You're in for a treat with today's guest: Bob Beverley, minister-turned-therapist. He's on a mission to make his 70s his best decade yet, and to let his light shine. We talk about a little bit of everything, from chasing your passion at any age, to putting yourself out there when it's scary, to why you should give less f*cks.
Can't-Miss Moments from This Episode:
This one will have you fired up to get out there and light up the world with your gifts. Listen now!
Bob's bio:
Bob Beverley is creator of The Sharp Club and author of The Daily Sharps. He has been a psychotherapist for over 25 years in the Mid-Hudson Valley of New York. He works knee-deep in the trenches of despair, violence, confusion, hopelessness, and the human struggle for growth and well-being on a daily basis. The wisdom offered in this club has been road-tested in the emotional emergency ward he’s always worked in. He has written several books including Dear Tiger: A Book for Tiger Woods and for Us All, How to Be a Christian and Still Be Sane, The Secret Behind the Secret Law of Attraction (with Kevin Hogan, Dave Lakhani, and Blair Warren), and Emotional Elegance, with a preface by David Allen.
Resources and links mentioned:
Let's collab:
Let's connect:
If you dig the show and want to help bring more episodes to the world, consider buying a coffee for the production team!
You're in for a treat with today's guest: Bob Beverley, minister-turned-therapist. He's on a mission to make his 70s his best decade yet, and to let his light shine. We talk about a little bit of everything, from chasing your passion at any age, to putting yourself out there when it's scary, to why you should give less f*cks.
Can't-Miss Moments from This Episode:
This one will have you fired up to get out there and light up the world with your gifts. Listen now!
Bob's bio:
Bob Beverley is creator of The Sharp Club and author of The Daily Sharps. He has been a psychotherapist for over 25 years in the Mid-Hudson Valley of New York. He works knee-deep in the trenches of despair, violence, confusion, hopelessness, and the human struggle for growth and well-being on a daily basis. The wisdom offered in this club has been road-tested in the emotional emergency ward he’s always worked in. He has written several books including Dear Tiger: A Book for Tiger Woods and for Us All, How to Be a Christian and Still Be Sane, The Secret Behind the Secret Law of Attraction (with Kevin Hogan, Dave Lakhani, and Blair Warren), and Emotional Elegance, with a preface by David Allen.
Resources and links mentioned:
Let's collab:
Let's connect:
If you dig the show and want to help bring more episodes to the world, consider buying a coffee for the production team!
Welcome to Permission to Kick Ass, the show that gives you a virtual seat at the bar for the real conversations that happen between entrepreneurs. I'm interviewing all kinds of business owners, from those just a few years into freelancing to CEOs helming nine figure companies. If you've ever worried that everyone else just seems to get it and you're missing something or messing things up, this show is for you. I'm your host, angie Coley, and let's get to it. Hey, welcome back to Permission to Kick Ass. With me today is my friend, bob Beverly. Say hi, bob.
Bob Beverley:Hello, how are you?
Angie Colee:I'm doing good. We're here. Everybody who is watching the video sees that I'm in a hotel background, so sorry for the echoey stuff, but we're you know. Podcast recording stops for no human right. We got to get this done.
Bob Beverley:Yeah, and look at my space. I'm in my office, but you told me to build a studio with pillows, so you can see the pillow over my left shoulder. I'm not good at building things.
Angie Colee:Handy dandy trick for people. I didn't have a chance to do it today because I was running a little bit behind, but that's how I reduce echoing in spaces like when I'm normally traveling doing my digital nomad thing. Put a couple of chairs behind me with pillows to just kind of help with the amplification. I've got like my little sound cage right here and doing what I can. But hey, podcasting on the road, this is how we do. Love that you're here, it's all good. So tell us a little bit about your business, bob.
Bob Beverley:So I've got a few things on the go. Mainly, I'm a psychotherapist, a down and dirty psychotherapist. I've heard it all. If you happen to be my new client, I say to you I'm sure you're embarrassed and ashamed to be here, because therapy gets a bad rap for being about pathology and really being crazy. When it's all, we're all crazy, it's just to what degree, and therapy is really about sharpening your life. So it's a shame. That's the deal about therapy. But down and dirty means I've heard it all. So if you come to my office and I haven't heard something that's exactly like what you're afraid of, only I've heard 10 times worse I'll give you the first session for free, and nobody's ever got a session for free.
