perspective of, of how the vendors see SMB versus being a partner, which is basically what outsourcing was.
6:51
I left Microsoft after five years and joined and helped set up and was one of the founders of an organization called Bamboo and Cloud, who were arguably the most successful business central partner.
7:02
We won four world partner of the year awards, but a lot of that fame was not based on doing everything that everybody else was already doing.
7:10
It was about growing faster and basically changing the model.
7:15
We we sold that business to Packs 8 in January 2023 and then in May 2023, and I’m sure this is something I’m going to talk a lot more about, my world hit a really quite significant roadblock.
7:30
Yeah, it, it really did take a huge turn.
7:35
So let’s, why don’t we just just get right to it.
7:38
What happened?
7:40
Yeah.
7:40
So I’d, I think this is when you look at these kind of events as they happen to people.
7:48
And I was guilty of it, as many other people were.
7:50
It always happens to somebody else.
7:53
And, and I think actually part of this is also as I’ve got older, you then start to see that it happens to more people or things happen to more people.
8:01
And, and I suppose it’s a bit like the lottery.
8:04
The more you play the game, the more likely you’re going to have a winning ticket or losing ticket, depending which way you look at it.
8:11
We told the business in January 2023 to Packs 8.
8:16
I spent a huge amount of time travelling back and forth to the US.
8:21
We were also in the process of moving house and I think a lot of people had had the after effects and the effects of COVID, which meant that a lot of people haven’t been able to move and do the things that they wanted to do when they wanted to do them.
8:34
And it all lined up very neatly because my son was finishing one level of his education.
8:39
My wife was a teacher and we wanted to move to where my wife was from and had been had wanted to move for a couple of years, but COVID had kind of put a stop to that.
8:47
And also where my children were up to in their education.
8:50
And I just got ill and I I had COVID in the USI came back to the UK, crawled into bed, spent a week or so there and got better, but not fully better.
9:03
And then I think a lot of the time I then spent thinking, I just kind of haven’t quite shaken off COVID.
9:11
I went to the doctors and I’ve done a conversation about feeling a bit ill and having kind of what I thought was a chest infection.
9:23
There was some elements of my care at that point, which in retrospect, I should have followed up more, but I haven’t been to the doctors in four years.
9:32
I’ve never really been ill.
9:33
I was very fit.
9:34
I did, I did all the right things.
9:37
I, I didn’t drink too much.
9:38
I ate the right things.
9:39
I did a lot of exercise.
9:41
So I was kind of in that tick box of immunity in my own head as to saying, well, you know, all the bad things, they always happen to other people because they drink too much smoke, blah, whatever the bad things that that they do.
9:53
And you also have an inner resilience as a person think, well, particularly I’ve crashed a lot of things and I’ve always got up, brushed myself down and, and kind of turned around and looked at broken bikes or whatever it was and gone.
10:05
Yeah.
10:05
So I’m, I’ve got some sort of safety net that sits, that sits around me, that stops anything bad happening.
10:12
I’ve always thought of myself as being lucky.
10:14
And actually I still do think I’m lucky.
10:17
But back to the from a medical perspective, I went to the doctors.
10:21
They did.
10:22
And actually, quite often, particularly in our world, if you tell people what they’re doing, they look at you and think you’re, you’re way too busy, like you’re doing far too much.
10:30
But I was, but my view of it was that’s what I’ve always done, right?
10:33
That’s the level that I operate at.
10:35
That’s what, how much I travel.
10:37
That’s where I go.
10:38
That’s the hours I do.
10:40
That’s the, the level of exercise that I do that it was kind of like a normal level.
10:45
And actually one of the key things I, I went to the doctors with first is that I said, you know, my, my pulse is too high.
10:51
And they, and they said, oh, well, yeah, but it’s within the normal range.
10:54
And I was like, well, that doesn’t really work for me.
10:56
I know it’s too high.
10:57
I’ve definitely something wrong.
10:58
And I’m telling you this because I know my own body cut a long storage.
11:03
I went to the doctor’s twice more.
11:05
And on the third time I actually saw the same doctor I’d seen the first time.
11:08
This was on May the 22nd, 2023.
11:12
And he was the one I’d seen six weeks before.
11:15
And he, he’s, I could see on his face he was like, oh, you look really ill.
11:19
And at which point I was like, yeah, I’ve sort of been telling you that he sent me some blood tests.
11:25
I went straight to, I actually went home after the blood test and then got a phone call at home from the doctor’s surgery saying you have to go straight to accident emergency.
11:33
Go there now and we’ll give you a passing effect that gets you into the back so you don’t have to queue up with everybody, which of course, scares you.
11:44
In my head, I still think maybe I’ve just got a back cold and or, you know, in my head I thought I had a chest infection.
11:51
And then of course, you hit and get that.
11:53
You think maybe I’ve got pneumonia or something a bit worse, but you still have that inner.
11:59
It’ll be fine, don’t worry.
12:02
I was then told on the Wednesday morning at 6:00 AM that I had leukemia, which was a complete and utter shell shock left field because it wasn’t even on mine Radar.
