Tell me about your vision.
My vision, well, my mission is to bring joy back in education and workplace and I do that in four different ways using the different
aspects of language communication, speaking, listening, reading, and writing. So in terms of reading,
I have the world's top reading engagement program, which in just over two months
shows parents how to get their kids to read more, read better, and most importantly to love reading. Writing, I've written 17 books.
Speaking, I speak over a hundred dates all over the world.
And then finally, this is probably most applicable to your audience in terms of listening,
I help individuals, entrepreneurs, and organizations leverage speaking on stages as a major client lead source.
Danny, where would you say that this vision of you going in the world and
creating a better education for people, creating more audience and more
business for people to speaking and writing books by, why is all this tied together? Where does this come from?
Well, in terms of the coaching, I never thought I'd coach because I have very high standards,
just like when I was a teacher and I basically tell people I have a two-step process. Listen to what I tell you and then do it.
I never thought I'd be coaching, but because of COVID and losing over a hundred speaking engagements overnight,
I had to make revenue somehow and people always asked me to help coach them.
How to create more engaging presentations. And now I absolutely love it.
Probably my favorite success story was last year, my business partner and I coached Jimmy Hayes Nelson.
We were working with a gentleman named Gustavo from Ecuador. Gustavo should be president of the United States.
He came to America 30 years ago, didn't speak a word of English, did every menial job he could, saved every dime, invested in real estate.
30 years later, he's a multimillionaire. And so we worked with him on crafting his story into a presentation.
Now his offer, Harry, was a four-month coaching program for $40,000.
Now that's a big offer, but one of the things I always stress to my clients is, hey, there are two ways to get better as a speaker.
First of all, you got to watch a lot of speakers. And then second of all, one of my mentors was a guy named Jim Rohn.
And Jim used to say, you can't pay other people to do your pushups. Translation, you got to do the work.
So I said, hey, you got to get out there and speak. You can speak to service organizations, clubs like Rotary Club, Lions Club.
Speak to schools, speak to synagogues, to churches, to chambers of commerce.
He said that he was going to be on a podcast that night. And I said, okay, here's my phone number.
You got to call me tomorrow, Gustavo, and tell me how you did.
So he calls me up the next day and Jimmy and I were so excited, Harry, because he says, Danny and Jimmy, you are geniuses.
And I asked, well, did you go on the podcast last night? He said, yes. I'm like, did you make your pitch?
He said, yes. I'm like, did you sell any? He said, 23.
Harry, reading is my specialty, not math. But if I'm doing my math calculations correct, he made $920,000 that evening on a speech that we had crafted that afternoon.
And since then, he and I have been in touch. He's made over eight figures based on that one speech.
And that's where I get gratification. I always say your results may vary.
It depends on what your audience is and what you're trying to do.
But it's amazing when a person actually goes out there. It's very rewarding to me when a person goes out there, does the work and succeeds.
Wow. That's why I recently had someone on the show and she mentioned that a lot of times entrepreneurs and students getting coached.
Then realized they do have to do the work. You cannot.
You come into coaching and you have to learn, OK, the teacher is going to tell you to do something or the coach is going to guide you to do something in a better, clearer way.
But you cannot skip that doing part. And if you don't do it, every program in the world, every coaching in the world works.
It's predicated on one factor. Do you do the work? And that's what I was like, yeah, that is absolutely correct.
And I'm glad that your friend Gustavo, he had a great experience that with $960,000, that's a lot of money for someone.
Well, and what you're saying, it's what I always whether I was teaching my little ones or my older ones as my students exited my classroom for the day, they always had to listen to me say the same refrain.
I always said, remember, kids, education is valuable, but execution is priceless.
Knowledge is not power. Only applied knowledge is power.
Knowing what the right thing to do and doing the right thing are two very different things to go out, do the right thing.
Let's make this world a better place. So I'm a big believer in action.
Yep, man, I am too. I'm not an as good of an action taker as I'm a talker, but I'm getting there. I have working on that.
So thank you for sharing that, Danny. My next question for you, Danny, is you have a lot that you do and there's a lot that you've done.
Then how did you get started in all this? Like, what was the starting point of you? Coaching and all these things together tied up?
Well, we can take them one at a time. So in terms of speaking, that was out of financial necessity.
I was a professor at the time and my wife and I attended a real estate seminar one weekend, which turned out to be a scam.
And we lost everything. And I could focus on all the negatives that came out of that. But I like to focus on the positives.
My wife is my life mate. I put her through the ringer and she stuck by me.
Second of all, I no longer think money is the most important thing because I realize you can lose it all just like that.
Third, I try not to judge other people anymore because I realize if you don't know everything about a person, you don't really know anything about a person.
Because if I was somebody seeing what I did, I would have said, oh, you deserve that. But again, they didn't know what my intentions were.