Angie Colee:That's a big, bold promise. Come in my office and see if I haven't already heard it.
Bob Beverley:Absolutely so. Anyway, I've been a psychotherapist for 35 years. I was trained at the best school in the world in my opinion. We had to go to seven therapists a week for four years and as well as academic training. And if you ever go to therapy, the first question to ask the therapist is have they been to therapy? If they haven't, and you're already there, stay for the hour, but don't go back Because it's so unfair that I've said you know if the therapist hasn't sat in the patient's chair, you have no idea how scary it is. So, at any rate, I've been doing it for 35 years.
Bob Beverley:Before that I was a minister. Now, to me, the Christian world right now is so nutty I dare hardly mention I'm a Christian, let alone that I used to be a minister. But it is amazing to be a minister. It's way more interesting than people know. Taught me a lot about.
Bob Beverley:People had amazing stories. One of them I think I told you the first night you and I talked I had these real troubled couple parishioners and they were fighting over a ramshackle house and the woman got her brothers to come beat the guy up. So she came down and asked me to go rescue him because he was bleeding. Apparently. I go in to meet him. He comes at me with a baseball bat. Thankfully he recognized me and then I said you know, bert, sit down, let's talk. While I'm on the couch talking to him, I hear a voice that says this is Sergeant McCord. I'm the man of the Duchess County Sheriff. We have our guns drawn. Come out with your hands up. And I said I'm Reverend Bob Beverly. One day this will make a good story on Angie's podcast. No, I didn't say that. I said I'm Reverend Bob Beverly. They said we don't care who you are. Come out with your hands up, we have our guns drawn. So I go out the back door my hands up and there's a state trooper and a Duchess County Sheriff and Bert had called in. While the woman came to get me at my office, he had called in and said he was being murdered. So they were responding to a murder scene.
Bob Beverley:So anyway, being a minister is much more wild than people know, and the point here is, I guess, that none of us know who we're really dealing with and we have to stereotype people in order to think. But if you get to know people, almost everybody's, fascinating Everybody's life is worth a novel. So anyway, along the way, I started writing books. My first book was called how to Be a Christian and Still Be Sane. I've written 10 other books, all self-published, but I have an editor whose IQ was 158 when she was nine. So my books are really pretty very well edited, they're very well put together. And David Allen of Getting Things Done. He wrote a preface for one of them, called Emotional Elegance.
Bob Beverley:But when I started writing I was so terrified that no one would read it that I started reading the direct marketers. And this is where I'm truly sick. And if anybody's jealous of my accomplishments, here's my sickness. I'll bet you I have more marketing books and copywriting courses than any copywriter in the world, and I hate writing sales copy. My view is my book's good. Here's my three-word sales text Just buy it.
Bob Beverley:So at any rate, I just have spent thousands on like unopened course material.
Bob Beverley:I should start a contest. Can anybody beat me Right? Anyway, what I figured out eventually is I'll stop talking in a second why am I doing all this? And I realized along the way that buying all these courses was like a drug for me. I've never had enough money who has?
Bob Beverley:But I have a bone disease that's cost me a fortune. I've broken like 26 bones, had three open-heart surgeries ruptured. I've ruptured three Achilles tendons. I've never had enough money and I wanted to make money, and what buying a new course meant was there's hope for me. I'm going to get this course and I'm going to make my life better. Now, often I didn't even open the drug, but that's so. I have learned marketing by reading Dan Kennedy, laura Belgre, ng Coley, jeff Walker, on and on and on. So I know how to market myself, but I really have not become a copywriter. So, at any rate, I got basically three things going on marketing, psychotherapy, and if you want me to perform your wedding in Key West, I will. The other thing I would say is I've spoken at conferences. I've actually spoken at Kevin Hogan's boot camp in Vegas a few times, so I'm a fairly good speaker. That's why I'm talking fast, because apparently if you talk fast, people think you're more intelligent and a better speaker. Anyway, that's a bit about me.
Angie Colee:That was quite the intro. I definitely. I wrote down a couple of questions. There was one thing that I wanted to touch on First of all how did I not know about the minister bit? I feel like in all of the talks that we have done because we worked together for a little bit that I should have known about the minister bit, but I find that fascinating. What got you to transition out of ministry into psychotherapy, or was that more of like a long-term evolution?