12:15
My, my, the issues that I had was struggling to breathe, not struggling to breathe, but I was breathless.
12:21
It turned out that one of my lungs was almost completely full of fluid.
12:27
So I was running on one cylinder rather than two and, and I was in a pretty bad place.
12:33
And, and it’s it, that’s the sort of piece when you see the worry in other people’s eyes that also has an impact on on yourself because you kind of in your head think I’ll be fine, whatever.
12:47
And actually my default position in those scenarios is always going to be actually, I’ll be fine.
12:54
Tell me what needs to be done.
12:55
I will get on with it.
12:56
And not only will I get on with it, I want to get it done faster and be out of here.
13:01
I’ve not actually spent a nine hospitals since I was about four years old.
13:05
All my trips and I’d only ever spent 2 two nights in hospital in my entire life.
13:09
They were like a kids operation time when I was about four.
13:14
So the first night in hospital was a bit like I don’t want to be here.
13:19
I also, I’d always had a mantra, which I raced under and had stickers made and put on every bike I’d raced and was something I tended to live by, which was you are not dead yet, which was basically a mantra that kind of like life, really.
13:35
And a lot of that came to help me.
13:37
And I, well, I’m reminding me of what I needed to do next.
13:40
Yeah.
13:41
So tell us, what type of leukemia did you have in I mean, that in that initial diagnosis, I mean, it absolutely had to be a gut punch.
13:52
But as you learn more about what you had, where did your mind go processing all of this?
13:58
So I suppose there’s two angles to it.
14:00
One, I didn’t really know what the, the doctor came in and this was 6:00 in the morning.
14:05
They said, oh, you’ve got leukemia.
14:06
And I was like, well, I didn’t really even know what that was probably like.
14:10
I, you know, it’s, again, it’s one of those things that other people have.
14:13
It’s one of those diseases.
14:16
And what then became apparent was there’s lots and lots of variants of leukemia or blood cancer as a lot of people now call it, because that actually makes it easier for people to understand what it is.
14:26
It’s cancer of the blood, which also has a bit of a detrimental effect on your head because whenever you think about anything else around cancer, be it brain cancer, breast cancer or whatever it is, the whole procedure that you know of is broadly speaking, you chop that bit out, clean up around the edges and then you’re good to go.
14:49
Can’t really do that with blood unless you suck the whole lot out and then put a load back in, which actually in fairness, I pretty much had, but that’s a different story.
14:59
I also then, and I think this is where in my head you always kind of have a mental place to go to.
15:05
I was taken into one of the wards.
15:08
They start to do some get more tests.
15:10
They start to drain my the fluid out of my lung, which had been caused by the leukemia.
15:16
And then I was very lucky again, I think I’m lucky.
15:19
This is where my luck comes in.
15:20
I may have been unlucky to get the disease, but I’m lucky all the way through the process that the consultant who was there realized that it was more serious and not run-of-the-mill and basically transferred me by ambulance, which also puts the fear of God into at that point because you’re like, oh, if they want to put me in an ambulance, it’s got blue lights flashing on the top.
15:41
That’s not a good thing.
15:43
And and transferred me to a centre called the Christie, which is the main answer.
15:50
Specialized hospital in north of England.
15:53
I landed there and was again very lucky to be to be met and put under the care of a guy called Professor Bloor who it turns out is the expert in my kind of leukemia.
16:05
And given that I always strive to be the best and win the chart, I managed to get the proper **** *** ****** version of leukemia called TALL, which means T Dash Acoustic Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, which is also rare.
16:23
There’s about 1415 people a year in my age group in the UK get it.
16:29
So quite often we joke about that the patients we should, we should do like a calendar, you know, like the ones that they do.
16:39
What month would you be?
16:40
I’d be made basically, I’d be made and it’d just be, it’d just be a load of people who are really pale and really thin.
16:46
I mean, I was joking with somebody and have done it repeatedly.
16:49
That part of the the leukemia and then the subsequent treatment is there’s no recommending it.
16:58
It’s grim.
16:58
There is no positive high spots unless you want really, really rapid weight loss.
17:04
You know, you could kind of do the slim fast or the diet shakes or go to the gym a lot or, you know, just get leukemia.
17:11
You’ll lose pounds and pounds and pounds very, very quickly.
17:16
But no, I’m sorry.
17:17
Go ahead.
17:17
I was going to say yeah, but I’ve managed to get the Super **** *** version, the rare one, but was also lucky that the person who became my consultant, my head doctor in effect was also one of the European experts specifically in that flavour.
17:33
So yeah, going right to the top, you got to be different.
17:37
You got to do the hard way, right?
17:39
And now it we’re going to have in the show notes for this Roberts website.
17:46
You got to be sure to check that out.
17:48
And you wrote something in one of your blogs that I want to ask you about.
17:52
You said I don’t see cancer as a fight.
17:56
And perhaps that’s a good thing for people like me.
17:59
Can you talk about that?
18:01
So I think, and it’s very difficult because I know because I, you know, I’m on the other side of it.