Fourth, I became Christian, which I'm not proud of. But the more I read the Bible, I realize I'm not the first screw up to find Jesus.
And fifth, and this is the most important, I didn't want to file bankruptcy. And so my accountant said, well, you have to make this much more money this year.
And so I started speaking on the side and I hit that number on the number. Well, in year two, he gave me a much higher number and I hit that number right on the number.
So in year three, I thought, well, maybe I should set a higher number. And basically, during one of the worst economic downturns in American history,
I was able to build up a speaking business, which far exceeded anything I'd ever earned in education.
So that's what got me into speaking in terms of writing. I've always been a writer.
I was a journalist before I was a teacher and I loved writing. And somebody asked me to put some of my thoughts into a book.
And that became one book. And now many years later, I have 17 books. The last book I wrote, I was really excited about because when I was a middle school teacher,
I was the only teacher at my school, never have a tardy student. And it's because I always started off class by reading a lot of Paul Harvey's story.
Now, I don't know, you're younger than me. Paul Harvey, when I was growing up, he'd be on the radio every day at 12, 15.
He'd say, I'm Paul Harvey with the rest of the story. And he tells you a story and you're trying to figure out who is he talking about or what's the company.
And my students loved it. But a lot of his examples were of people like Sears and Roebuck.
Well, kids today don't know what Sears Roebuck is. And so the last book I wrote, Leadership Begins with Motivation, it's an homage to Paul Harvey.
But my stories are about people like Jeff Bezos and Sarah Blakely and Michael Jordan, people like that.
And then the book I'm writing right now is actually a direct result of the last book, because after I wrote Leadership Begins with Motivation, I read it.
And I was amazed because completely unintentionally, most of my examples were of white male Americans.
And so the book I'm writing right now, most of the examples are females, minorities and international people.
I'm having a ball writing that. So that's how I got into writing in terms of the reading.
I was actually in India touring schools. And at one school, the principal opens up the door and there's five thousand kids.
There's 20 newspapers, five TV stations. And he said, you know, for the next hour, Dr.
Bricell is going to teach us the three secrets to reading better.
Harry, nobody told me I'm speaking and I have no such speech, but I got five thousand people in there and I got media.
And so fortunately, it was in India, so I get to speak slower.
And so I looked at the kids and like today, I am going to teach you the three secrets to reading better.
Who wants to learn the three secrets to reading better?
And the kids are going wild and in my head, Harry, I'm asking myself, what the heck are the three secrets to reading better?
And during that 45 seconds, I created a speech using the exact same structure I teach people now today on how they craft their presentations.
And like I mentioned earlier, the reason I started coaching people was out of financial necessity because of covid.
But I absolutely love coaching entrepreneurs and CEOs and executives on how to craft a presentation that gets their audience to take the next step,
whether that's to purchase their product or to invest in their coaching program or to donate to their cause.
And so that's a very long answer to your short question, but that's my motivations behind my different aspects of of why I do what I do.
That is awesome. Well, I want to go back to your India story. Where were you in India?
I was in Tamil Nadu. I was in Chennai, which I love Chennai.
I actually I got to get back to India right away. India is amazing.
I spoke to a school, an all girls school.
And after I spoke, these two beautiful seniors come up to me. One wants to be an attorney.
The other one wants to be a doctor. I said, well, that's this is in 2018.
I said, that's great. Are you going to go to university here in India or maybe the UK or even the United States?
And they said, oh, we're girls. We can't leave India.
I said, get back in that auditorium. I got up on stage and said, now is your moment, ladies.
You know, India is, you know, within the next five years, India is going to become the largest country on the planet,
which it is now in terms of population. I'm like, you know, you're a very young democracy.
You're only 75 years old. Yet you've already elected a woman prime minister.
America still has not elected a woman president.
Like right now, there are twice as many women in India as there are people in the United States.
There are actually more women in India with a graduate degree than there are people in the United States.
And I told those girls, I'm like, you just made it my mission.
Like the next CEO, the next prime minister and the next really good mom is coming out of this audience.
Don't let anybody ever tell you what you can't do. Everything's possible.
I got me in a teacher mode. I got very excited. But I got to speak throughout Tamil Nadu.
I was in Chennai, Bangalore and Utti were the three major places that I got to speak and spoke to about 20 schools.
Absolutely fell in love with the people. And I can't wait to get back to India.
So Utti were like in the northern side.
Utti is in the forest. It's up in the mountains.
It's absolutely isn't it beautiful. I mean, I spoke at one school, they didn't have an auditorium.
So I was speaking on the balcony with all the students there and there's literally monkeys on the banisters.
And I'm looking at the mountains. I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is just one of the most incredible experiences
of my life. And I just I fell in love with India and I can't wait to get back.
Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show. And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.