Shelley Rogers: You're listening to another episode of Inspiring Greatness where we share the stories of remarkable entrepreneurs. Welcome. My name is Shelley Rogers, your host. Join me each
week as we share experiences from amazing entrepreneurs who have had success and barrier. Listen to their stories, recommended books, technology tools and business tips. If you're an entrepreneur at the startup stage or if you have a business experiencing high growth, welcome. This podcast is for you. Listen and learn from the entrepreneur's best and worst moments and hear what inspires them. Now let's begin.

Craig Harper: You know, here's the thing, we all think ... Consciously or not, we all kind of assume that people think like us or they kind of see the world like us. As a speaker and a coach and a mentor and even an author, it really matters that I at least have an awareness of, not a preoccupation or obsession, but an awareness of what it's like to be around me.

Shelley Rogers: Welcome to episode 124. You just heard a snippet from Craig Harper. Now in this episode, you're going to discover Craig talking about being called Jumbo as a child and how it motivated him to go to the gym at age 15. We talked about the importance of maintaining your health for success in your business and with only 1,440 minutes each day, Craig gives his top health tips. He also shares his best advice when someone asked him the question on what do you think it's like being around you. He's got a great video on success and we have a link on our show notes page. He talks a little bit about success and the struggles of a business partnership going wrong. We also have some tips on how to set up partnerships for positive outcomes.

What inspires Craig is seeing people work hard and achieve great things. Let's dive in to today's episode. Entrepreneurs near and far, it's Shelley Rogers and thanks for joining me today and listening to this episode where we share remarkable stories from amazing entrepreneurs to inspire you. I am excited to introduce our guest, Craig Harper. Welcome to Inspiring Greatness. Are you ready to share your story to inspire our listeners?

Craig Harper: Well, I'll give it a go, Shelley. We'll see how we go.

Shelley Rogers: Well, I'm excited. Now Craig Harper is one of Australia's leading presenters, writers and educators in the area of health, high performance and personal transformation. Craig has been an integral part of Australian's health and fitness industry since 1982. You're aging yourself there.

Craig Harper: I'm super old.

Shelley Rogers: You've worked as an exercise scientist, corporate speaker, consultant, university lecturer, I mean it goes on, AFL coaching, radio host. Eclectic.

Craig Harper: Lots of stuff. Yeah. I know. I know.

Shelley Rogers: Go ahead.

Craig Harper: I'm okay at a lot of things, but not awesome at anything. We'll just leave it at all.

Shelley Rogers: Very diverse. You started your first business in 1990, Harper's Personal Training?

Craig Harper:  Yeah. To give you a little bit of a backstory to how that happened or why that happened, so I was a morbidly obese kid. I was 90 kilograms or about 200 pounds when I was 14 years old and not particularly tall at that stage. Fat kid at the school and so much so that my name, my day-to-day name, with teachers and students and parents was Jumbo. My shape and my size became my name. By the time I was about 14, 14 and a half, I was pretty sick of that, so I just started to become an exercise kind of fanatic. Probably started in a healthy way and ended up in a not too healthy way. I became pretty obsessed, but that led me to being really fascinated with physical performance and health and wellness and body image and all of those things.

I started working in the fitness industry in '82. I started working as a gym instructor and a few other bits and pieces. By the time I was about ... How old was I then? By the time I was about 21 or 22, I was running other people's gyms and then I started doing PT, personal training, in Australia in about '86-'87 when it didn't exist. Is that 30 years ago? Yeah, 30 years ago. It started to get a bit crowded in the old public gym training my clients who didn't really want to be amongst all the stinky body builders, so I came up with this idea of setting up a standalone training facility just for my clients. There were no personal training facilities in Australia at that stage and I wasn't particularly awesome at business or marketing or brand development.

I probably didn't know what any of those things were to be honest, but I was pretty good at training people and not bad at communicating and connecting and managing the people stuff. I started to conceptualize what this thing might look like. I opened Australia's first PT studio in Australia in 1990 and that kind of kicked on and I had that and a few more of those for 25 years. I employed over 500 trainers in quarter of a century. I had a lot of people come through the mill and yeah, it was fun. It was a lot of awesome and a lot of fun and a lot of personal and professional growth.

