The Microphone Went Into The Crowd, And This Is What Came Back

You’ve sat in a room like this one before, arms crossed, waiting to see if anyone would actually say something real. Then someone stands up, hand shaking a little, and the whole room shifts. Near the end of this event, the mic got passed into the crowd, and what came back wasn’t polished testimonials. It was grief, addiction, cancer, and self-doubt, spoken out loud by people who’d spent the weekend deciding they were done carrying it quietly.

What does it take to stand up and say the thing out loud in front of strangers?

Aaron Hubbard, who introduced himself from Seattle as the guy in the bow tie, didn’t open with a business update. He opened by telling the room that his best friend had taken her own life after feeling depressed and made to feel unworthy by the people around her. He turned that loss into a direct challenge to everyone listening: never make another person feel that way, and stop waiting for a tragedy to force you into taking your own life and your own business seriously. As he told the room: “If you’re not living your life like it might end tomorrow, then you’re not taking your business serious”. That’s not a marketing line. It’s grief converted into urgency, and it landed exactly the way honest grief does in a room that wasn’t expecting it.

Why does it often take losing someone to actually take your business seriously?

Aaron’s answer to his own challenge was simple: take your message and your heart and put them out into the world now, not eventually. He wasn’t asking the room to work harder in the generic sense. He was asking them to stop treating their own voice as something they could get to later, because later isn’t guaranteed for anyone, a lesson he’d learned in the worst possible way.

A few different people echoed some version of that same urgency without ever hearing Aaron’s story directly:

• Doug Landers, from Tulsa, described deliberately releasing a stressful situation he’d been carrying instead of waiting for it to resolve on its own, and having a private mastermind invitation show up almost immediately after.
• Hank Klinger, from Chico, described a personal mastermind conversation where David Wood told him plainly that he doubted himself far too often and needed to stop, because the breakthrough he kept searching for had already happened. Hank also shared that he’d struggled with addiction for a decade before getting clean in 2012, crediting the people in this room with a recovery he says wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
• A final speaker, a musician and a stage four cancer survivor, described meeting David Wood and being told he didn’t have to give up his dream, only the specific way he’d assumed it was supposed to arrive.

What changes the moment you stop needing everyone else’s permission to be yourself?

Kim Rust, who’d traveled from the UK, described a very specific fear before ever getting on a plane: that she wasn’t good enough, wasn’t educated enough, didn’t look the part she thought successful people were supposed to look like. She named the people in this community, several by name, as the reason that fear finally loosened its grip on her.

it’s okay to be me and if it’s okay to be me it means it’s okay to be you

That line is worth sitting with longer than the applause it got in the room. Kim wasn’t describing a tactic. She was describing the exact moment self-acceptance stopped being conditional on anyone else’s approval, and she immediately turned it outward, back toward every other person listening to her.

Why does one live conversation undo years of self-doubt?

What ties every one of these shares together isn’t a shared script or a shared product. It’s that each of them describes one specific moment, a conversation, a loss, a callout from a mentor, that did more than months of solo effort ever had. Hank’s version of that moment was blunt and personal, someone finally naming his self-doubt out loud instead of letting him carry it silently. Doug’s was a released intention meeting an unexpected invitation days later. Aaron’s was the hardest kind of moment there is, and he turned it into a challenge instead of letting it stay only grief.

None of that happens on a screen at home, alone, on your own schedule. It happens because a room full of people decided, one at a time, to say the true thing out loud instead of the safe thing. That’s the actual argument for showing up in person, and this segment of the event is the proof of it in real time.

The full session includes every breakthrough shared from the floor, not just the ones above. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

Guy not awesome. How was that? Wow. Are we good?

You hear me? All right. All right. So how many of you have had a breakthrough since the beginning of the event?

All right. Well, now it's time to show and tell. So what we're going to do real quick is have you raise your hand if you want to share your breakthrough. And we'll take just a moment.

And what you're going to do is you're going to do is if you want to share your breakthrough, we're going to bring the mics around. So I want you to raise your hand. And we'll take just a moment and encapsulate it for us so that we can also, in the spirit of good community, move on to the next person. So we have only just a few short moments to be able to do this.

But we want to make sure, guys, the breakthroughs are the biggest thing. And when you have those major realizations, I know what it did for me. I know that it transformed my life. And I want to honor those that know that they feel like they have a new realization and a new understanding of what they are going to do out of here and maybe a completely different perspective on how they look at themselves and their business.

So with that, let's go ahead and raise your hand. First one I saw was right over here in the tie. Stand on up. Everybody give him a round of applause.

What's your name and where are you from? My name is Aaron Hubbard, a.k.a. the Bowtie Guy. All right.

From Seattle, Washington. I want to say thank you to Tracy Walker. If you're not living your life like it might end tomorrow, then you're not taking your business serious because there's something happened in my life a while back. And someone left my life that meant a lot to me.

This person was my best friend and my everything. And she decided to take her life. She decided to take her life because people made her feel depressed. And they made her feel like she wasn't worthy.

I want to challenge everybody in this room to never make anybody feel like this. And I also want to challenge you to take your business serious and don't wait until something like this happens to you to realize that you have to go and take a chance. Go take your message and your heart and put it out on the line and do it now. And don't wait for a tragedy to hit your heart to wake you up inside so that you know that this is what you're here to do because guess what?

