Paul Brunson is a Mentor, Entrepreneur and Television Host. His goal in life is to help you live your best life in love and professionally. He’s the world’s most influential matchmaker, founded and exited three businesses, hosted two television shows and spent nearly a decade working directly for a billionaire. He’s now here to share many of his experiences by mentoring and coaching thousands of people.
Questions
- Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
- What are some things you would recommend to a business owner to build stronger relationships to really come over as being authentic and true in what they are selling?
- As a small business owner, how do you find your mentor? How do you know that this person is someone you can connect with?
- What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
- What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
- What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
- Where can our listeners find your information online?
- What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?
Highlights
- Paul Brunson shared that the last 7 years of his career where he left financing and became a Match Maker. It was really interesting as people would ask him “Are you really a match maker, is there such a thing as a Match Maker?” It was a career that he was passionate about and it allowed him to do so many things, so the biography, in terms of hosting television shows and launching other businesses, he was able to do that as a result of becoming a Match Maker. Most recently he has hosted a few television shows, “Love Town: with Oprah Winfrey” and “Preachers of the L.A” where he did the after show. He stated that he is preparing to launch a new show on ABC Primetime which is his own show where he is Executive Producing, he also launched a Match Making Agency and he also launched several other projects that he is proud of and so he stays really busy. He stated that for his entire life, he joked about doing many things and often times we all say that we hustle and have 3 or 4 jobs but what he most recently discovered over the last year and a half is a book called “The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results” by Gary Keller that really changed his life. If we want to be good at things in life, we can do multiple things and be good but if you want to be great, it requires a singleness of purpose and that is what he is trying, get focused and divest out of all of his projects and just really focus on one.
- Yanique stated that it is important that whatever you are doing, you put 100% of yourself in it. She was reading a book that says, “You can’t effectively do things 100% at the same time,” in other words, if you are watching the television and reading a book, you are following the gist of the movie and you’re reading the book but you’re not doing both activities at 100% because it is just not humanly possible.
- Paul Brunson agreed with the phrase and stated that on top of that there’s a switching cost that not a lot of us realize, so you’re watching the television and at the same time you think you are working and responding to an email, technically you can’t do both at the same time so you’re only doing one but what you’re really doing is you’re going from the television to the email and when you go to the email there’s a switching cost, your mind now has to re calibrate to the email and because it is re calibrating that’s a cost and energy involved and so it re calibrates to the email then you go back to the television and has to re calibrate back to the television so there’s a cost and time allocated to that. It just goes to show that there is really no such thing as multitasking.
- Paul Brunson stated that for business owners to build stronger relationships they have to start with themselves, they have to start with a true examination of who they are. You can’t begin to outline what your mission is, your brand position mission statement is, you can’t come up with your marketing concepts, you can’t do any of that until you are first not only deciding of who you are but also be comfortable with who you are. There are a lot of small business owners attempt to replicate what they see other people in their industry doing and you can’t do that; you have to grasp your uniqueness. Paul Brunson says he always says your uniqueness is where your power is, that’s what differentiates you and you want to embrace that. First, know who you are and the second is to understand that effective marketing is about content marketing and a key component to content marketing is relevant, value added, consistent information so you want to always be making sure that the content you are distributing is not just relevant to you but it ties you with your customers and the experiences that your customers are going through. You want it to be value added and essentially moving them forward towards whatever they’re goal is, so if you’re helping someone get close to their goal, you are a value add to them. Consistence is tricky because if you’re leveraging Social Media, you have to be extraordinarily active and consistent in your content and not just daily content. We’re at a point now where you need multiple pieces of content to be distributed on a daily basis. So to really engage the customers for them to really know authentically who you are, doing some soul searching, you have to know who you are and you have to embrace that and you have to articulate that or convey that through consistent value added content.