Shelley Rogers: Well, there's got to be a lot of challenges with that many staff or personal trainers under you and then how many locations did you have?

Craig Harper:                     I had four. I mean the thing about when you employ somebody, you employ egos, attitudes, personalities, backgrounds, beliefs, fears, likes, dislikes. That's the thing. That's where I inhabit these days mainly in my job in Inverted Commerce is personal development in a professional setting. Helping us get the people stuff right in the middle of our business. Yeah, that was the steep learning curve to me was trying to figure out not necessarily anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, nutrition, adaptation, progressive overload, which is all the PT stuff, but how do I actually run a business? How do I manage all these personalities? How do I figure this stuff out? How do I be a leader?

How do I build a brand and grow a business and manage the personal stuff and the professional stuff at the same time?

Shelley Rogers: What helped you the most get through all that because that's a lot of challenges especially if you have that much growth?

Craig Harper: 100%. I'm a pretty experiential learner. Obviously I went to university. I did a degree and all of those things, but for me it was just very much on the job. Because my business was at that stage unique in that there wasn't another one early days, I couldn't go and look at what anyone else was doing, so I just kind of learnt on the go. Asked lots of questions. I had a couple of mentors. I had people around me that knew more than me about business or marketing or product development or all of those things. I picked their brains plus I just really paid attention to what was happening and I listened to my clients. I went what do you like and what don't you like and I paid attention to my results.

I always say to people, "What are your results telling you? What's your life telling you? What's your marriage telling you? What's your body telling," because we're constantly being given information that sometimes we don't pay attention to.

Shelley Rogers: Absolutely. You touched on it, mentors absolutely have been huge for my success of my growth and business coaches along the way. I've had multiple mentors depending on what I'm going through during my entrepreneurial journey or stress that I have maybe in my personal life. When I'm coaching clients in business, maybe it's not just one mentor that you have, you have a few that help you get through to that next level and continue on your journey and growth.

Another thing that I've really noticed and found helpful for me is we could go to all these educational seminars and do all these reading books, but if you don't implement and like you just mentioned, continue to change and check in with yourself and say, "Is this working or is it not," you're not going to grow and it's not going to ... It's just the repetitive thing that's going to happen with getting frustrated and no results.

Craig Harper: 100%. Life is not a theory. I do a lot of speaking. That's my main job these days is corporate speaking, but I also do a lot of open to the public workshops and programs. I always say life's not a program. Life's not a workshop. Life's not a book. Life's not a conversation with Craig or Shelley. Life's not a moment in time. It's great. Theory's only valuable when it's turned into action. I always say transformation lives in the application of the information or the application of the education. The challenge is that quite often the things that we need to do and not the things we want to do. We as human beings are hardwired for comfort. The dichotomy is on the one hand we say, "I want to grow. I want to learn. I want to evolve.

I want to build a brand, build a business. I want to be awesome. I want to be resilient," but at the same time on a subconscious level we're going, "Yeah, but I don't want to get uncomfortable. I don't want to take risks. I don't want to step into uncertainty." The challenge for us is to say, "All right. Well, I need to do things that won't be fun, won't be quick, won't be easy, won't be comfortable and won't be painless and that's okay."

Shelley Rogers: Face the fear. I always say, "Everyday is a learning day. Everyday is a school day. Fail fast. Fail forward," are a couple of the tips that I always give as well.

Craig Harper: It's okay with stuffing up. It's okay to be dysfunctional. It's okay to be scared. It's okay to be not good at things. It's okay to articulate that. Like I'm floored. I stuff up. I've written nine books and we'll talk about five of them today maybe or not or one of them and I stand in front of thousands of people and I'm still an idiot at times. I'm still a work in progress because underneath all of the knowledge and the skill and the education and the articulation of the concepts and the ideas is this floored human being that's still trying to figure crap out. We're all works in progress and it's okay.

Shelley Rogers:                 How do you deal with that if you say sometimes, "I'm still an idiot?" How do you mentally ... I do the same like, "Oh, I wasn't perfect on that podcast. I should have said this." I think people appreciate authenticity, but how do you personally and how do you coach your clients that, "Yeah, I feel that way, but how do you get past it?"