Bob Beverley:Wasn't a long-term evolution. After seven years I was burned out being a minister. I went to an amazing 10-day conference led by Roy Oswald of the Albin Institute, the best clergy consulting group in the world. At the time the conference was great, he was amazing. But at the end of the conference everybody said if you want to change your life, really change your life, go to therapy.
Bob Beverley:So when I came back to my area I found I think the best therapist in the world and saw him for seven years and after a year I realized this is what I really wanted to do help people at a very deep level. Because unfortunately and for good reason, people view ministers as judgmental, though 46% of the time when they're in mental trouble they go to a minister first. I'm sure that's not the same now, but back then it was. But ministers are viewed as judgmental and it's a shame because a lot of them aren't. So I just realized I really wanted to be a therapist. So I ended up doing a mid-career shift. I didn't lose my faith, nor did I stop preaching, but I ended up with a little a smaller parish for 15 years.
Angie Colee:That's fascinating. And what? So you said mid-career shifts. About what point in your life did you go back to school for psychotherapy?
Bob Beverley:34.
Angie Colee:34? Oh, that's fantastic, I feel. I say that's fantastic because I feel like there are a lot of folks that I talk to in the entrepreneurship space who indulge in what I call. It's too late for me, thinking like I've got too much going on. It's too late. If I really wanted to do this, I should have started this at this age. Look at all of these other people who have something going on that's much better than I could ever build. It's too late for me. Go on, save yourself. And I just I want to give them a fainting couch and I also want to faint on a fainting couch because I'm dramatic like that. But look all around you are people that are changing things.
Angie Colee:I wrote about this in my book. My aunt, chris, went back to school in her 60s to get a master's degree and I actually asked her about that at one point, said what made you decide to go back to school and get your degree in your 60s? That's, I mean, it's incredible accomplishment and I'm curious about it. And she goes I was going to be 60 whether I had a degree or not, so might as well have the degree. And I was like, yes, yes, we need more energy like that in our lives.
Bob Beverley:Yeah, like I'm 69 and 11th, 12th, so I'm going to be 70 on January 5th, 2024. My identical twins going to have the same birthday. Funny, I've never forgotten his birthday, aren't I impressive? At any rate, I am still scared to do things. For example, I'm not too scared to talk to you. I'm not scared at all right now. I was scared setting up my sound studio because I'm so inept at that, like you. But I at least knew I would have company. But, like I have never done, I just started doing podcasts because I was terrified to do it. Secondly, in a couple of weeks I'm doing a webinar at a beautiful spa near me and it's called Shortcuts to Sanity and how to Live a Life of Confidence, peace, Meaning and so on, or Emotional Elegance. But I am scared to do it. And the reason I'm doing it is I want my clients to know that at 70, you can still change things and make life better and do scary things.
Angie Colee:Amen amen.
Bob Beverley:None of my clients think I'm scared. All tell them but they don't project on to me that I'm still scared of things, even though I've done a lot of speaking in my life still scary to do new things. About five years ago I moved into a new office. That was just. I have an office in a church. They offer me for 30 years free space so my fees could be reasonable. They view it as a service to the community. But a bigger room opened up and I decided to go for it because I always had the fantasy of having all my books in one place. So I started building this with the help of people who know how to pound a nail and I was telling my best friend like I don't know why I want to do it, but I want to do it. But you know, is it pointless? I'm 65, five years I'll be 78. Maybe I knew I was going to talk to you one day and I had to up my act.
Angie Colee:But at any rate, my friend and you was coming along.
Bob Beverley:My friend said this amazing quote. He said it doesn't matter why you do it, you have to do it. And I said why? And he said because change is the guardian of hope.
Angie Colee:Ooh, that's fascinating. I like that one Isn't that.
Angie Colee:That's so great. I mean, this reminds me it's all very timely the way these things happen and I'm heading up to my 40th birthday. I look forward to what adventures come for my 70th birthday, when that is on the horizon. And yesterday as part of that, I did the corny 40 lessons that I've learned in 40 years on this planet, type thing, and I posted yesterday a little story about confidence comes first, or confidence doesn't come first, it's courage and commitment, and I told people it's really interesting to me to just kind of observe, especially when somebody says oh my gosh, angie, you're so confident. Oh my gosh, I admire your confidence and I'm like if you were in here and you had to hear the chatter going on in my head. Every time I have to try something new.