18:08
A lot of time you meet people and they say I’ve had cancer or I’ve got cancer or my wife’s got cancer or my husband or partner or whatever.
18:15
And there’s, there’s quite a default position that people say that they were fighters.
18:19
You know, they, you’ll be, you’re a fighter, you’re good, you know, you’ll get through it.
18:22
And actually, and I know people don’t mean this by in any this level of disservice.
18:27
It’s just one of those things.
18:29
But being a fighter in that scenario implies that it’s a battle that you have a choice in that you can win necessarily because ergo, if, and I came very, very close twice during my treatment to not being here, I didn’t really have any choice in the matter.
18:47
And I think sometimes if you say people are a fighter and then suddenly they don’t make it through, that also casts the light that they weren’t strong enough, they weren’t good enough, therefore they lost, which I think is quite a negative connotation, almost means that they’re weak and they’re not somebody.
19:02
Whereas I often like and I kind of go back to where I came from, from riding bikes is, you know, it’s like having a high speed crash.
19:14
Lucky is going to work out when when you come off that bike, you hit a wall or a tree or you just bounce down the middle of the road and jump up and brush yourself off and go.
19:24
I was lucky.
19:26
There’s so many factors that come into play.
19:28
That said, I think having mental people used to say you’ve got, you’re so strong mentally and you know these you’d be brave, you’re brave and you’re going to be a fighter, all of those kind of characteristics as if it’s as if you’re on a battlefield.
19:44
To be honest, part of my one was one.
19:48
I’m lucky and I think having the belief that I’m lucky even though I’ve got leukemia, But I also think that there’s a reverse to that is that there was a, there’s a definite area of belligerence in my part.
20:02
It wasn’t about fighting.
20:03
It was like I’m, I actually don’t want other people to think that I was weak and, and to somehow that be represented.
20:12
And there was a bit of a.
20:14
I won’t say the word, but it gives with an F moment.
20:17
You know I’m, you know I’m, I’m not letting go here.
20:21
And an impact on how well you get through the treatment or not.
20:27
It’s just how you keep your head strong.
20:29
I don’t.
20:29
I think it’s more a case of where do you go in your head?
20:32
When particularly leukemia was a very lonely disease.
20:37
I had to stay in room for 2 1/2 months.
20:40
I didn’t leave it because I had to have positive air conditioning in IT.
20:44
People the bugs out.
20:45
I have no immunity system.
20:47
I also got sexist as part of the journey.
20:51
You can’t see people, you can’t go to the pub to touch people, be with people, be in a room.
20:58
You can still do things over teens, but for many people who would have been experienced COVID and isolation, it was basically like having that again but significantly worse.
21:09
I could stare out the window and look at the beautiful weather or horrible weather, whichever I wasn’t allowed out.
21:16
So that does create a mental state of mind that you just have to deal with.
21:21
You don’t have a choice either.
21:23
There’s no, it’s not like you kind of pick the oh, I’ll get in the boxing ring and have a leukemia and if I decide to give up and I’ll get back out again and all will be well.
21:30
It’s like you’ve got no choice in this, like you, you, you’re going to get out of it or not.
21:36
You, you wrote a line I think dovetails in really nicely with what you just said that when I read it, I was thinking about, I think, you know, a lot of leaders, a lot of people I have on my podcast, they’ve all been very successful, accomplished some tremendous things in their careers.
21:55
And I think we developed this Bravada or this outlook that we can control way more in our lives than we think or we, you know, then we really can control.
22:08
And you, you wrote, you’re not dead yet, but it’s not a fight you can necessarily control.
22:15
That line really hit me.
22:18
You know, that it’s like we go through our lives.
22:22
I mean, I think I think it’s a pretty normal, natural thing to do to think that because you want to be gloom and doom all the time.
22:28
But the reality is, I think we do think we can control way more than what we really can control.
22:35
And so when something like this happens, it’s like a major shock to your system.
22:39
Like you have to address the reality, the vulnerability of your situation.
22:49
How did you process that and go through that?
22:54
I still don’t think I have fully, if I’m honest.
22:57
In fact, I think it’s actually almost harder when you come out of the other side of it, when you when you feel like you’ve won, if that makes sense, Right?
23:06
It it’s, and I again, when I look at the kind of that high speed crash, to some extent you run on adrenaline because you’re just like, I’ve got to stay alive, I’ve got to stay alive, I’ve got to stay alive.
23:19
You are.
23:20
And I was in that sort of mental state for the best part of a year going through, although it didn’t, it wasn’t like having a millisecond crash where you bounce down the road like a constant thing of, you know, I’ve got to have more treatment.
23:33
I also had a treatment plan that I knew what was going to come and what I had to do and what phases I had to go through.
23:41
I think when you come out the other side of it, actually that’s almost harder because it’s almost like the shock probably sets in after the event.
23:49
A bit like that same thing where people have an accident, they sit down and then it then it hits them afterwards rather than during the period.
23:58
And I think the piece for me is one of obviously I want to try and give back as much in to some extent.
24:05
I know a lot of this is cliched and I, but I also think, well, to be honest, I’ve earned the right to be cliched.