Craig Harper:                     I never pretend. I just go, "Well, of course, I'm floored." If I waited until I had all my shit together before I stood in front of a group or wrote a book, I'll never stand in front of a group or write a book. This ridiculous perception that people have of a high profile ... Not that I'm high profile, but high-ish profile people or authors or speakers or personal or professional development people, that they have somehow got it all together, well, that's just fairytale. I do some things really well, some things not so well. I have days where I'm killing it. I have days where I go, "What on earth was that about?"

In the middle of all of that, I recognize and accept my humanity, my strengths, my weaknesses and what matters most is not how many hours in a day or how much talent or what my genetic potential, but what I do with all of that. Probably the only thing that we can really control in our life in many ways is our response for the things we can't control. My biggest management project is me. My biggest challenge is me. Me in standing in front of an audience and talking, easy. Me managing me on a daily basis, not so easy.

Shelley Rogers: See, other people might go, "Oh god. I could never stand up in front of big huge group of people." That would be so daunting for a lot of people.

Craig Harper: 100% and that depends on your skills set and your internal reality. If you tell me all the things that you do, there would be three or four things on your list or more maybe that would terrify me, but you're very comfortable with it. There's this component that we explore in behavioral psychology called subjective reality and I don't know how many are listening to this right now, but let's just pluck a figure. Let's go a thousand people are listening to Shelley and Craig talking right now about a particular idea or a concept. Well, the reality is that nobody is having the same experience.

Everybody is listening to the same words delivered the same way with the same intent, but everyone's having a unique experience because consciously or not, intentionally or not, we all create our own reality moment to moment, day to day. This is where this whole challenge of in the middle of our business, in the middle of our product or service development or the middle of this conversation or the middle of this day, what stories am I telling myself? Am I making this hard? Am I making this easy? How am I labeling this? How am I giving this thing meaning? That's one of the ongoing challenges of us is to realize that self-awareness and situational awareness really, really matters.

Shelley Rogers: I mean I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years and when you find something that you're passionate about, that's when everything becomes easy.

Craig Harper: I totally agree. Yeah, you start working then, don't you?

Shelley Rogers: It's fun. Yeah.

Craig Harper: Yeah. When your passion, your purpose and your job will collide, well, boom.

Shelley Rogers:Absolutely. I was looking at some of your YouTube videos and one that resonated with me was the one that you did on success.

Craig Harper:Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shelley Rogers: I love that. We're going to attach some of your links back to your website and your YouTube videos for people to watch because I just ... It's so motivational. It's nice, short, simple and powerful words. Thank you for producing those and you have quite a few on there.

Craig Harper: Yeah, thank you. I mean I think the interesting thing about success is just like we said then, experience is personal or success is personal. Like you made before, for me to stand in front of a thousand people is awesome. It's fun. It's what I do. It's my job. For somebody else, that would be the opposite of success. That would be sheer terror. When I say to a room full of people, "Put up your hand if you want to be successful," of course every hand goes up. Then you say, "Okay. Well, you've got a bit of paper in front of you. Just write down what that means," and 950 people will look confused because they want to be successful, but they don't actually know what that means for them specifically.

One of our challenges in business, in life, in health, in wellness, in communication, in relationships, in serving God or whatever our mission is is to try to figure out well, what does that look like for me? Not for mom or dad or not for the collective around me, but for me. Here's another really interesting question while we're talking about an entrepreneur and growing a brand and business, how many people have you met and how many people have I met over the years who are killing it corporately or financially or professionally, but mentally and emotionally and socially they're a train wreck?

You go, "So listen, Dave or Sally, if you're building this amazing brand and business, but in the middle of that you personally are dying, maybe you need to hit the pause button." Because it's great to build a brand and business, it's great to be financially successful, it's great to be killing the gun, but it's also great to be a happy human being. It's also great to be mentally, emotionally and physically healthy. It's also great to have connection. It's also great to be valued and loved. It's trying to manage that personal and the professional stuff in a way where there's like a pleasant synergy.

