You Don’t Need The Result Yet To Be Part Of The Story

Eric Kanja stood up on the second morning of Lake Las Vegas holding a microphone and said something most people in that room were thinking but hadn’t said out loud. He was all in, he told the room, but he wasn’t all in. He’d been on the fence for a while, making excuses, right up until he walked through the door the day before and saw a leader he’d only met once, at a completely different event. That was the crack. And what he did with it is the real lesson sitting inside what looked, on the surface, like a standard morning kickoff.

What’s the difference between being in the room and actually being all in?

Jonathan Cronstedt, running the morning session, pulled that distinction out for the whole room to hear. You can be physically present and still not be connected, and the connection is what actually produces a breakthrough. Eric’s fix for his own gap wasn’t a new tactic or a sharper script. It was smaller than that, and more useful. He got a picture of his wife, something to have in front of him while he’s on camera, so that when he’s talking and making videos, in his own words, “my heart comes out.”

Sit with that for a second. Most people treat content as a performance problem, chasing better lighting or a tighter hook in the first few seconds. Eric solved a belief problem instead. He didn’t need to perform being all in. He needed one object in the room that made it impossible to fake being anything else. The lesson travels past video. Whatever you’re avoiding by staying on the fence, the fix is rarely a new skill. It’s usually a physical anchor that forces the real feeling to show up before you ever hit record.

Why does admitting what went wrong build more trust than only talking about what worked?

Later in the same segment, a second attendee, Dave Brio, described hearing Dave Wood connect the dots of the last two years on stage the night before, the wins and the very public stumbles both included. Cronstedt’s response to that is the real teaching moment of the morning. Walking someone through the complete story, he said, equips you to hold an actual conversation with anyone you meet. You get to show them genuine triumphs, and you get to be just as honest about the moments Empower Network openly admits it got wrong. The business isn’t perfect. It’s a process, and treating it as one is what makes the conversation trustworthy instead of rehearsed.

Here’s what most new marketers get backwards. They assume prospects want polish, so they hide the rough parts of their own story and publish only the highlight reel. What actually builds trust runs the opposite direction. Showing the part that didn’t work, the pivot, the mistake, sitting right next to the win, is what makes a story land. A story with no failure in it reads like an ad. A story with failure in it reads like a person, and people trust people, not ads.

Does your story count before you’ve gotten any results?

A third attendee, Peter Vicente, put language to something that ties the whole segment together. He’d spent years chasing the good stuff in life and flinching from the bad, until a shift a couple of years earlier taught him to look at the hard events instead and trace where they actually led. Hearing Dave Wood do that same tracing out loud, on a stage, in front of a thousand people, is what finally made an abstract idea land for him.

we’re all part of the story if you show up you’re part of the story

Read that as a rule, not a nice line. The size of your check has nothing to do with whether your story is real yet. The newest person in the room, the one still working a day job, the one whose last video got barely any views, is already inside the same story as the affiliates standing next to them with rings on their hands. The only requirement is showing up and telling the truth about where you actually are right now.

So here’s the actual assignment, hiding underneath a morning of housekeeping and raffle tickets. Before you publish anything else, write down three things:

• The moment you almost quit, named specifically, not generically.
• The thing you got wrong that you’d normally leave out of the highlight reel.
• The one object or memory, a photo, a person, a promise, that makes your reason impossible to fake on camera.

That’s not content strategy. That’s the foundation content strategy sits on top of, and it’s the difference between a feed full of announcements and a story people actually want to keep following.

The full session goes further than what’s above, including the rest of the morning’s takeaways and the raffle that sent two attendees to dinner with Dave Wood. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

All right! Everybody get a good night's sleep. Everybody get maybe a little bit of breakfast here or there. I hope you guys are ready because we got an action-packed day for you today.

Tom, that's a different hat and vest. How many of those do you travel with? That's outstanding. All right everybody, one, two, three.

Oh man, I know you guys can do better than that. We gave you so much time to sleep in, guys. Come on, it is the crack of 10.30. 10.30.

One, two, three. That's more like it. That is more like it. And we want that energy in here all day today.

So guys, go ahead, take a seat here. I got a couple of things to go over and then we are going to get into a ridiculously action-packed day. So how many of you last night enjoyed your evening with Dave Wood? Yeah, I was back in the green room and Dave is, he's just so fun.

Like, he's one of the funniest people I've ever met. He has a way of literally just staring at you that immediately elicits laughter for me. Like, the situation can be anything and he'll just do that thing with his forehead. Like, I can't even do it because it's like, it's almost like he's blinking at you with his forehead because he's not blinking.

And it's, it's something I've practiced at home but I still, still don't have quite down. So let me go ahead and touch on a couple of things because you with your phone there just reminded me. Guys, recording. This is important.

So our events are privileged proprietary material for those of you that are in the room. Event recording is a no-no. We've created a really cool, fun, animated video. I just want to remind you guys of it.

