In this episode of The One Small Change Podcast, Dr. Richard Kaye shares how transforming his professional life began with a small, intuitive decision that led him down a completely new path. From a thriving chiropractic career to working with entrepreneurs on amplifying their visibility, Dr. Kaye discusses the power of stepping outside comfort zones, listening to inner guidance, and leveraging publicity to accelerate momentum. He dives deep into the mindset shifts and practical strategies behind standing out, embracing discomfort, and building credible influence through association and media presence. Listeners will discover how even the smallest changes can make a remarkable difference in both personal and professional growth.

Guest Bio

Dr. Richard Kaye is a celebrated business growth strategist and former chiropractor who built a highly successful practice in San Diego before pivoting to serve entrepreneurs. Renowned for his expertise in publicity and relational marketing, Dr. Kaye empowers clients to elevate their influence and visibility using proven techniques from his own expansive career. Through consulting, speaking, and collaborative events, he continues to guide professionals toward transformational change.

Chapters:

00:00 One Small Change Podcast Introduction

04:55 Trust Your Inner Guidance

06:30 "Embrace Uncomfortable Growth"

10:22 "Recognizing True Talent Potential"

13:15 Leveraging Information for Credibility

18:53 "Television Foray and Top Talent"

21:28 "Legacy of Launching Success"

23:45 "Engage and Transform Your World"

Quote from the Guest:

"When you step into uncertainty... that's where life changes. That's transformation. None of us are built to play small. We're all on this planet to give our gifts."

Links:

How to leverage any publicity you have, or will have.

http://richardkaye.com/leverage

Welcome to the One Small Change. I'm glad you've decided to spend some

of your time with me on this journey of exploration and

transformation. I'm your host, Yvonne McCoy, and I bring almost

30 years of entrepreneurial experience. And I have a passion

for discovering growth through the power of seemingly small change.

And so I am glad that you are here with me this week. And

our guest, as always, will share a smaller, unexpected or

insignificant decision that. That sparked a remarkable

transformation and growth in their life, either personal or

professional or both. And the person who you are

going to get to know today and spend some time with

is Richard K. Richard, thank you for spending time

with us today and sharing some, I'm

assuming, remarkable things that have happened in your life

so that we as the audience can grow from your experience.

Yeah, well, thank you. You know, we all have decisions to make in life,

Yvonne. Sometimes very small decision changes

the whole trajectory of our lives. And that's the way life's

supposed to be. We step into uncertainty, and that's where growth

occurs. Absolutely, absolutely. So I'm gonna

let you take it away. And every once in a while, I'm gonna interrupt you

and say, stick a pin in this because this is really important.

So tell us about. Tell us about that thing that changed your

trajectory. Well, I

had a very, very successful, thriving practice. I was a

chiropractor in San. I still am. I just don't have any state licenses

anymore. But I had a wonderful practice in San Diego.

I'm going to give you a little background onto how it became that

large. When I moved to San Diego, Yvonne, there were

300 chiropractors in town. Yeah, that's

the exact. Yeah, we're all in crowded fields. And here I was, a new kid

on the block. I didn't know anything. Well, how do you stand

out? You've got to distinguish yourself from

everybody else. Otherwise, you just, whatever you do, ladies and

gentlemen, to everyone else, most of us are invisible.

I said, I gotta get some publicity. So I got myself invited

to be a guest on a morning television talk show in San Diego called Sun

Up San Diego. Turn that into getting invited back

every month for almost a year. Then I got an article in the

San Diego Tribune. Visibility is going up. Then I got

an article in the Los Angeles Times. Visibility is going

up. Elon, you know the statement, it's not what you know,

it's who you know. Yes. You've heard that. I assert there's a

much higher order than that, and that's who knows you.

No matter how good you are. People don't know you. It doesn't matter.

Well, one day I get a phone call from the producer of ABC News

in San Diego. The essence of her question was, who

are you? I'm seeing your name, I'm hearing about you. Well, now

I got a 6:30 news segment on ABC News.

Then I got a similar phone call from the producer of

pbs. Who are you? Well, now I got a PBS segment about me.

My visibility was. Now, up here, ladies and gentlemen, that's what you

want to do. You want to get people to know who you are. So that's

just the background of the change that I made in my life.

One day I'm meditating and

I hear, shut your practice and work with entrepreneurs.

And I kid you not, I looked around. There was nobody there.