Shelley Rogers: Absolutely. I see that very, very often where the home life is not healthy. They're not happy. They drown themselves in work and successful at work, but yeah, not happy at home, which leads me to my question, my next one, what health tips do you have for busy entrepreneurs?

Craig Harper: Look, nothing too specific other than to have a plan, have a structure. I always say to people, "You can make more money. You can get another business. You can build another brand, but you can't get another body, so let's manage that one optimally." What we know also quite clearly now is that when your body is in better shape, your brain's in better shape. There's an absolute correlation between physical, mental and emotional health. I know for me, when I'm in better shape physically, which thankfully I'm in pretty good shape more of the time, when I'm in better shape physically, my brain works better. I resolve conflict better. I'm more creative. I think more clearly. I'm a better communicator and leader and connector.

Conversely, if I'm out of shape, that might just be that I haven't had enough sleep for three days or I'm dehydrated or I've been eating not great or whatever it is. There's an adverse reactive. There's 1,440 minutes in a day. If I had to give something specific I would say to your listeners, set yourself a minimum of 30 minutes of movement a day above and beyond incident or occupational activity. That can be structured however you want. If that's three 10 minute efforts or two 15 minute efforts or one half hour effort that's fine, but our bodies strive on movement. Our bodies do not thrive on being still. In fact, the more stillness, the more sedentary kind of component there is to our life, the more we put ourselves at risk.

I can go through all the physiological consequences, but I won't bore you. Let's just say movement matters a lot. Whether or not that's with a trainer, with a friend at a gym, in the mountains, in the garage on an exercise bike, it doesn't matter so much as long as we're moving our body regularly.

Shelley Rogers: Perfect. I like that. I like that you say movement and not just any kind of specific things. It's a very broad category. I like when you say health, it's not just the food. It's the sleep. It's the dehydration. It's the totally of health, which is so important.

Craig Harper: 100%. Let's just pick one example. Think about this, let's say you've got everything right except you just don't drink enough water, so you're chronically dehydrated a lot. Well, your body is 70% water. Your brain's 90% water. Your blood is 90% water. What do you think happens to brain function and stress on heart and risk of stroke and things? When you're dehydrated, everything goes through the roof. If you're dehydrated, your brain doesn't work optimally. If you're dehydrated, you're like four or fives time more likely to have a stroke or a heart attack. If you're dehydrated, nothing's working and that's just one single component. Managing our body really matters.

Shelley Rogers: I want to touch on alcohol because obviously that is a dehydration.

Craig Harper: Part of it, yeah.

Shelley Rogers: What are the effects of alcohol? I mean there's so much controversy over how much everybody should drink, how often. What's your take on that, Craig?

Craig Harper: There are lots of variables. How many glasses? Well, what people fail to I guess consider is that ... I haven't even met you face to face Shelley, but let's say you weight 50 kilos and I weigh a hundred. Well, then I can definitely drink more than you based just on body weight, so there's that. In general terms, I think like with anything it's more about the abuse than the use. This sounds a bit airy theory touchy feely, but it depends on the relationship that you have with alcohol. I work with addicts and alcoholics as part of my job. Drinking, fine. Excessive drinking, not fine. Being dependent on drinking, not fine.

I think part of it's not just about how do I manage alcohol on a practical level, it's about what kind of relationship do I have with alcohol. Just like with food. I say to people all the time, "Tell me about your relationship with food," because a lot of us have habits and behaviors and thinking around both food and alcohol, which do us more harm than good. In general terms, like people say to me, "How often should I drink," it's like how long is a piece of string. I go, "Well, if you're a drinker and you want to drink, why don't you give yourself two or three days a week or why don't you have one wine a night or whatever it is, but be conscious and aware rather than emotional and in the moment where you're not really keeping track of things."

Shelley Rogers: Right. Be specific. I'm going to have a cheat night or a cheat day on the weekend or something like that.

Craig Harper: 100%. It's about accountability. Look, you don't want to be a fanatic. You don't want to be a weirdo, but at the same time you don't want to wake up in five years and go, "All right. Well, I'm an alcoholic then." That happens so easily.

Shelley Rogers: Everything in moderation.

Craig Harper: 100%.

Shelley Rogers:  Thank you for the health tips.

