Focus, Motivation, Happiness

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of interviews. In this episode, we start another interview. This will be a couple of parts again, and we're talking with Gregory Offner. He is a, essentially a motivational kind of speaker, but really focused on helping us focus, helping the audience, his customers focus, finding out how to focus on getting better, getting to something that is essentially we'll call it happiness, as opposed to running away from things that are not so happy or pain points. And he will talk about that. We'll dig into it. And it is something that I think is very useful for us to consider because we often talk about becoming better. And better is like a lot of things. It's sort of up to what you define better as being. Well, yes, there is that career better of being able to do in a technical sense, maybe solve more difficult problems, do them more quickly, cheaply, things of that nature. But in a general sense, how do you become better tomorrow, next week, next year? And that's sort of the sweet spot of what Greg is going to talk about. Incredibly interesting guy. I know you'll see this right away. Great speaker. This is just a really fun interview. It's one of those that's fun. Even going back the second and third time as I'm doing editing and all that kind of stuff, it really is one of those things. I think you're going to get a lot of maybe more than normal life lesson kind of things that are come out of this interview. I think I have set the table well enough for this. So let's get started with our interview with Gregory Offner. All right. So it's first time talking with Greg Offner and want to get sort of dive right into things. Definitely the keys to success are your is your focus and particularly something we talk about a lot that I think comes up, looks like comes up very regularly with you is why is you determining your why? It may seem very simple. It may seem simplistic, but it's huge. I think we've found that in a lot of areas, a lot of people we've talked to have agreed and you being almost that being almost in a sense, your niche, I guess. I'd sort of like to get started with just sort of get to know you. How did you get to where you're at as far as becoming a speaker, presenter and the why of how you got to why? Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here and talk about this because, yeah, for me, the way that I got here and the reason this is important or important to me is by nearly losing the ability to speak full stop. So I have to take you back a couple of years to 2015. At that time in my life, I had a day job like most people do working in the insurance and risk management industry. I had a night job. Now, lots of people have night jobs, but they don't have night jobs like this night job. I was a dueling piano bar performer. For 12 years of my life, I had toured the world at night and on the weekends under the stage name Junior and I'd played at solo piano bars and dueling piano bars. I mean, Vegas, New York, Paris, five continents, many, many countries, many, many, many states. It was what I loved to do. Now, it didn't pay that well. Certainly you could say it paid in terms of experience. I got great experiences, but financially, it wasn't that that rewarding. The day job, on the other hand, was that paid very well. Wasn't really that interested in it, but it paid really well. So you kind of do what you got to do is what I told myself. So 2015, that's my life. In July, I sat down at the piano bar in Philadelphia, like I'd done hundreds of times before. Very unremarkable night. And I was ready to start my shift. But then something remarkable happened. I went to play the chords for the first song. And as I opened my mouth to sing the first words, nothing came out of my mouth. My voice was gone. And over the next couple of weeks, working with medical teams and doctors who specialize in the voice. I would find that my voice could be gone forever. They said that my voice was so badly damaged that my vocal cords were temporarily paralyzed. They went into a state of shock to try to protect themselves, if you will. And if I did nothing within two months, that temporary paralysis would become permanent paralysis. Permanent and irreversible paralysis, meaning I would never speak again. Doctors said that they could attempt a surgical intervention, but that I should prepare for the fact that it might not work. And that even if it did work, I would likely never sing again professionally. So I'm now confronted with the end of the career of the life that I really enjoyed, which is my musical life. The persona of Junior at that point in time was dead. And the very real possibility that how I made my money was also going to change, fundamentally change, change in a way that I couldn't imagine a future state. Because how was I supposed to make a living if I couldn't use my voice? That's how I had made my living for my entire career in sales and marketing, leading and building sales teams internationally. I mean, my voice wasn't just who I was. It was how I supported myself. And so over the next few years, I would go on to have 15 surgical procedures on my vocal cords to completely rebuild my vocal cords and repair them. And in that time, Rob, I just decided if I get the ability to speak, if I can sing again, I'm never going to I'm never going to take that for granted. And I'm not going to go back to doing something I'm not completely passionate about. And that brought me to the work I do now, which is as a keynote speaker and a corporate consultant, I work with organizations and talk about engagement and passion and performance and appreciation. And I bring the experience from my time as a professional entertainer into the business world, because I also sat in those seats. I spent 15 years in the business world and I spent 12 years in the professional entertaining world. When we merge those two together, we have a really interesting conversation about what engagement looks like, how appreciation fuels engagement and how collaboration sets the stage for the performance that organizations are trying to get out of their people right now. That's an incredible start. So before we go on, I know, you know, obviously, sort of flash forward, it sounds like it was a happy ending. Are you able to sing and play now? Are you able to get back to that and enjoy that that first love? Yeah, Rob, spoiler alert, I can talk. Hi. Otherwise, that roboticized voice is excellent. Yeah, man, Siri's really kicking it up a notch here. So I can obviously speak. I've had to make a lot of lifestyle modifications. So my voice is not as strong and resilient as most people as your voice might be, Rob. So, for example, I have to be very aware of the the ambient volume of an environment that I'm in. So I can't spend a whole lot of time in a crowded, busy, loud bar, not safely anyway. Can't really go and scream my head off at, you know, a football game or a hockey game or anything like that. I have to be cognizant of if there's alcohol involved in an evening that dries out your vocal cords. So making sure that I'm over hydrating to compensate. There are a lot of things I have to think about that I didn't have to think about before. I can sing. I can't sing as long as loud, as freely as I used to be able to. But if you were hearing me and you'd