Well, the Reader's Digest version, the short version of on is three weeks

later, I shut my practice, shut down. 30 years

of chiropractic. I was in San Diego.

I now live in Taos, New Mexico. I owned 80 acres out here.

About a month or so later came out, and I've been serving

entrepreneurs ever since. Now

was not a decision that I feel I had a choice

in. I was guided. I don't care whether you call it download, chat, whatever it

was, it was a decision that I stepped into a void.

And that's where life changes. So that's one of the

decisions that I made that changed my life forever.

So if. If you were going to

help us to. To use that. Yeah.

I mean, I know one of the things that is doing

kind of the unexpected or doing the uncomfortable. Right. Because

everybody, if it's comfortable, then you're not changing anything. You're just,

you know, with the stream. But

I think there was something else that. That prepared you

for that, and that was that whole awareness of being visible

and standing out in the crowd. So can you talk about that a little bit

more? Yeah. And there's multiple layers to that, Yvonne. One

is how can you, as a viewer, a listener

to this program, use that in your life? We've all gotten

messages, and I don't care what you call it. We have that

little voice that sometimes whispers and sometimes

yells. What if you were to pay attention and say, oh, that

doesn't mean anything. You're walking up the street

and you know you have to make a left or right

to get to where you want to go, but you wind up going in the

other direction. You say, why did I do that? That inner

guidance directed you. You may have just avoided an accident by

going in the other direction, Ladies and

gentlemen, when you play in life, heed those

calm instincts, for lack of a better expression. When

you hear something, pay attention to it.

Watch what happens to your life when you say, I'm just going to

listen and say, nah, that's nonsense. I got

married the same way I met a lady, and it was instantaneous.

And most people say, that's crazy.

Well, we've been married five years, and it's a

magnificent. Better than any other relationship or

marriage. There have been a few before that I've ever had. Pay

attention, get out of your mind, and listen

to your heart and soul. And whether you call

it waking up or whatever, whatever you assign it to,

be aware of what's around you. Well. And

I think one of the things that I say to people all the time is,

and it's taken me a long time to get there, is,

you know, people have tried most of your life to

put you in a box or to certain thing.

And if that's what you keep doing, then you

will never stand out. You will never come to be the person you were meant

to be. It's when you take the road less traveled, you

know, that, that you really start. And, and, and that

is uncomfortable, right? And I say to myself,

I must be making a great change because I've never been this uncomfortable

before. So I, I celebrate that.

And I think the thing is, you know, like, you're, like, you're saying

many times our parents have said, you know, when we were kids, sit down,

be quiet, don't grow. And so the

whole idea of being visible is almost foreign to us. I mean,

I had a boss once. I got an evaluation, and it was an okay

evaluation, but I thought I had worked my butt off. And he

was like, you know, And I was like, okay, then tell me what it is

I have to do to get the higher evaluation. And he

said, I'm not trying to make superstars. I'm just. And I

said, that's not your decision. I get to decide if I'm a

superstar or not. If I want to put the work into it. I just need

to know, you know, what, what, where the bar is,

right? And he was like, huh, I don't,

you know, I don't think I was meant to be mediocre. And, and,

and, and when you listen to yourself, I

mean, it's a very weird thing. I mean, I think all of us got that

wake up call with COVID right? I mean, on Monday

I had a business, and on Friday I did and said,

okay, if I Have to start over again.

You're not really starting over, you're continuing on because you're not starting

at zero. What is it that I really want to do?

Not what is it that I can do easily, but what is it that I

really want to do that made all the difference in the world?

Yes. Yes. You talk about people

putting you in a box, ladies and gentlemen, there is no box.

That parameter is established by people

with saying the same thing, just different words, who want to keep you playing small.

So you're confined to a 9 to 5 job or

whatever it is. And I had one of those. I was an electronics engineer and

I went in and worked weekends and, you know, did that because that's what

I thought. Then someone introduced me to chiropractic and I

went to college, got my doctorate and you know, life changed.

When you step into uncertainty, and you said it so

beautifully, it's uncomfortable. That's where life

changes. That's transformation. None of us

are built to play small. We're all on this planet to give our gifts.

And your gift may be in service to somebody else at

a job, and that's okay, but you're always self employed.

Why? Because you have to perform at your best

even. And I go back to my days as an engineer.

My job from my perspective was to do the best I

could, not so I can get a promotion. You know, those come when you

perform, but that's who you are meant to be.