Craig Harper: Pleasure.

Shelley Rogers: What technology tips or tools do you use whether it be in business that helps manage your business better or even your personal life? Do you have any go to ...

Craig Harper: Yeah. Well, I'm a bit of a dinosaur. All your listeners are probably way ahead of me. I use a thing called Fitbit just for me for tracking my sleep and my steps and monitoring my heart rate and energy expenditure, which is just a little watch kind of thing that sits on my wrist. I use that really just more for personal interest rather than anything too profound in my world. I guess from a practical point of view, I don't really use ... I'm just thinking about this. The main thing for me and you might relate to this ... I don't know how old you are. I'm 54.

Back in I guess the '80s and '90s when Tony Robbins and Deepak and Wayne Dyer and everyone was like ... All the personal development was starting to come into its own and I used to rush out and buy my bloody Tony Robbins cassettes and then my Toby Robbins CDs. Now I guess my favorite tech thing is just that I have virtually unlimited access to unbelievable people, information, ideas, thought leaders via programs like yours. There are so many amazing podcasts. I can go, "I want to listen to Gary V talk. I want to listen to Wayne Dyer or whoever it is. I want to listen to this amazing interview," and I jump on and I listen to ...

I listen to a consistent kind of group and I would listen to one or two hours a day where I'm going to for a walk or I'm in the car or I'm getting ready for something and in the background I've just got a podcast playing. For me just that instant access to awesome information and ideas and conversations has been a real blessing.

Shelley Rogers: It's all free most of it.

Craig Harper: That's just ridiculous, isn't it? I love it. There's just so much online. There's online garbage, but there's also online goodness.

Shelley Rogers: Now I'm dying to ask what is the best advice someone has given you? You touched on mentors and ...

Craig Harper: Yeah.

Shelley Rogers: Was there one that you can ...

Craig Harper: The best advice? Best advice? Wow. I don't know that one thing stands out, but for me I guess one of the questions that I got asked once was what do you think it's like being around you? I went, "Oh, yeah," because here's the thing, we all think ... Consciously or not, we all kind of assume that people think like us or they kind of see the world like us. As a speaker and a coach and a mentor and even an author, it really matters that I at least have an awareness of, not a preoccupation or obsession, but an awareness of what it's like to be around me. That really for me opened the door on me exploring self-awareness. What's the Craig Harper experience like? Maybe I'm a dickhead. Maybe I'm super boring. You know what I mean?

Shelley Rogers: Yeah.

Craig Harper: That really caused me to pay much, much more attention to my audience and whether or not that was an audience of one or a thousand, whether or not that was via an online post or a face to face conversation. I guess that, Craig, people don't think like you. It's not better. It's not worst. It's different. I always say to people, "You're thinking is your language. If I don't understand the way that you think or at least try to understand the way that you think, it's very hard for me to connect with you. If you think one way and I think a completely different way and I operate on the assumption that my thinking's right, I'm going to create more disconnection than connection."

I guess it would be that that would be around the, "Hey, Craig, you really need to understand what the Craig experience is like to others especially if your job is communication."

Shelley Rogers: Absolutely. Speaking of communication, you have quite a few books out there. Pull Your Finger Out was one that resonated with me and I really liked. I liked that it's this kind of straight talking instructional manual for life and that your mom maybe thought that there was more swearing than needed in that book. Can you share which book is your favorite and why you wrote it?

Craig Harper: Look, I've written a few books, but probably that book ... How much time have we got? Have we got three minutes?

Shelley Rogers: Yes, we do.

Craig Harper: I'll tell you an interesting story about in terms of business and branding and selling stuff. I wrote a book before that book and I won't say the full title because we don't want to offend you, but it's called Stop F-ing Around. When I started, that was just a working title because it was just 30 simple principles because I kept having essentially the same conversations about the same issues and I went, "I'm just going to write a little bit. It's going to be like 20,000 words. I'm just going to cover this stuff." It's straightforward. It's quite sweary. It's quite blunt. It's quite in your face. There's a bit of humor. Anyway, some of my friends are going, "I don't think you can call it that."