24:12
So, you know, I’ve got the sticker and the badge and I’ve, I’ve, I’ve got my, I’ve had my near death moment.
24:18
But I, I think it prioritises how you look at not just your own personal life, but also you look at business life, work life.
24:30
It changes your focus on things.
24:33
It also because it’s almost like, imagine this has disappeared completely, literally in the blink of an eye or your life has changed significantly.
24:44
What what’s the impact of that?
24:46
It creates some strange thoughts in your head.
24:49
And I also found a lot of it is you go back to even the most simplest of things.
24:56
My priority for the 2 1/2 months when I was in that hospital bed and not being able to was firstly to be able to get out of the bed.
25:04
Then it was get out of the door and it was go downstairs and stand outside in the sunshine.
25:09
And then it was go and get in the car and drive my own car.
25:12
And these were all things that I’d done for, you know, all my life, but maybe not driving a car, but it’s it’s how do you put it into steps and stages and how do you eat?
25:23
The elephant, as we often call it, is you have to go start in small, small pieces, but have a better view of where you’re trying to go, which I think is where the business piece comes into play.
25:34
Is, is understanding that how do you get where you need to go?
25:38
Because a lot of people just don’t ever do they, they get to that point.
25:41
Then actually, I don’t see the grand plan.
25:44
I don’t see the big pictures.
25:44
So I’m going to do nothing.
25:46
Right, right.
25:47
Which I now you wrote something else that I’m now rereading in a different perspective based on what you just said you wrote.
25:56
It’s lonely.
25:57
There are days and days when they’re I’m sorry, I didn’t get emotional reading this.
26:01
It really there are days and days when there’s a little you can do but think, but also just the mental effort of talking is hard.
26:12
It’s hard to concentrate, the fog descends and then you forget rolling into another day.
26:18
When I first read that, I was thinking about the period of when you’re really fighting the fight, the term, you know, but when you’re enduring the treatment, did that loneliness extend after as well?
26:34
It goes to some point because it changes a lot of your relationships with people.
26:38
And I think also, and I know, I know from other people who have, who I’ve spoken to who’ve had the same treatment or very similar, and not just for leukemia, for other cancers as well.
26:51
Chemotherapy is, is particularly having as much as I had over the period and I still have treatment now.
27:00
One of the things you have a lot of is that a sense that you basically feels like you’re hungover, whether you’ve got like a fog and you can’t concentrate, you can’t really do stuff.
27:11
You and the days just sort of pass in a sort of grindingly grey way where you can’t even really remember what you did or how you did it.
27:18
So that actually creates a fear that when I came, when you come out and the other side of it is kind of get it back to where I was before.
27:27
Like, am I going to recover?
27:28
Like I may recover physically.
27:30
I might be able to walk out of the stairs and down the stairs or walk, you know, go drive a car and whatever.
27:34
But actually have I lost my brain as well?
27:38
Which also makes me very fearful for I’m very understanding.
27:41
I think of people who go that who maybe have things like dementia or Alzheimer’s and stuff.
27:44
You can kind of see that same kind of, you know, my wife would come and see me and she said, oh, what did you do today?
27:51
And I couldn’t remember, I mean, and that is the drugs, that’s the treatment, that’s the goes with the and now I’m fine.
27:59
But I think that loneliness also changes a lot of the way people look at you.
28:06
And to some extent they see you as being, you know, you when you’re being treated and you’re really ill and you look at your, your complexity changes you, you have a look about you that says you’re ill.
28:18
And I think interestingly, a lot of people even to this day, you can still see people under, they’re not, they don’t look very well, even though they look normally on their suit and shirt and tie and working whatever and all the rest of it.
28:30
They’ve got like kind of colour about them.
28:33
It’s quite lonely because people want mostly want to help and there’s not an awful lot they can do.
28:39
But and their pity almost kind of brings it back.
28:42
You almost want them to say not to recognize that you’re I’ll because it just keeps a constant reminder that everybody’s looking at me like I’m I’ll, so I’ll be ill right now.
28:52
You also wrote that you you wrote the alternative is realism.
29:02
So you know what it’s like.
29:03
I took a huge amount of comfort in speaking to others.
29:07
Was that hard for you initially or is that do you have, I imagine you have a pretty good support network, but was that difficult for you to open up and be vulnerable?
29:17
A lot of, you know, and I asked this question because I think a lot of people are very successful.
29:23
Some are really OK with being vulnerable, being open.
29:27
Others think they always have to have this armor on and, and aren’t necessarily willing to make themselves vulnerable.
29:35
Where how would you describe yourself and how you went through that process of finding comfort in speaking to others?
29:42
I think there’s there’s there’s different groups of people you can speak to.
29:48
Obviously there’s friends, family, your support network as such.
29:52
And actually generally everything they say is is it a is said with a positive.
29:57
You know, they’re trying to G you up, trying to keep you happy, trying to look after you, be nice, my wife, everybody and and which is exactly what I would do to somebody else and try something that I didn’t know you would be.