Angie Colee:My first podcast was a very similar experience with my friend, kevin Rogers, and everything went wrong. Like my setup wasn't working, we couldn't figure out the audio, we had to try a couple of different things. You and I had that experience trying to get on the Zoom call, like the tech just wasn't working, and that can be a super frustrating experience. But to like be on with somebody that goes okay, I get this, let's bring this energy down. Let's figure out what we can do to put on a good show. Got to hold people in this.
Angie Colee:I posted on LinkedIn, if you wanna find it, and it's a graphic that says confidence doesn't come first, courage and commitment do, and I told people. It's funny to me that people think that they're attracted to my confidence because I don't feel confident most of the time but I do feel committed to the choices that I've made and I do feel courageous in pursuing those things because I think about the mission every time I get scared. The mission that I'm on to help entrepreneurs, to help people step out and be brave and do things that they don't think that they can do, and that matters more to me than staying safe and going. Well, this is my comfort zone and I'm going to stay right here in my box.
Bob Beverley:Yeah, years ago. I don't know who said it, but they said courage is like sitting on a plane. The plane does not get lift off until it starts down the runway. If it just sits at the end, there's no lift off.
Bob Beverley:I remember a long time ago, well say probably 12 years ago, when I started trying to put stuff on the internet, I wrote like three pages of sale copy for a $5,000 seminar. Now I was scared to do it, terrified. Now the moment I hit send, my confidence just went through the roof because I knew I had the view that my seminar was worth 5,000. Now, did anybody buy it? No, with a lead time of three days and a price tag of 5,000. Kevin Hogan, a very famous persuasion marketer, read my sales copy, said it's not bad, but there's not enough in it for making it more. What's about them? And I just in a way couldn't be bothered. But oh well. But I got the confidence as soon as I hit send.
Angie Colee:It sounds like you learned one of those things too. This is important to me too, because I feel like there are a lot of people that self-judge before they put things out there. They're so scared of how it's going to be received. But if I could read between the lines and unpack what you said a little bit, it sounds like you got a lot of learning just from putting it out there. It wasn't just the confidence but like, oh, here's what I could have done differently, here's what I'll change for the next time I try this and that stuff. Exactly like you said that lift off doesn't happen without moving down the runway. Maybe you have to move down the runway a little bit longer sometimes, Maybe you take off right away, but you got to get moving. I love that.
Bob Beverley:And if we enjoy the journey a little more, we're less afraid. The thing that I focus on the most is what gives me courage is I try to live my life for others. I don't mean that I don't count, but in the world I live in I've had amazingly broken clients who I couldn't walk from here to the door behind me in their shoes, and I want to live a life of courage. I live to show the world that we can do better, and if I do better, you'll do better.
Angie Colee:Absolutely, and okay, I want to. I'm looking at my notes here. I want to go back to the webinar that you're doing, because I know a little bit more about this since we've been working together. But I would love to hear about the evolution of putting on this webinar, putting on this conference at this fancy mirror, but which I'm totally going to someday.
Bob Beverley:So the evolution is, I knew I could feel well a year ago no, six months ago. I was thinking I got to let my light shine more, and what happened was I hired a business coach named Austin Church, who I think you've connected with, who's from Knoxville, tennessee, and we talked about how am I going to let my light shine more, and I fantasized about like doing a webinar. I mean a seminar at a beautiful resort, which I have done before, but never one where I invited people to come and record it. So I have a nevergreen thing that can that all your viewers can buy thousands of copies in the night while I'm sleeping, and I promise I'll sleep more peacefully. Well, anyway, austin was at such integrity. After a while he said to me you don't need to let your light shine more, you need a break. And so he said I'm going to cancel our coaching agreement. You don't need me anymore. What you need is I'm going to give you back half your money because we're only halfway through the journey and and you are going to spend that on a sabbatical. Now, I'm only saying that because marketers have the reputation of being sleazy, etc. Well, some are, but there's a whole lot of people like you've met them and I've met them. They have amazing integrity and Austin Church is one of them. Holy cow, can you imagine One way?
Bob Beverley:I had a great sabbatical over the summer, got renewed. I had took five week, thought I'm good at marketing, so I got all my clients to pay for my vacation. Now I give them makeup sessions. But you know they've been with me so long and they know my fees are reasonable that there was a win-win for them. So, anyway, after that I realized I've got the energy to do the webinar. Now I kept putting it off because I'm still scared. But it's fall where I live and I wanted to do something before winter sets in. So I had that looming deadline. I'm going to be 70 in January. I got that looming deadline. That's all I got promised, apparently. So.