Anyway, I went, "Well, we'll see what happens." I self-published that book and I called it that. The subtitle or the tag line on the bottom is "It's 30 principles for a better life" and underneath it says, "Self-help for people who don't like ..." No. "Self-help for people who hate self-hate." Now just that little tag because a lot of people go, "Oh, I hate self-help. I better buy it," right? There's almost a reverse psychology thing. With that book, there was no media launch. There was no PR campaign. There was nothing. I just launched it through my then blog, which I had about 70,000 subscribers. We ended up selling in the first week with no bookstores, no anything, we sold over a thousand books.

Then subsequently went into bookstores and got distribution, but it's somewhere around 50,000 sales now. Now in Australia that's amazing especially for a self-published book. Then anyway, Penguin, bless them, Penguin the publishers, said, "We like that book. We want you to write a bigger book," which ended up being "Pull Your Finger Out." Same style. Same everything, except we can't have the F word on the front cover. I went, "Well, you can because I've done it." They went, "Oh no. We can't." I went, "Oh, all right." Anyway, I write a book and obviously it's their book. I'm the author, but they own the book so they get the final say on title and color and cover and layout and graphics and all that.

I came up with a title and I went, "Really guys? I know you're the experts, but I don't like the title." They went, "Well, we've done all the market research, blah, blah, blah." Anyway, so that book is a bigger book and it's got four times the content. It's a better book. It's newer. It's got a lot more stuff in it. It's a significantly better book than the 50,000 sale book, yet that title, just the title, didn't resonate with people as much. I would have done 60-70 radio interviews. There was a media launch. There was posts. There was in bookstore signings and we're still yet to reach 10,000 sales.

Shelley Rogers: Pull Your Finger Out. It still has an F on the front cover, but definitely not the impact.

Craig Harper: It does. It does. To your listeners, if they want to buy a book that I would think is the best book for them just in terms of creating momentum, having a few light bulb moments, yeah, they can just go to my website, which is just craigharper.net and it's all on there.

Shelley Rogers: We'll put links to your books on our show notes as well. Besides your book, what favorite book could you share with our listeners and what were your takeaways or why is that your favorite?

Craig Harper: I think this is going to sound ... Okay. Can I say two quickly and they're very different? They're like almost totally opposite. Mine is The Five Love Languages, which you probably heard of ad nauseam, by Gary Chapman I think it is.

Shelley Rogers:  Yup.

Craig Harper:  He just basically talks obviously about the way that people experience and express love. Not just love in the sense that we're talking about deep meaningful love, but even just compassion and kindness and care. That could be anything from romantic love to the love we have for somebody across the street that we want to help get out of a car, right?

Shelley Rogers: Yup.

Craig Harper: I just found that quite enlightening. There's another book by Robert L. Greene, which is called The 48 Laws of Power. That's a really interesting book. It's basically about how power and manipulation and control work. It's like almost amoral, but it's super interesting. It's a really book good to get your teeth into and your head around just understanding how that stuff works, not so that you can become a manipulator or some kind of dastardly over lord, but so that you can ... It's really well researched and really well written and there's awesome stories and awesome lessons. I could tell you 50 books, but they're two of my favorite.

Shelley Rogers: I ask this question to all my guests and over a hundred ... Gosh. I don't know how many books have been recommended. I haven't heard that one, so 48 Hours of Powers.

Craig Harper: No. 48 Laws of Power.

Shelley Rogers: Laws of Power. Okay. We'll have that on our show notes. I'm going to look that one up. Yeah, The Five Languages, I love the fact that you can go online and have a quick questionnaire that you could fill out and it gives you your top five ways that you need to be appreciated or find love. Then there's also one for couples, so you can do it together as well. We'll add on our show notes page. It's really cool. What's has been the worst entrepreneurial moment you've experienced because we definitely are failing sometimes and it's not fun?

Craig Harper: I guess my biggest challenge is and I won't to be too specific, but have been around business partners where a relationship starts out a way and ends up another way. That is healthy and then ends up unhealthy, but nothing ... I mean nothing terrible. Just not optimal. All the normal peaks and troughs of business and things that worked and things that didn't work and profitable and not profitable, but the things which impacted me most personally were just relationships that maybe over the course of three, four, five, six, seven, eight years in business or whatever didn't prosper, that things changed.