30:07
How can I help you?
30:08
You really, you know, your heart goes out to people and you want to be helped to your or be helped.
30:13
But the other kind of source of truth you get is then from the medical profession who actually, certainly the people who who treated me are very specific in that this is what’s going to happen.
30:28
And you know, you can even ask them about, you know, what are my percentage chances?
30:32
What are these chances?
30:33
What’s the chance of this?
30:33
What’s the chance of that?
30:35
What’s the risk?
30:36
You know, to be honest, you’re just playing with bad numbers because, and it’s kind of like, oh, well, you’ve got, you know, your treatment path, you’ve got a 50% chance of dying or 70 or 90 or whatever, take your pick.
30:50
My view of that was always, well, I’m a, I’m a sample of 1.
30:54
So what happens to me is mine, what happened to other people, that’s down to them and whatever treatment they got, I can’t affect that.
31:02
And I’m not going to bother looking at those figures.
31:05
The other piece I found was that, and there’s no disrespect to medical pressure, they even got it.
31:11
They know what they’re doing.
31:12
They’re very good at treating it, but they haven’t been through that journey themselves.
31:15
They’ve seen a lot of other people go through that and they’ve got a lot of advice they can provide.
31:20
I, I also, I’ve always had a, an actually something that it was something that I put into a name when I was at Microsoft, just because it was something that Microsoft did a lot and which was learning all culture, that constant learning, constant growth mindset, constant.
31:36
And I think that goes back to even when I was a kid.
31:38
It’s like, how do you make it go faster?
31:40
How do you do better?
31:41
How do I, how do I, how do I win more, better, faster Go, go, go.
31:44
It’s I’m, I’m like, I don’t ever stop and I still don’t even now know that I’m well.
31:50
So my experience and I was very lucky that I, it was introduced to just by extended networks of people and other people met a number of people.
32:01
One person particularly would have exactly the same diseases me and a very similar trajectory.
32:08
He was a professional or he is, well he was, but he’s not there.
32:11
So not many this impact sense he was a professional or player.
32:15
He played for Wolves, he’s in the public domain.
32:18
So I’m not sharing anything that’s not there.
32:21
He was a professional football player, goalkeeper for Wolves, very successful, was also the goalkeeper for Nigeria.
32:29
And you know, he was very successful and basically one day a very similar experience to me, didn’t feel quite well.
32:36
And obviously in his environment he was treated by doctors and they had to take tests for blood, for doping and drugs and all the rest of it and they picked it up there.
32:46
So he got picked up a bit earlier.
32:48
But hearing it from him and also the very nature of treatment is, you know, you’re on a ward, there’s particularly leukemia is lonely.
32:57
You’re not on a ward with lots of other people.
32:58
So you can’t kind of just turn around or go and see some other people and say, hey, how are you getting on?
33:03
These drugs are horrible, these are grey and how do you fix it?
33:06
You’re locked away in a room because your immunity is very poor.
33:10
Hearing it from somebody else and also sharing with somebody else gives you a dose of reality because I think as part of that, it’s climbing.
33:21
You’re climbing a big mountain with lots of base camps and it is back to that.
33:27
How do you do the steps and what to watch out for?
33:30
I hope that I’ve helped.
33:32
I already, well, I hope I’ve helped them.
33:33
I’m sure I’ve certainly talked to them and given other people insight into what I went through, which I think part of the rationale I built the website and put those ideas down was not to necessarily make money for the Christie, the hospital that treated me.
33:48
But I mean, and that’s obviously a by product, but it was also just I would have loved to have that access to that knowledge when I was doing and to talk to somebody like me.
33:58
And I took a lot of comfort from even though their news they were giving me was pretty crap and not what you really wanted to hear, the fact that they were still alive to do it was a great positive to be.
34:12
And secondly, was it gave you a clear almost like a customer case study in our business world, that’s exactly what we would do.
34:20
It’s kind of like be the vendor or I can be the partner telling me, hey, go do this thing, go buy this thing.
34:24
It’s great.
34:26
But actually if I can hear it from somebody who’s being a customer for one of a better word he said, yeah, I did that.
34:31
And this is what this is what happened.
34:32
And and this is the success or otherwise seems people who had it and being able to share that information.
34:40
The most important thing was the fact that they were still there.
34:42
And Carl, the guy who I was talking about, he’s now gone on to be a Taekwondo champion and he’s back to full fitness and kicking *** and doing everything that you’d, you know that he was doing.
34:53
And it was like, this is a blip.
34:55
I’m going to learn from this.
34:56
I’m going to grow out of it.
34:57
And the stats with cancer, one in two people are going to get it.
35:02
So to some extent, you’ve got to ready yourself for that ride, or at least 50% of you do, you know, choose your poison and get ready for it in effect.
35:13
Yeah, I like that.
35:16
It it I think one of the difficult things, you know, we all go through down periods in our lives, different kinds, different levels.
35:27
But I think it’s important to remember that we’re not alone.
35:30
We’re not the first to be wherever we’re at.
35:33
There’s always people that have been there and probably worse than whatever it you were going through to maintain some type of perspective on that.