Bob Beverley:But I just felt the life that came from energy and, by the way, it isn't just I mean, it is what you said it's commitment, it's courage, but the biggest factor I believe in life is energy. What's the great quote by Emerson? Energy is eternal delight. Oh, I like that one, so like when I've said this in my writing if I'm alone, lord, have mercy on me. If I'm alone and tired, I'm a danger to myself. When I'm with people I'm almost never in trouble. Tiredness is the biggest factor. I believe in mental health, like overwhelmed. You know, overwhelmed and tired, that's what everybody comes into my office. Now they don't know that underneath it there's like borderline personality disorder, narcissism and all the big words that can make me money. But everybody that comes in, especially parents, is just overwhelmed and tired, and so energy is a really huge factor in being an entrepreneur.
Bob Beverley:And our minds, I mean. I can use fancy words. I'm the world's number one expert, not only at buying more marketing than Kevin Rogers has, but I have such a grandiose mind not arrogant but I have on the computer where I'm talking now I'm embarrassed to say it 86,000 emails. Now they're not from friends. I respond personally to everything, but these are blogs that about living with sharpness and so on.
Bob Beverley:And do I have time to read? You know what I do every morning I open my cell phone, go on AOL on my email. I spend 15 minutes deleting blogs. I know I don't have time to read. And then there's, say, 20 great ones left and like, I often don't get to them. And what's going on there? Grandiosity, okay, all the gurus are saying now. They're all saying it. I wish I knew how to turn my phone off. See part of my tech techy stuff. All the gurus are saying distractions, what's killing us? But the thing is we are so in our grandiosity we don't realize we're a victim right now and if we don't change it today, we're not gonna change it tomorrow.
Angie Colee:Yeah, Seth go Now. This is good, aren't you, great marketing?
Bob Beverley:guru.
Angie Colee:Yeah, oh yeah, I took his podcasting course. That's how I have a podcast. I love Seth.
Bob Beverley:Oh well, he keeps his cell phone in his glove compartment or trunk. Hmm, you know Cause he's super smart and sure. Anyway, I think what makes a sane is limits, but you ain't talking to the sanest person. Now I'm lucky. I have an identical twin and in most of the ways that I'm screwed up, he's worse. We will not give him a chance to respond. He probably has 300,000 emails on his computer, but he's a professor, so he's a. He's a world religion expert, james Beverly. I'll put a plug in for him. He's very, very smart. Did I say I was an identical twin? But at any rate, you know he's. He makes me look like I'm just lying on the couch doing nothing.
Angie Colee:Well, this is all fascinating. I want to circle back to looming deadlines because I think that that's super powerful and we often don't give it the credit that it deserves, I think. And I had a mentor once in my early days of copywriting. I took I always took deadlines very seriously. But I remember one of my very early projects. I gave myself kind of an impossible deadline and I'm the one that set it with the client and he was mentoring me through this project and when I delivered everything I had to deliver on this really tight deadline he came back to me and he told me okay, so first of all, congratulations, you did it. You delivered on the deadline. It was a super ambitious, it was a lot of hard work and you did that. Not a lot of people can. Second, the deadlines are arbitrary. We set them, we can move them. So just be aware of that. Moving forward, that like, does it make you look good? No, but can you move it? Yes, will there be a cost to your reputation to resetting the print, the printers when I did print catalog work stuff like that? Yeah, sometimes there's a cost to moving the deadline, but the deadline is what you set it to be. There are some exceptions. You know I used to laugh. I mentioned catalog writing In one of the companies I worked at. It seemed like Christmas was a surprise every year. Oh shit, the holiday catalog's coming up. Have we done anything on that? No, but I'm quite frankly surprised that that is a surprise, that that's coming. It's at the same time every year, but this I don't know. I find it funny how often these things kind of just come up in conversation and seem to be themes in my life.