This company, this vision, these people, there's a higher power here. And I believe that. And I hope you guys all take this with you from this event. run run as fast as you can do everything you can and do it now do not wait thanks so much all right I'm gonna go over to the other side here real quick first so I see way over there in the corner cream shirt yes stand up what's your name where you're from hey I'm Kim rust and I am from the UK I just first of all want to say thank you so much for Chris Rushlow coming over to me when I went oh my god that's Chris Rushlow and he was like what and I went you don't know me but I know you okay and he came straight over and he was so friendly and the same when I was lucky enough to be at the party the other night I took me about 20 minutes but Chris Jones and Dave would walked in and I kind of stood there and turned around and looked back and then I thought they're gonna think I'm really not a big fan of them I'd best go over and say hello so I just want to give them a massive round of applause for being so approachable I want to say a massive thank you to these guys because like I said to them for me they're my Richard Branson who's been my idol since I was little that I wanted to be this person that could change the world that never took no for an answer but I was not good enough but I didn't look good enough I wasn't educated enough and then I found Sarita or should I say Sarita found me okay some massive round of applause for Sarita thank you so much because all of you and I'm sure there's so many more of you that I'm gonna meet you've taught me my breakthrough this weekend that it's okay to be me and if it's okay to be me it means it's okay to be you round of applause to everyone that is awesome thank you so much I love that I think that it's okay to be me it's okay to be you that is the core of it really when you really get comfortable in your own skin and you just say you know what this is me it must be me for a reason I have these unique things about me and when you can take those and start to turn those into your strengths and not hold back that was my breakthrough so thank you for that and let's go back here in the middle blue shirt let's see if we can get a microphone behind me all right give him a round of applause what's your name and where are you from Doug Landers from Tulsa Oklahoma and my biggest breakthrough it actually came kind of before the event and it's just been manifest through all the experiences I've had here I set the intention of hanging out with my friends and my family and my friends and my friends and my out with a leader in their hotel room before I even got here and then like before Dave's talk the other night I had had some other crap going on that I was worried about and I just I just said I'm gonna forget that I'm gonna release it and let it go and I even I even had like not even thought about that intention I put out there I'd released that and released myself from the stress of like oh is it gonna happen is it not gonna happen and when I did that it was magical because coming back from the dinner break I bumped into Tracy and Dave and got invited to a private mastermind in Dave Woods room and that is the exact intention that I had set and it just manifests perfectly but only when I was able to release the energy of the negativity and the doubt from other things and just allow it into my life absolutely give him a round of applause you know that's the amazing thing we'll come back we'll come back that's the amazing thing guys is you know a lot of you some of you know a lot of you know my story some of you haven't heard all of it yet but you know one of the main things that I was always telling people is exactly that it's about setting the intention right and so I set an intention when I sat on that curb that night when I was in San Diego and I said to myself I want to have my breakthrough I want to have my I want to understand why it is I'm not having the success that I want and I don't care what it is but I've got to know it now I want to know it for the sake of this weekend and I truly believe that because I set that intention it's why as stubborn as I am it took about eight times of that manifesting that eight times from eight different people the fact actually came to pass where it finally hit me so the power of intention is so important so thank you for that give him a round of applause again and we'll go right here all right in the Lucky brand give him around applause Hank Klinger from Chico, California.

So the breakthrough that I had this week, a few days ago, I sat down with David Wood at their Women of Bliss Mastermind. He said some things to me that absolutely I needed to hear. He called me out, and I think it really relates to everybody. And what he said was, you know, he looked at me and he said, you doubt yourself.

You question yourself. Stop. And I think a lot of people can relate to this. He said, you have worth issues.

You're looking for a breakthrough. You're searching for it. You've already had it. You know, the longer you look for the breakthrough, you're always going to see it around the corner.

Everybody that's in this room has already had the breakthrough they need. That's why you're all here. Be the leader that you are. See yourself as the leader because you're already that leader.

And when he said this to me, I could feel the claw come off of my heart. And I had to stand up and share this with all of you because he wasn't just speaking to me. He was telling me what I needed to hear so that I could relay this message to all of you. Because everybody in this room is already the leader that they want to be.

You just need to look in the mirror and see it and believe in yourself because we all believe in you. And I just want to say, thank you to all of you and to David Wood and to Empower Network for helping me. Five years ago, I'd been hooked on drugs for 10 years. March 24th, 2012, I cleaned up.

I'm three and a half years clean right now. And it wouldn't have happened without this company. So if I can change, anybody can. I believe in all of you.

I love in all of you. Thank you so much. We got one last one. Can we get a mic right here real quick?

Yes, right here. Oh, right here on this mic. On six or seven, I believe. There you go.

You're good. You're good. You're good. You can hear me?

Yes. I'm happy to have the microphone in my hand again. You've been getting a lot of time this week. Yes.

First and foremost, I wanted to thank you for now giving me the chance to say this, that I had my breakthrough this weekend. This is my seventh month in employment. I've been working with Power Network and I-PASS and the last event I came was in Vegas and I met Dee Ferangia and I told her what I do. I do music and stuff and she said, I want you to come to my event and perform and I said, okay, you know, and it's just been phenomenal since.

I mean, meeting with her and Justin and being a part of the Women of Bliss, it was just amazing. Hello, all the beautiful ladies. And then I met David Woods. I met David Woods and the things he said and the one thing that he stuck, that stuck in my head that he said was, because I told him I don't want to let go of my dreams to inspire because I am a stage four cancer survivor.

It's been a long road. You know, thank you. I promised myself I wouldn't get teary. And he said to me, you don't have to give it up.

Give up the way you think it's supposed to happen. And I thought, you know, for years, my music career would go whatever way and now I'm here and I got to be an inspiration like I always wanted to be and thank you, everyone, for the love. It's just amazing. So my breakthrough is to let go of the old way I thought it was supposed to happen and embrace this, you know, my business and being a part of Empower Network and I pass.

And everyone has a chance. It's here just I love you all. Thank you, my brothers and sisters, and giving me the opportunity to share my gifts with you and my second chance of being alive. I'm here for a reason.

So you're helping me to live it. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right.

We're good. No more. We're done. We got to go, guys.

We got to roll. We got to roll.