35:43
That.
35:44
Yeah, I mean, you have to, I think you have to be, like you said, accept the realism.
35:49
But it it’s you, you can’t control it, right?
35:54
You just have to cope with it.
35:56
You have to find a way forward.
36:00
And you mentioned this.
36:02
I’m I’m going to reread you because you kind of talked about this, but I’m going to read another portion from your blog.
36:09
My mentality often made me think of cancer.
36:11
Like a long ride with lots of climbs and grinding pain, with flat dull sections where the road stretched out and occasional downhill moments.
36:22
I didn’t view the downhills as getting seriously ill.
36:27
They are the bits I enjoyed, like going home, the moments of light and hope that put smile on my face, the bit that reassured and reminded me that I wasn’t dead yet and that that’s it.
36:38
It’s I’m not dead yet.
36:40
Right.
36:40
You got to keep living.
36:43
Yeah.
36:43
It’s funny as you read that back, I, I live in a.
36:46
And partly, actually, it goes back to what I was saying, right where I grew up, I live in.
36:51
I was born brought up in the north of England, which is north of a place called Manchester and Liverpool.
36:58
The weather is notoriously poor.
37:00
It rains a lot.
37:01
It’s a beautiful place when the sun’s out, it’s hills and mountains and the scenery is beautiful.
37:11
And it’s also got a lot of history there.
37:13
There’s a lot of mountain biking, a lot of cycling.
37:15
I did a lot of cycling over my years.
37:17
I get a lot of solid little happiness out of it.
37:22
But I also looked at some of the other sports that people do, and I always did it for the downhill.
37:28
And it was kind of like and a dominus of disrespect.
37:31
But a lot of people go, oh, you know, I like running and I go out running and I’m like, yeah, but basically there’s no downhill.
37:37
Like you run, you run up a hill, it hurts.
37:39
You run across the hill along the flat, it hurts.
37:42
Then you ride down the hill, run down, sorry, run down the hill and it still hurts.
37:45
You couldn’t see more running downhill because it hurts your knees.
37:48
Whereas I always looked at the, if I ride up the hill, I’m doing it for benefit.
37:53
It’s like the carrot and stick.
37:54
Basically.
37:54
It’s like right up the hill, you can get a free ride down.
37:57
And that’s where the thumb hits.
37:58
That’s where the bits where you can, you get that buzz and the the energy that flows through you is.
38:03
So it’s worth putting the effort in because you never know if it’s going to be a good downhill or a bad downhill.
38:08
But at least it’s sort of just, it’s winding a bit of adrenaline.
38:15
And I’ve always, I mean, and because of where I live, you have to soak it up.
38:21
You have to go out.
38:22
You know, I used to go out on the mountain back.
38:24
The weather would be terrible.
38:25
People would often look at me.
38:26
Why are you like the weather is awful?
38:27
Why don’t you just stay inside and sit by the fire?
38:30
In fact, my father probably was one of the main people that started this process.
38:35
I’ve got 2 younger brothers and myself and my father who suddenly passed away.
38:39
Now he used to take us to the Lake District at the weekends and the weather would be notoriously bad and we’d go and walk up a mountain.
38:48
And my father was at a textiles business.
38:51
So he had, he always had quite good gear because he used to get it as part of the business.
38:58
And things like Gore Tex came out and he would have the nice shiny Gore Tex jacket and a nice pair of boots.
39:04
And me and my brothers were always in hand me down jackets and hand me down boots that didn’t fit because we all grew really quickly.
39:11
So the boots I was wearing, my brother would be wearing it the following year.
39:14
And then my little brother would be wearing it the year after that.
39:17
And our stuff always used to leak off.
39:19
It would get wet.
39:20
And yeah, it would be, you know, you just described my childhood with, with three older brothers.
39:25
Yeah, Yeah.
39:26
It’d basically be like looking with dad going, oh, this jacket’s really good.
39:29
I’m like, we’ll all be stood there freezing on the top of some hill.
39:32
And he always used to say to us, you know, wouldn’t you rather be here rather than sat in front, sat at home just bored in front of the fire because you’d be bored.
39:40
You wouldn’t be doing it.
39:41
You’d just be you’d be buying your hand off basically with boredom if you just sat at home in front of the fire.
39:47
And at the time you were like much rather be sat in front of the fire.
39:50
But as you get older, you suddenly realize I’d rather be stood on the hill in the pouring rain and feeling this feeling that some of my face.
39:59
I think that that attitude of having.
40:02
Seeing the benefit and the light and stuff that’s coming out of it was a big part of, I think what helped me get through mentally and physically.
40:15
I was lucky in that I was already fit.
40:16
I mean, my doctor I because I think you do spend a lot of time going by me like this is not fair.
40:23
Like what have I done to deserve this?
40:26
What you know, and actually my consultant brought me down to earth with it very quickly at one point and basically said if you hadn’t been in this physical state that you were in when you came here, you’d be dead.