Angie Colee:The reason that I'm in a hotel was I was at an author's mastermind yesterday in downtown Houston. Shout out to Cindy Childress, editor extraordinaire, help me with the first draft of my book. Very, very smart person if you're ever looking for a ghost writer. And we were talking about the difference between the folks who were still working on a book idea and those of us who were a little bit closer to publication. I actually got my pre-order approval link from Amazon yesterday in the middle of the masterminds. We're recording in this in October, so it's still pre-release for my book. By the time this airs it'll be spring of 2024, so the book will already be out. But it's kind of interesting to know that we're time traveling right now, right, yeah, oh, we're also six months in the future.
Angie Colee:But people there were a couple of folks that are kind of in early stages of drafting their book that said, oh my gosh, how did you get to this point? Like they were astonished by the publication process. I totally get it, having gone through it. It's overwhelming. There's a lot of steps, there's a lot of places to drop off and get discouraged, especially when it comes to editing. And I said I don't know.
Angie Colee:Earlier this year I had a personal issue that had me kind of frustrated at life, and the way that I deal with frustration has always been action. And so and I know that if I decide to do something, kind of in between my ears, I will break promises to myself. But if I make promises out loud in front of other people, because I see myself as a woman of her word, I will not break that promise. I will move heaven and earth to make it happen. And that's what happened.
Angie Colee:And so I was in a moment of frustration.
Angie Colee:I took thee to LinkedIn and I wrote my 40th birthday is coming up and I'm releasing this fucking book.
Angie Colee:I gave myself six months to get it done, after working on it for four years and now, five years after the fact it's coming out, it's actually a thing.
Angie Colee:So all of that to say I know that that was a bit of a ramble, but like give yourself deadlines and give yourself people that will hold you accountable to the deadlines and ask you when is this happening, how are you doing, what's the holdup? And I support you. I think that's been the biggest surprise about speaking out loud about the thing that I'm scared of, because I'm terrified to put out a book. Anybody who's ever written a book that tells you that they're not scared to put out a book. I don't know what the hell has happened in there, but most of us are scared of that because that's a lot of work, that's a lot of heart and soul on that page that you're seeing, even if it's the driest academic book, people are scared of judgment when they lay their work out there for the world to see and judge. I don't know where I was going with that thought, but yeah, put it out there.
Bob Beverley:Well, you said a couple of things. One is our integrity matters, our word matters. Keep your word. Long ago I read a Harvard study. If I say in my head I've got to pre-order your book, it's like clear to my ceiling here If I say it. But if I just say it in my head with no talk, it's clear to the ceiling. If I say it out loud to myself, it's clear to the roof. If I say it to you, it's clear to the moon. In other words, cognitively, that's how things get through to us. But you also said every now and then we have to change our deadlines.
Bob Beverley:Reminds me of the most boring class I ever had with my best teacher in therapy school. He spent two two hour classes on what's called assimilation and accommodation, which is it doesn't always have to be ABCD, it can be DCAB and all the variations thereof. Now I found it really boring and this guy was brilliant. But those two classes I wish I had skipped. But I can tell you this it's the single most classes that I think about in my career Because people like me at times we get so rigid as if you know the same man with a gun is going to shoot us, then we don't realize. You know, I could go to bed now, or I can just get one thing done, I don't have to do 12. And it's so hard to be flexible. But what you've discovered is and this is why it worked for you the key is you keep moving.
Angie Colee:Yes.
Bob Beverley:Like I think if there's a devil, he gets us when we're sitting in a chair doing nothing or lying in a bed doing nothing. Like that's when I'm susceptible to thinking I'm a useless piece of you know what?
Angie Colee:Oh, yes, absolutely. I agree with that 100%, and I've heard a lot of chatter recently. Well, everybody knows that a lot of industries are up in arms over AI and you know it's coming for our jobs and stuff like that. And I disagree, first of all because I saw the garbage that AI churned out in terms of writing when it was first released and now that it's being fed by everybody, not just super smart scientists, I don't have high hopes for it getting smarter soon. But we'll see. I don't know, time will tell, maybe we'll be proven wrong. But around this is kind of the conversation of who gets left behind in jobs like that. What traits are most important to entrepreneurship, to employment, to the world at large? And flexibility you mentioned is one of those things. Adaptability is the other one. I think adaptability is going to become even more important being able to roll with the punches, being able to pivot we all hate that word since the pandemic, but pivot when things don't go according to plan. That just happened to me. I have it. I've talked about it once kind of publicly, but this is it just happened.