- Yanique made reference to a video Paul Brunson posted on his Facebook Page with his mentee about “How do you know who you really are?” Paul stated that the importance of knowing who you are is critical because ultimately if you’re a small business owner or micro business owner, people are not necessarily buying you, they are buying your brand and your brand is never what you say it is, it is what everyone else says it is and so the trick is you have to figure out how do you break through the noise. He stated that he has a memorable brand and the trick to that memorable brand is being unique and a lot of people said, “Paul how can I be unique?” There are a lot of people that look like me or maybe from Jamaica but the bottom line is that every single person on this planet, everyone listening to this show, there is no one that has ever walked this earth that has had the same set of experiences like you’ve had and if you really think about that, it’s powerful because what it shows is that you have a unique perspective on life and so the key is how do you translate that unique perspective to your brand. Part of identifying and being comfortable with all of your uniqueness is in identifying that you truly do love yourself and connecting with yourself. People define self love in many different ways but he always looks at it as if you think about your optimal life in all the different facets of your life, think about your career….what’s the best career you can imagine, how much money are you making? What kind of flexibility do you have? What’s your title? Think about the best romantic relationship you could ever have, think about best spiritual relationship you could ever have, think about all those aspects of life and after you have identified the best of the best, then you ask yourself one simple question. That is simply, “Do I feel like I can reach that? Do I feel like I can get there?” Not to say there won’t be hurdles or challenges along the way or maybe you feel like you can get there but you are 20 years from it, that’s fine but the big question is “Do you feel like you can get there?” If you don’t feel like you can’t get there, if you don’t feel like it’s possible, that means you don’t feel like you can ever become your optimal self and that means you have a problem with self love. Self love is really each aspect of your life, all those categories, business, social, health, romantic and then collectively saying in all of these categories “I feel like I can become my best self” that is self love. High self esteem is just simply saying in each one of those categories “I can get there” so there’s a big difference in self esteem and self love but ultimately that’s what self love is.
- Paul Brunson agreed that in connecting with your mentor, it’s hard to put something on paper and match 2 people together. “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead” by Sheryl Sandberg COO of Facebook wrote this book and in it she wrote something that really moved him was that, “If you have to ask someone to be your mentor, it’s too late” in other words, you can’t someone to be a real mentor to you, it jus t happens. We know that nothing just happens, so you have to put the work in, so what is the work. He stated that he wrote a blog post specifically about this, about how he was able to acquire certain mentors and that he believes that what Sheryl said was absolutely right. He never had to outright ask, the first thing is you have to make yourself mentor material. “Are you mentor material?” That’s the first question, whenever there is a problem; the first place you want to point the finger is inward and ask, “What can I do to change the situation?” Are you mentor material? Are you someone that someone else would want to give advice to? Are you someone that someone else would want to surround themselves with? Are you someone that exhibiting that you are ambitious? Are you mentor material? That is the first step. The second step is to then identify the people that you would love to be mentored by and that in itself takes time because a lot of people will select possible mentors based on awards or accolades that they’ve acquired but that’s not how you select a mentor, you select someone that shares your values and you select someone that you personally witness walks their talk, that’s really what you want to do. It’s not a long distant relationship, this isn’t someone that you’ve just observed on social media but this is someone that’s in your life somehow, somehow connected that you know that they actually walk their talk. The third part is then you add value to that person continuously over a long period of time. Paul then gave us a scenario, as he was mentor material, super ambitious, wanted to learn, the second part was that his mentor was his boss so he had a personal experience with him and was able to see how he was delivering on what he was talking about, he was walking his talk. The third part is that after he stopped working for him in about 2004, he then continued to add value to him even though he stopped working for him. He lives in Turkey and he would visit the United States of America, he would continue to help him, helped to arrange meetings, when he launched a new business in the United States and ask him to sit on the Board and help launch those programs, he wasn’t being compensated, he continued to add value to him over the years and how he found out that he was his mentor, Paul posted on Instagram about 3 years ago a story “2o Habits I Learned Working for Two Billionaires” and the second part of the article he said “And he continues to be a mentor to me to this today.” And he read that post and reposted, he was really proud of it and even had it translated into Turkish, at the end he said that he didn’t realize that Paul Brunson looked at him in that way and thanked him. In other words, at no point did he ask him, when you have a true mentoring relationship, you will just realize at a certain point that that’s your mentor and not only will you realize as your mentee but your mentor will realize that and that’s the most effective mentor relationship.