Shelley Rogers: I've had partners over the years. I've had several businesses and from my experience I've had some bad ones. Going forward I just always coach or mentored my pupil that it's all about having clear expectations at the front, having a shareholder's agreement, how it's going to end. Really spending the time at the beginning even though we're all excited about this new business idea and want to get launched, but really spending the time to make sure core values match and that we have clear expectations of rules. Most difficult is partnerships that go bad because it's personal, because it's usually friends as well, right?

Craig Harper: 100%. Where were you when I needed you? Where were you with that advice? Come on. Now you tell me.

Shelley Rogers: Yes. Yes. Yes, definitely most important when going into partnership is getting that done right from the start. That doesn't mean that it's still not going to end badly, but it definitely helps with the outcomes and it's the exit strategy. If it doesn't work, what's it going to look like, how are we going to deal with it, that kind of stuff.

Craig Harper: 100%. It's good to go in with that awareness and that knowledge and that reality. Let's hope this is amazing for a long time, but it might not be because that happens.

Shelley Rogers: Well, we're getting close to the end of the interview and I would like to know what inspires you right now and what will you be doing this time next year?

Craig Harper: What inspires me is seeing the people that I work with or getting feedback from people that I speak to who are doing great things. I get inspired by others. That sounds very bloody predictable, but it is true. It is true. When I see somebody who's really up against it and somebody who has really done the work, rolled up their sleeves, stepped into their fear and just worked through crap, physical, mental, emotional, financial crap and people that aren't even necessarily that super well-equipped or necessarily talented, but just do some amazing through the work and through the courage. That inspires me. I get constant ... Not because of me, but because they've done the work and applied the principles.

I've never changed anyone. All I've done is influenced a few people, but yeah, that inspires me, seeing other people do good stuff.

Shelley Rogers: Yeah. Seeing the results.

Craig Harper: What was the second part?

Shelley Rogers: What will you be doing this time next year?

Craig Harper: Good. Same. Same. I'll be doing the same and maybe on a little bit bigger level. I've got a full-time PA, Melissa, who runs my life, who's amazing. She's got a double degree in marketing and psychology. She's much smarter than me and so she kind of does my business development. My job is talk and write. The end. She books all my venues and she kind of comes up with ideas about doing a gig here or there or running a new program. She does that. Like this year we spoke to thousands of people and I spoke in England and Ireland and all around Australia. We go into the States early-ish next year to do some stuff. Just more of the same and hopefully just connecting with more people.

Shelley Rogers: Well, it sounds like she's well ... Got you well organized and congratulations. You do amazing things. Thank you so much for being on Inspiring Greatness. Right before we go, do you have any parting recommendation or a quote that inspires you?

Craig Harper: A quote that inspires me. Well, I love the quote by a writer from the early 20th century. Her name was Anais Nin. She said, "We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are." For me that's always been pertinent to ... That's further to our conversation about subjective reality, but we don't see things as they are. We see things as we are. If you're a leader, if you're a manager, if you're developing a brand or a business, if you got people around you, if communication's integral to what you do, then having that awareness in every moment and every conversation, every relationship really matters.

Shelley Rogers: Well, thank you for sharing that quote. What is the best way for our listeners to reach you, Craig?

Craig Harper: Probably just to go to my website, Shelley, which is craigharper.net and then they can just ... There's a contact info app. They can send me an email and that will come straight to Melissa, she who runs my life, and it'll come to me next.

Shelley Rogers: Perfect. Perfect. Thank you so much for being on Inspiring Greatness Podcast.

Craig Harper: Keep doing your good work. It's awesome. Thanks, Shelley.

Shelley Rogers: Thank you for listening and spreading the word of Inspiring Greatness. We have some incredible guests coming up each week. Stay tuned for what's coming up by liking us on Facebook, search under Inspiring Greatness Podcast, or subscribing on our webpage at inspiring-greatness.com.au. It's that time to commit to change, time to implement ideas. It's time to maximize everyday and make decisions as if you only have a limited time to be great. Learn from the experiences our guests share. It's time to go out there and inspire greatness around you.