Angie Colee:I had been working for the last two months on that book through a platform called Draft to Digital and that came highly recommended by one of my author friends who said it was a great experience. And it was a great experience when I was working on the e-book when I got my print proof of the first paperback. That was when we ran into our first issue. So I reached out to customer service and said, hey, like half of the pages are blurry and double printed, how do we fix this? And I sent them a dozen pictures of me showing them exact instances where it was like clear prints on top, when in the blurriness, clear print, like it was just arbitrary and random. How often it was printing blurry. And I got the most weirdly condescending explaining that it was like thin paper and bleed through and they had to manage costs and I had to decide what I could live with. Oh, my gosh and I'm not even exaggerating, those were word for word. You have to decide what you can live with and I was like what I can't live with is, after five years of working on making this book the best it can be and agonizing over which publisher I was going to choose, my publisher going too bad, that's the way it is, we're not going to do anything about it. Decide what you can live with. No, because if I'm charging people $25 for a print book to have in their hot little hands, I don't want them distracted by blurriness, any more than I was distracted by the blurriness when I went through that proof. And so I told them I really don't find this acceptable. And I said that exact same thing. I don't want to charge people $25 for a blurry book. That's not what I'm about. I'm willing to pay for a higher paper quality, and they were basically like well, we don't do that, take your business elsewhere. And so that's why I mentioned earlier I have an Amazon pre-order link now, because when invited to take my business elsewhere, I usually do so.
Angie Colee:I polled everything at two months of work off of one publisher and moved it all over to Amazon in like 48 hours, because when I'm angry I can move mountains. I was a little bit angry at that one. But all of that to say flexibility, adaptability that's one of those critical points. I was talking about that with the author mastermind yesterday. That's one of 1,000 points along the book publishing journey where you can quit, because I put two months of effort into this platform and I don't know why. Is this a sign that I'm meant to give up and this book shouldn't be out in the universe. No, it's just somebody not using their. They didn't put their thinking cap on before entering that customer service email. That's what I'll say.
Bob Beverley:Yeah, you know, like my two businesses, like being a minister and being a psychotherapist hardly anybody views it as a business, but you got to make money. So because of that and because of my writing, I read all these marketing books. I mean, I did read a lot of marketing books and I did go to a lot of great masterminds. I met Kevin Rodgers I told you that at Brian Kurtz's mastermind, like five or six years ago. But at any rate, I say to a lot of clients am I the only one that has read marketing books? Like most businesses just seem atrocious to me in how they deal with customers. And I have the line if they just walked into Burns and Noble and read the titles of the books, they'd be 40% better, you know. And the other thing that what the story's really about is I don't care what happens, ai, gb, blah, blah, blah. What everybody wants is to be taken seriously and to know they matter.
Bob Beverley:Like I have a client who has terrible anxiety. She was really let down by a prior therapist who told her after 10 years of therapy I just think you don't wanna get better and said I have no more bag of tricks for you, really wounded her. So she came to see me and now I'm I'm fairly confident as a therapist, but it's a scary job. But I told her one of the things I do is anytime a day you can call me. If you're gonna have a panic attack, call me at one in the morning. And that just calmed her down because she knew she had someone to call and she has called me and I'm really proud. Like I've had in the last couple of years, I've had teenagers call me in the middle of the night. You know, can you imagine what it takes to get a teenager to call you in the middle of the night? No, so I've. You know they've called me when they wanted to end their life. So it's like my personal. People know I, as they say in maybe the Bronx, they know I give a fuck. So because I do people, you know they wanna talk to me and you're the same Like I was scared.
Bob Beverley:Well, I wasn't that scared, but I can't remember how I heard about you. But I loved your permission to kick ass and I really loved your. You know what I read about you. And then, when I called you, I was scared because I thought, oh, my God, she worked for Jeff Walker. She must have really nice t-shirts, and isn't he known for wearing t-shirts or something All right. So, anyway, I thought your t-shirts are better than my t-shirts, and then I thought you would be aggressive, and I didn't think about it, it was just my fear.
Bob Beverley:You're gonna be condescending, aggressive, just like a type one male. You know how they can. And what did I find? No, what you mean by permission to kick ass is largely kick your own ass and get your light out there. Meanwhile, people are seeing if they're on the first time with you here. You're funny, you're human. You're not a type, a arrogant bitch or bastard or whatever word we would use. Right?