If a cast member asks you to stop recording, please stop recording because the next person that's going to ask you is going to be me and it's going to be weird. And you guys don't want that. Now obviously if you're taking a still photo or if we're recognizing people on stage, either for a gentleman like Chuck Marshall receiving his ring or commission countdown, in those instances we're a little bit lenient because those are very important moments of recognition and we want those people to have that. And of course if you're going to be putting that footage anywhere it will be properly disclaimed, right?

Yes? Okay. So with that, hopefully we covered the event recording and uh, you know, thank you very much. Not, not picking on you.

You're just, you're just right in front with a really nice phone. That's a good-looking apple. All right. So we got that covered.

What I'd like to do is I'd like to get my mics out with the cast members and, perfect, I would like to hear from two people about their takeaways from last night. Two people. So we're going to start. You've got the mic right there and just go ahead and raise your hand.

I want to hear from two people. Okay, we'll start here. Gentleman in the hat in the middle. So tell us about, what you got last night?

Uh, well, my name is Eric Kanja and I'm traveling as far away from 20 minutes. I live here in Las Vegas. How was the traffic? Yeah, it was rough.

It was really rough. Had to travel past the strip. Anyways, one of the question or one of the takeaways that I got is realizing that I'm all in, but I'm not all in. I've been on the fence.

For those of you, you may not be able to see that he said he's all in. but he's not all in all in but not all in and the reason why i can say that is because when i walked in i saw toby at the front door i actually met him at a no excuse summit and i've been making excuses and so what i done in a result to what you had said in taking action is i got a picture of my wife so when i'm talking and making videos my heart comes out you know thank you so much for sharing that and i'm excited to hear about how it feels for you when you do those videos because i know it's going to make a huge difference and also i love the fact that you're differentiating between being all in here but if you're not all in here the connection's not going to take place and that's what has to happen for breakthroughs to happen so thank you let's go ahead and head over to this side of the room here and um people i haven't uh hey superman hat right there hey how you doing uh dave brio from virginia fredericksburg dave from virginia welcome um uh i just uh yesterday when um dave was up there talking you know and he's explaining the events that have taken place over the past uh two years uh actually got in in power like in april right before to my first event was when they launched and you know i saw what happened with everything and everything going around but the way he explained it and connecting all the dots to put that in my head you know connect the dots of what actually led me here to this point at this point in my life to this event and all the events that have taken place in my life you know i wasn't a real great kid uh but there was a wake-up moment when you know flipped the car and wound up with a broken neck and broken back and got medevaced out you know that kind of straightened me out there and life went on and actually uh started right away in amway but that's been a company we love and respect since 1979 you know been bouncing around and everything but connecting the dots and you know just seeing how that how looking at it and how that uh track of events you know it's just stories for forever for me to write about and to you know instill hope or inspiration in other people awesome thank you very much how many of you gained a little bit of insight into the story and the development of not only dave's vision but this family and company that we call empower network last night the reason that that is so powerful is because it equips you to have a conversation with people that you may meet and people that may be interested in your business it gives you the ability to not only walk them through our triumphs which are numerous we've literally challenged every long-held foundational belief of this industry and generated tremendous results but it also allows you to share the areas that we lovingly and transparently admit kind of blew it that business is not perfect it's a process and that's where one of the things that dave does that is is so endearing and so powerful is dave's willing to be transparent about that that's not something that's normal so it's something we love and appreciate and i'm glad you appreciate hearing about that as well i'd like to take one more from this gentleman right here in the corner who has kept his hand up hold on we're getting you a mic so peter was standing i was at the first event this is the t-shirt hold on hold on peter vicente um spain peter from spain grew up in spain grew up in new jersey been traveling ever since so this is the first t-shirt from the first event i have laundered it a few times since then um i loved dave's talk last night a couple things that really stood out is i have a philosophy that i adopted really only two years ago i was i love the good stuff in life i always had that philosophy that was easy but when things like bad things happen i didn't quite get it okay and a couple years ago i was introduced to this idea to look at those bad things and see where they lead you to the good things and to hear dave like that he took that analysis he looked at those these big huge you know ruined upset things in the company that turned into incredible things like you standing here um it was so great to like come to present time on that like yeah i've been on that journey too so the other the other thing about you know pointing out that um i have this t-shirt is i was at the masters retreat okay and it was an incredible experience never to be repeated i think okay it was just the timing of it right and when the hype about it or the mystery of it was like should i buy the course what am i going to learn like i didn't feel like telling anybody but but now it's like it's kind of easier the one thing i learned because i was asking myself what the heck did i learn because i didn't think i did when we did the testimonials i realized empowered network is a story that's it like it doesn't get more complicated than that i mean that's not small it is a heck of a story and every one of us is part of that story whether we're on the sidelines for a while or get hit by a car or we're in head or have a million dollars we're all part of the story if you show up you're part of the story and then so i just just keep remembering that every blog post everything you do in an event you talk to people you're adding to that story forever so facebook has that cheesy timeline that's totally false we have a real time sorry facebook um it's very small thing it's going to go away soon but we have this timeline within power that can go on forever and we're a part of it and in the last little detail which i couldn't help the irony of it my sponsor and my other sponsor have quit david wood's my sponsor my man thank you very much so what i think's really important that he brought up very eloquently is there is a story here there's a story here that is now over three years old involving hundreds of thousands of people all over the globe but what's exciting is that story is your story it's a story that we're here to facilitate being written one affiliate success at a time that whether you're brand new just starting blogging whether you're a million dollar ring earner with a team all over the globe those are the stories that get woven together to form the tapestry that is empower network that's what makes this business so special so with that thank you for all being here and being a part of the story give yourselves a round of applause and i'm going to head over to my uh my little my little box over here so my team is incredibly thorough and they do not require sleep so what i had them do last night is i had them print off our entire hotel manifest i had them print off our entire ticket holder list matched them up and made sure everything is in there so without further ado let's find out who dave wood is going to be taking some photos with okay now i do want to be clear you are only entitled to one butt grab in the photo only one so use it right and taking a photo with dave wood will be anna pintado there you go anna all right thank you very much bonnie's gonna come right up behind you and make sure we get connected anna so anna let me ask you a question have you already selected an outfit for your photo with dave wood are you really prepared for this moment rock on are you are you thinking you're going to do like the awkward prom pose or like the arm around or bunny ears that good option too excellent well and if you need any help picking some poses we'll make sure that all of these lovely people present you with some ideas so now let's find out who dave and i will be having dinner with this evening drum roll please and our first two guests are are going to be Nathan Buhlman, unbelievable, and Shelly Como, Shelly CMD.