never known that I had a vocal cord injury, you'd think, oh, that guy's got a pretty good voice. I mean, I'm not going out for Broadway auditions like I used to, but I can sing to the standpoint of an untrained observer would go, yeah, that's pretty good. It's a pretty good singer. Wow. So this really doves tails nicely into how did you... So, you know, you have this life altering moment basically, and you were happy. I mean, granted, your primary income was not what you love, but you were able to do what you love. And so now you have this change. How did you... how were you sort of reconciling that? Because it did change the piano side of it, that part of what you love. Did you also sort of see that what... is it sort of like you've changed, so you have a different thing that really energizes you now? Well, I wasn't happy. I was at best satisfied. But I existed in this really panicked state of anxiety and discontentment. And I masked a lot of that with alcohol, with a sort of like very aggressive social lifestyle. So I'd go out several nights a week and was the loudest guy in the loudest bars is how I tell people. People ask, well, how did you get into this situation with vocal surgery? I said I was the loudest guy in the loudest bars, and I smoked cigarettes for way too long. I wasn't happy. I had been living a life trying to fit into a box that I thought other people expected me to fit into. And because it's easy to just get caught up in the whirlwind and the velocity of life, once I started down the road of this nine to five professional Greg, it's very easy to just go along and get along, especially when you're making more money every single year. What's the incentive to look at this and go, you know, I could really do with much less money and stability, so I'm going to make a big change. My life existed to make sure I didn't lose what I had. So when I speak to audiences, I talk about this idea, this principle in psychology called approach avoidance. What it really means is that we run towards things we want and away from things we don't want. Simple, right? But our brain is wired such that we're more attuned to notice what we don't want and act on that. So very few of us are actually running towards something compelling. Many of us are actually taking action to avoid things we don't want. So why do you go to work? Because I got to pay bills. Do you want to pay bills? Well, no. But if I don't pay my bills, I won't have a car. I won't have a home. OK, so you're going to work so that you're not homeless, not because by going to work, you get to do something that you're tremendously passionate about, that inspires you, that allows you to create impact in the world. So what that experience really gave me the opportunity to do, Rob, was say, I'm going to stop running from and start running towards. And so now the decisions I make are less fear based. What if I lose all this? What if I almost lost everything? I mean, the only step you could have taken it further was if a doctor said, hey, you got two months to live because it's cancer. I got the opportunity for that type of perspective shift, a death like experience without the death. And I decided I was going to take full advantage of it. And so now the decisions I make are what will bring me closer towards what I want, which is to have, quite frankly, more people taking action the way that I did to say I'm going to stop operating out of this fear based environment and doing things so that I avoid negative consequences and instead structure my life and make decisions so that I move towards what I want. The first step of that, Rob, is identifying what it is we want. My first mentor in the world of piano bars, his name was Mike Marguerite. But, you know, I told you my stage name was Junior. His stage name was the Professor. So my first mentor in the world of the piano bars, the professor told me the first thing you need to understand about this job is identifying who's in your audience. That's the real skill of a piano player is reading the crowd and knowing who's in the audience because the crowd, he said, the crowd will stay engaged as long as they believe you're going to give them what they want. The trick is figuring out what they want. So that's really the first step. The first piece of this puzzle is identifying what it is we want. I'm sure, Rob, you could identify right now things you don't want in life. But I'm not trying to put you on the spot, you know, but how clear are you? How clear are we on the things that we do want? And I mean, really clear, like a great simple example that pops to mind is wanting to be a millionaire. You know, so many people, I'd love to be a millionaire. But an interesting question is what would being a millionaire allow you to do? What's at the end of that sentence? Being a millionaire would allow me to do blank. Maybe it's to buy a yacht. Let's choose that example. Well, now it really you really don't want to be a millionaire. What you want is a yacht. So let's work on getting you that yacht. Maybe you don't have to be a millionaire. Maybe we can just take out a line of credit. Maybe there are other solutions that you can follow or pursue to get what you want. So are we clear on what we want? Through a job, through a partnership, through a relationship. And that will wrap up this episode. Don't worry. We have plenty more to talk to Greg about. It continues to get deeper into the psychology of what makes us happy. How do we pursue happiness versus avoid unhappiness? This whole idea of approach avoidance that he mentioned is something that is going to be sort of a common theme as we go through our conversations with him. As you can see already, he has quite the background, has lived a life that is in itself storybook type of material. So Disney movie or maybe if you're old enough, that movie of the week after school special kind of thing. And even at this point, just to be where we're at with this conversation, it sort of has a happy ending. But we're not done. We're going to continue to talk to Greg and talk about where he's going, what he's done and how he's taken his new lease on life and is turning that around to help other people see where they can do the same. So where he sort of struggled early on, he talked about the things where he was is really living to sort of fit himself in a box that really was defined by other people or what he thought other people expected of him. And now we're going to get into the conversations around him deciding what he wanted to do and realizing what gave him joy and what has turned him into the great guy to talk to that he is today. But for now, I think we'll wrap up the day for you. Let you get back to that and whatever it is you're doing, hopefully moving forward towards your why. But however you do it, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. One more thing before you go. Develop-a-Noor podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. But if you've gotten some value out of this and you'd like to help us, be great if you go out to developernoor.com slash donate and donate whatever feels good for you. If you get a lot of value, a lot. If you don't get a lot of value, even a little would be awesome. In any case, we will thank you and maybe I'll make you feel just a little bit warmer as well. Now you can go back and have yourself a great day.