Bob Beverley:So touch is just so beautiful, you know, and like I know you well enough to know it's real. Some people are real for an hour and then you know they don't really care. Yeah, that's unfortunate, that will never be replaced, you know. That's why I mean, I love doing the Zoom call now, but you know, I love it when I love it more if I do therapy that people are in my office and I can smell their perfume and they can smell my cologne and see my chest hair.
Angie Colee:Now, you want to like, why would?
Bob Beverley:you wear a shirt that has chest hair on it. Well, it was deliberate because when I was six years old, Timmy Goodall, who was my play partner friend he was like a kid my age he made fun of my early chest hair. So I was ashamed of my chest hair and then through the years, I realized, you know, shame is really powerful and I have worked so hard to like, let my light shine that I've even got to where I'm with a famous type A uptight person and I got chest hair showing, and I bet you the world won't cave in. No, by the way, I did want to say, like I know that the biggest thing for entrepreneurs is fear, and I wanted to mention one book that people might not have heard of.
Bob Beverley:I know everybody's heard of Steven Pressfield, the War of Art. Well, don't tell Steven. But I think there's a book even better that he referred to. It's by Nick Murray and it's called the Game of Numbers. Now Nick Murray is probably the top financial investment coach in the world. He's an older man now. The book sells for 45 bucks. I've probably made him a yacht like recommending it so much.
Bob Beverley:But unlike added to Steven Pressfield, he goes into more. How do you get over fear?
Bob Beverley:It's just a magnificent book. I'm not into the stock market. It's all about selling, cold call selling to people. And how do you do it when you're scared? Okay, yeah, and it's just a magnificent book. And the thing about fear is it's so powerful and I think beneath it is something that's not talked about more Now. Shame is talked about a lot because of Brene Brown, but I think the deepest thing that happens to us is despair, when we just give up. That is the ultimate fear, and you know there are some things we have to give up. I got a bone disease. My career as a mixed martial artist would probably not go well at 70 years of age. Okay, but largely, I think despair is what just gets us, stops us, cold, and it speaks with certainty and I think that's there's not a lot about despair, because it won't sell books.
Angie Colee:No, I think this is a great thing and this seems like the perfect place to wrap up on that. I think we're both talking about owning who we are, accepting our limitations but still continuing to push, staying connected with people instead of staying in your head and finding ways to hold yourself accountable and move into action, versus staying where you are and potentially falling into that despair trap. So that sounds like something. I'm on the right track there.
Bob Beverley:Oh, absolutely.
Angie Colee:Do the scary things. You can do the hard things. That's what I love telling people you can do the hard things, you can survive more than you think you can do, more than you believe yourself capable of doing, and you've got love and support, even when it feels like you're totally alone. So thank you so much for being on the show. I think this is an incredible episode. It was worth the tech troubles it took to get us on this call to have this conversation. So I'm going to say thank you for showing up, bob, and tell us a little bit more about your business. Where can we find you online? Where can we learn more about maybe this event, maybe your practice?
Bob Beverley:Tell us, okay. So my website is called thesharpclubcom and it's, I believe, psychotherapies, about living a sharp life. So thesharpclubcom. The event coming up is in Rineback, new York, dutchess County, new York, two hours north of the city, but it's November 12th. But if you, you can call me at 845-417-5486, 845-417-5486. Let me know you want. In my email you can see how old I am. Here is bbever1008 at aolcom. Awesome, what an, what an Osbridge or dinosaur I am.
Bob Beverley:I guess I know that all your listeners must love you. So, on behalf of you, thank you for having me on. Yes, my pleasure. I want them to know. You know, if I I went. I lived in Scotland for a year. I went to the University of Edinburgh studying philosophy. I was so lonely you could have taken the wallpaper off my bedroom wall with loneliness dripping down it. At any rate, I have such a soft spot for hurting lonely people. Your people can call me and just they've got my phone number. They call and say you know I need help and I'll help them. All they got to do is say code word Angie, okay.
Angie Colee:What an incredibly generous offer. Thank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate you.
Bob Beverley:Well, you're, you're delightful.
Angie Colee:That's all for now. If you want to keep that kick ass energy high, please take a minute to share this episode with someone that might need a high octane dose of you can do it. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the permission to kick ass podcast on Apple podcast, spotify and wherever you stream your podcast. I'm your host, angie Coley, and I'm here rooting for you. Thanks for listening and let's go kick some ass.