Shelly, I can't spell your last name, but we're gonna go ahead and pull it off of our manifest. So those are my first two guests. Let's find two more. And now, of course, I'm going to put the tickets back in here, to be fair, even though they all fell out.

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, I am not a professional raffleist, but I want to make sure you all have an equal opportunity to enjoy my company over candlelight, to ask me about anything you are in the mood to ask about, and perhaps even take a photo with me, should the moment strike you. And I'm going to need two more guests. So, two guests joining us at dinner tonight. So something to eat dinner this evening.

I have the two tickets. You will be finding out where we will be eating. I promise it will be delicious. I promise it will be engaging.

I promise that we'll include some moments that may get a little touching. It's just something that's so intimate when it involves food. I've got Everett from Team Impact. Do I have an Everett from Team Impact?

Everett, over there. Thank you very much. And then I also have As regulations. Alison King, Alison King, Alison, are you in the room?

Do I have an Alison? Okay, we're gonna go ahead and reach out to Alison in her room, so those are gonna be the people that are gonna be joining us for dinner this evening. Bonnie, I'm gonna hand you these so we can reach out. Hmm?

Yeah. If you're in the room, please meet Bonnie in the back so we can get you the details, but other than that, I'm looking forward to having a meal with you guys tonight. I also look forward to having a meal. I've really been surviving mainly off of granola bars and fruit, so tonight will be a special treat for yours truly.

So how many of you are ready for what we have for you today or how many of you don't even know what I have for you today? You're just excited. Well, let me talk about it. How many of you are excited to hear from Dave Wood again this evening?

Me too, and he's got an entirely different lineup for you tonight. I don't know if it will involve another kung fu trick. That one was an audible. How many of you are excited to hear tonight from one of the world's largest experts on blogging and content marketing, my friend Neil Patel?

I'm excited about that as well. How many of you are in your seats fully engaged, ready to take notes, ready to have fun, and be introduced to some of your top affiliate leaders that are making it happen all over the globe right now? Yeah. I have a powerful lineup for you today that is global, that is impactful.

I know you're not recording me right now. Okay, good. Just checking. I know, it's crazy.

Snapchat, yeah, don't do that either. My brother's in college, and from what I understand, people send weird stuff on Snapchat. I'm not ready for that. Its icon is a ghost.

It freaks me out. So that being said, I've got someone very special to bring up this morning. Woo! I have the pleasure, and actually, it's been kind of cool because our show flow always changes, so I always have the opportunity to introduce different amazing affiliates.

But somehow, in our rotation, I seem to get to introduce this person more often. And selfishly, it's because she is so incredibly easy to introduce because she's just un-freaking-real. I am going to be bringing up, one of our million dollar ring earners, who is also a mom, who is also one of the most powerful personalities that I have ever met in this industry. Her ability to inspire, captivate, and build a team is something that everyone in here needs to internalize.

I want you taking furious notes on what she is going to share, share with you. And to give you a hint about who it is, she really knows how to help others dream. Now, she also has a team. So, if you're following me here, dream team.

They do it every time, it's amazing. So here's what we have for you this morning. We have someone that has created an unbelievable team, and culture. We have someone that has scaled a business while having a life, and having a family.

We have someone that has taken their skill sets and capabilities to being recognized as one of our million dollar ring earners, and she's just getting started. So ladies and gentlemen, get on your feet this morning, because it is my distinct honor and pleasure to bring to the stage this morning, to blow your mind, the always amazing, ever so, powerful, Ms. Tracy Walker.