- Paul shared that he is a reader and he is traveling now and the books that he has with him is a oldy but a goody, “Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing” by Harry Beckwith which is one of the modern marketing books, “The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results” by Gary Keller, a book he read in the last few years that changed his life, he just finished a book call “Contagious: Why Things Catch On” by Jonah Berger which is great for people focusing on their personal brand because it’s about how words spread and ideas spread especially in the day and age of social media. Another book is “Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion” by Gary Vaynerchukthat had a big impact on him. Some of the classics too that have been very helpful is “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu and his favorite is Sun Tzu and Sun Pin who was his grandson. It’s really fascinating because Paul has witnessed how over the years even in business school his teachers would reference Art of War all the time and in actuality, that book is probably one of the most influential books not just on war strategy but business strategy that was ever written. A wild card book that influence business is a book that was written about Abraham Lincoln but what’s fascinating about the study of Abraham Lincoln is that it is a very refreshing read, any of his biographies because what it does is that it illustrates how if you feel like you are too old, his story will help to sway you differently, if you don’t think you’re smart enough, his story will sway you differently, if you don’t feel like you’re connected enough, if you don’t feel like you’re in the right social class, or you came from the right family, his story will help to sway you differently, here is someone who came from meager beginnings with no connections and was one of the oldest elected president at the time he was elected and he rose to greatness and stands as one of the most influential presidents in US history and there is a lot of inspiration that can be pulled from his story.
- Paul Brunson stated that the app that he cannot live without in his business is Instagram as it is allowing him to connect to a degree that he was not able to connect with people before. He stated that over that last 10 days, he has received 2 speaking offers specifically from Instagram. He was able to build a rapport with certain people via Instagram and it’s one of those platforms that when it first came out he didn’t think it was going to be effective for him but it has really turned into something that’s special. He shares the he can’t live without it right now, it is one of the first apps he opens in the morning and one of the last one he closes at night.
- Paul Brunson stated that he is that there is so much that he is excited for but he just started a daily video blog, it doesn’t have a title, it’s a daily video blog that allows him every day to speak to his community about a subject that he believe is important to him and typically he talking about business or relationships and it’s something that he’s really excited about because he has a Primetime television show and so many people come and say “Paul, I want to be on TV, I can’t believe it, this is wonderful.” But when he pushes them and he asks why do you want to be on TV, typically he would get the response that they want to help people, he would say “if you want to help people, do it now, don’t wait/” He stated that he has fallen victim to that as he is hosting a show in the US called “Our World” and it’s a weekly show that covers news impacting African Americans so in particular around business, entertainment and Arts but it’s not on the major networks and he remembers saying, “I love doing this show, I hope it’s picked up on a larger network” and he said to himself, why doesn’t he continue doing it himself because ultimately it’s not about popularity, it’s about the influence. He reiterated that he is most excited about the daily video blog and can’t stop thinking about the different things he’s wants to do with it.
- Paul stated that he has committed to 100 episodes, so every day from Monday to Friday he is committed to that. He wants to show that given all the things that he is doing in his life that he can still drop a quality video blog every day and he can do it, many people should be able to do it and he also want to be able to point back and show what has resulted because of the deployment of it and even on metrics alone and not that number of followers is critical, since he has started doing frequent videos, not only has his audience increased, but more important to him is that it has become more homogenise and with it becoming more homogenise, the fastest growing demographic of his audience is Jamaican, it is the number Jamaica followers has dramatically increased and also Nigeria, they are out pacing the United States and he is planning on sharing all of that at the end of the 100 video to show what has been the result.
- Paul Brunson says listeners can find him on:
- Paul Brunson stated that he has a lot but one that is very simple when you see a Nike sign you think of “Just do it” he thinks of that quote whenever he has an idea and he is thinking if he should or shouldn’t, he always says “Just do it”
New Online Course – Mastering Customer Experience and Increasing Your Revenue – 50% off for all who sign up in September…..A Must Have Course for all Business Owners, Entrepreneurs – https://bit.ly/50OFFMCXIR
Links
- “The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results” by Gary Keller
- “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead” by Sheryl Sandberg
- “2o Habits I Learned Working For Two Billionaires” by Paul C. Brunson
- “Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing” by Harry Beckwith
- “Contagious: Why Things Catch On” by Jonah Berger
- “Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion” by Gary Vaynerchuk
- “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu
- “Abraham Lincoln Autobiography” by Abraham Lincoln