40:40
So count yourself lucky that you’ve done all those things that you’re still here and that you are not dead yet, because that is how you’ve got out of this is you’re physically, you’re in good shape and you’ve looked after yourself And don’t treat it as a why you the why you, why are you going to live is because you’ve put that effort in in and giving you a, giving you a position to get out of it.
41:03
But mentally they have two, they’re disconnected systems.
41:08
Yeah.
41:09
It, it’s I, I love that analogy of the, the bike ride to going up the hump because you like when you’re grinding.
41:15
Anyone’s ever done that?
41:16
It’s brutal.
41:17
Like when I do it, I just keep my head down and I always think I just look 3 feet ahead.
41:22
I just need to go 3 feet.
41:24
I get that three feet.
41:25
I need to do another three feet.
41:26
I never look up the hill because I don’t want to know how much further I have to go.
41:29
It just discourages me.
41:31
And I’ve just learned, just keep my head down.
41:33
Just keep the legs pumping.
41:35
Focus 3 feet, 3 feet, little bit at time.
41:39
And man, when you get to the top and you start going down.
41:43
And now I’m not fighting gravity anymore.
41:44
Gravity’s taken over.
41:46
I got the wind in my face.
41:48
It, it’s just such an incredible feeling.
41:53
And I think that it’s a great metaphor for this.
41:55
Like there’s so much we can’t control, but what you can’t control is your perspective, your attitude, your your willingness to keep pedaling.
42:05
You don’t keep climbing the hill because it’s easy to give up and just say start just I just want to stop and rest for a little bit.
42:15
But sometimes that’s what you need to do.
42:16
But you can still got to get back on the bike and finish the climb.
42:20
Yes.
42:21
I don’t recommend anybody gets blood leukemia, blood cancer, just to test the theory.
42:26
But yeah, it’s a big hill you have to climb to get over the other side of it.
42:30
Yeah.
42:31
I’d like to finish up with some of your roles that you have in your.
42:39
You have 100.
42:40
You talk about the 100 rules in the roles.
42:42
We’re not going to go through all 100.
42:45
But do you have some favorite roles out of that that you really are kind of your anchors?
42:51
Yes.
42:52
So the rule that I’m just to be clear, the rules are not mine as such.
42:56
They were, they are borrowed from a book called Vela Miniati and it’s actually, and I you can probably guess from this and it sounds like you are as well.
43:08
It’s a cycling book and a lot of the rules are based around kind of the comments that you would have.
43:16
Rule 5 is the classic which I love Ross, which basically is hard on the F or basically I stopped loaning, just get on with it.
43:30
And I think the that whole process of understanding that whole process of of kind of just stop.
43:44
Like a lot of these things, you can always complain about it being somebody else’s fault or something else’s fault as in why you can’t do what you can do.
43:56
And there’s a blame culture.
43:58
And I think sometimes that in in other circumstances, it doesn’t matter, particularly if you blame other things.
44:06
And basically you think about it because it actually it’s not you.
44:08
It’s not the end of the world.
44:09
You’re not going to die off because of you blame somebody else and don’t take personal responsibility or, or just get on with it.
44:15
But in, in the scenario of leukemia, for me, it was like, well, I can blame everybody or whatever I like, but it’s not going to make any change to the outcome.
44:26
Like I can turn around and go, well, I, you know, it was, it was work’s fault because they worked me too hard, or it’s my wife’s fault because she gave me too many green beds or too little green beds, or my fault, you know, it’s somebody else’s fault because they didn’t do something.
44:39
And therefore I’m it’s like, well, yeah, but actually, who cares?
44:43
Basically, am I going to die or not?
44:46
If I want to do or not?
44:47
Do I want to not die?
44:48
So I need to sort that out myself.
44:50
And whoever’s fault it was or is going to make no material impact on that.
44:54
So rule 5 basically.
44:57
We also used to just say this to a lot of my friends base because quite a lot of people would always, and I’m sure a lot of people have got those reasons where they’ve got friends and groups that, you know, you play golf window or you go running then or you you do something with them.
45:13
We always used to basically use it to poke fun at people because they would always be saying, Oh yeah, you beat me to the top of the hill or you did this and or you beat me to the bottom of the hill.
45:21
And it was always kind of oh, well, yeah, yeah, your bike’s better or my bike’s broken or my my golf swing rabbit jumped out at me or whatever.
45:30
It’s like rule 5 responsibility.
45:35
Yes, my mother.
45:37
Yeah, looks like then two of the other rules.
45:40
I mean, a lot of the other rules.
45:43
Oh really?
45:44
Actually, I wouldn’t say 10 commandments or so, but it’s all just kind of available respect.
45:52
I think that creates a a spine and a core of of moral compass as to what you do and how you live your life and take responsibility yourself.
46:05
But also back to the you are not dead yet.
46:08
It’s like there’s loads of good things.
46:11
The sun always comes up.
46:12
The following day might be covered in cloud and rain and misery as it is in the Uka lot of time, but sun stuff comes up and when the sun comes out, that’s when you get a lot of simple pleasures from.
46:23
I think that’s the other pieces.
46:24
You come off the back of something like this, You take a lot of pleasure out, things that you forget because you’re just too busy doing stuff that you’re living your life.
46:32
And it’s, I still, even now I’m a lot more grateful for the sun comes out and you kind of go actually life’s well, life’s a good place.
46:43
And I’m looking, I’m still here.
46:45
Yeah.
46:46
I, I went through a really hard time when I was 32 and I got some incredible advice that I use all the time, the person said.
46:56
Chris, when you’re feeling like this, do me a favor, just go outside, stand and look up at the sun.
47:04
Just close your eyes, look up at the sun and feel the warmth of the sun on your face and just just feel that.
47:12
Just be in that moment.
47:12
Just feel that warmth of sun on your face.
47:15
Oh man, that is like, it’s so easy.
47:19
Just forget.
47:20
Like man, it’s, it’s a beautiful day.
47:22
The sun is shining and I made it just, I, I still use that today just to shift my perspective, you know, just get that little jolt and recenter myself that and then I just can’t move forward, you know, and those little things like that that you otherwise, like you said, take for granted, but you know it.
47:45
It’s life’s too short, you know, stop, feel the sun in your face and all the flowers, whatever it is.
47:51
Go fast in your car.
47:53
Go a little bit faster than you probably should, you know, enjoy life.
47:58
I’ve done a lot of that.
47:59
Yeah.
48:00
Yeah.
48:01
And that’s, I mean that’s the bit I get my pleasure from.
48:06
And to certain kind of slightly belligerent perspective was even going out in the bad weather, I still get a lot of pleasure out for it.
48:15
I think 9 is, is basically if you’re riding out in bad weather, you’re a ******.
48:24
To be honest, we were in a much better position to talk about that, like me and my group of friends, because the weather was pretty much always bad.
48:29
Always bad.
48:30
Yeah.
48:30
It was more of a planet where you see all these other people going out.
48:33
And actually when I used to race bikes, a lot of the, we used to go to France a lot to the Alps and do down all that.
48:40
And OK, particularly in some of the weathers tend to be very hot there, although it’s the Alps and you know, you’re talking 35°, so close to 100°F or certainly in the 90s.
48:54
And all the local heroes, they would all be pretty handy because they were used to riding in that.
48:59
And then occasionally you get big heavy downpours, really bad rain, lots of mud, really sleepy.
49:06
And me and my mates, we used used to clean up.
49:09
Like, we’d be ******.
49:12
We’d run out of the bad weather.
49:13
You live with that every day.
49:14
Yeah, yeah, some of them, some of them wouldn’t even show up and do the race.
49:17
Never mind.
49:18
Oh no, it’s the weather’s too bad.
49:20
Yeah, yeah.
49:21
Anyway, yeah, so that what I the other thing that struck me reading through the rules I know is written for like cycling, but it really applies to leadership and I’m just going to give 2 examples.
49:33
Rule #2 lead by example.
49:35
I love this one.
49:36
To me, leaders always out in front, setting the tone for everyone else to follow and then guide the uninitiated.
49:42
That’s the other key part to me of being a leader is you got to look for those that are struggling, that maybe haven’t quite figured things out yet.
49:50
Those are the ones you need to guide and help.
49:52
So yeah, I think that’s a big part of how we looked at how we set up our businesses and how I’ve done everything in life is, you know, we were all there once, regardless of how good we are now.
50:04
And that guide the initiative that help people learn bring them on the old wing mentor them if I look at my own leukemia journey, but that guide the and initiated that that’s me talking to people who’ve had it and their support was to me priceless.
50:21
The fact that they gave up their time.
50:23
I also know that actually now having done it for other people, how hard it is to be able to share that back again, because it takes you back, you get, you get PTSD, you know, in effect have been taken back to that time when how horrible it was.
50:39
Because actually the biggest thing is you, you over time, you start to forget and you kind of you start to default back and you forget how horrible it was.
50:49
And that also means it’s quite hard to help people.
50:52
I can understand how people don’t want to talk about these things because they don’t want to be taken back to their.
50:57
Whereas I suppose my view of that is I was so grateful that all and other people I spoke to were happy to give me their time and take themselves back mentally to where they were that I felt I feel it’s all only right for me to do the same for other people who are at their stages in the journey that I’ve already completed or much further on that journey.
51:20
Well, Robert, this has been incredible.
51:22
I just, I wish we could keep going, but I know you have a very busy schedule and I appreciate you sharing your story with us taking this time.
51:30
It really is a gift.
51:32
I know all our listeners are truly appreciative and, and I personally am very appreciative.
51:37
So we will have the link to Robert’s website in the show notes.
51:43
So be sure to check that out at impellercrm.com/sales Lead Dog where you’ll get not only this episode, but all our hundred plus episodes of Sales Lead Dog.
51:53
Be sure to subscribe to get all our future episodes as well.
51:56
Robert, thank you so much for coming on Sales Lead Dog and welcome to the Sales Lead Dog pack.
52:02
Thank you very much and it’s been a pleasure and always have to help.
52:06
But thank you.
52:09
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52:17
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52:30
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