No one grows by playing small. I love the way you said it, and I

don't remember the exact words, but we are meant to give our gifts on this

planet. It's the only reason for being here. And I think the other thing is,

you know, if I, since I had this mindset, if I look back in

my life, probably all the weirdest things that

happened to me in my life was because I was doing something

differently. Yes. I remember being in Wharton, having

this, this, this class, you know, what do they

call, I can't even think of the word, you know, a project where you had

to like diagnose. And this woman got promoted. She had, she had

mentored all these people all the way up the ladder. They decided to promote

her and in the job they gave her, she did not do

well. And everybody in that class said, fire her except

me. And I said, this woman is a wealth

of information. Find a role that's right for her.

She took me aside and said, you don't intend to work for a big

corporation, do you? Like, it was like,

right, yeah, they've Caught up to me now

realize that human capital is a wonderful thing. Right.

And so I think, you know, and it's funny because my dad was kind of

like that in the sense that, you know, he was. He. My

dad always looked for the best, cheapest solution for

things. And he went to the art museum and they were going to spend, you

know, like $100,000 solving a problem. And my dad said,

that's not. You don't need to do this. You can just fix this for

$10,000 that he went with was

like, ready to kill him. Right. But the art museum hired him

to take care of all their stuff. Sure. Because he

could, you know. So, Richard, if you were, if

you were talking to. Oh, well, you do talk down our breakers. But if you

were talking to entrepreneurs and what would be three

pieces of advice that you could give them that they could put to work, like,

almost immediately? One of them, as we talked about, is step out of your

comfort zone. As a classic saying, if you do what you've always

done, you're going to get what you've always gotten. The question is, is that

working for you in the space that I play now,

Yvonne, it's about publicity. You know, my early experience,

God knows how many decades ago was publicity will

grow your business faster than almost anything else.

Imagine, ladies and gentlemen, what would it be like if you were featured

in a big city newspaper or in a big city magazine.

As a matter of fact, here's an example. It's one of the things we do.

Even if you don't know the magazine, you know the person.

We put clients on the other side of these magazine,

a whole stack of them here. And it's.

You've heard of guilt by association? This is fame by association.

When your name is attached, hey, I'm in a magazine with

Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise or Shania or whoever it is

that adds to your credibility. A couple of weeks ago,

we had a whole bunch of people being filmed at ABC Studios.

Now, let's be really clear. Not everyone reads the magazine.

Not everyone watches the news segment. When you happen to be on it,

it's leveraging all that information.

And ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages, stay tuned,

because later on you're going to get a gift on how to leverage everything

you've got. What does it mean? And you've seen

this over and over and over again. As seen on or. As

seen on ABC or a scene on or, you know, I

was in a. I had a feature article in a magazine with, you

know, Tom Hanks, that adds to your credibility.

And how do you leverage? I'll give you a simple example. You put it

out to all the media. You put it out on your social. You put it

out to the people who are your

prospects and to your current clients.

It raises your credibility. When I was on

pbs, it didn't change a thing about the way I practiced,

but it added to my credibility. Hey, PBS thinks enough of what this

guy does to have a special feature on him. And Ivana,

I'll give you an idea how long ago I was handing patients VHS tapes.

Okay, so it was a while ago, but today he put it

all over social. So, stuff. Step out of your comfort zone and embrace the

unknown. All right, I have a question for you.

There's marketing, there's publicity,

and there is proximity.

Association by proximity. Can you talk about how

those three things are the same, different work together?

Yeah. And I'm going to add one other thing in there, and that's pr. Public

relations. What's public relations? You hire someone

or you send out, make phone calls, yes, even fax,

and you pray to God someone picks up the press release.

Now, if there's an 8.8 earthquake in Russia, you know,

your press release is gone, never to be looked at again. Because there's other

things that matter. Does it work? It's beautiful. It's

worked forever. And it works very powerfully if your stuff

gets picked up. So then there's

marketing. Marketing is point of sale. Hey, you

know, four cans of peanut butter or four jars of peanut butter for the price

of two today, you can measure that. You can measure. Did

sales go up? Advertise. We all know what advertising is. You

see it all over the place. You know, buy this car, this

movie's coming out. Special advertising. You can measure

roi, Return on investment on that, too.

Publicity. You cannot measure the return on investment

because it's long term. No one's going to pick up this magazine

and say, oh, well, for example, we get people interviewed at the NASDAQ

studio and have them featured on the Nasdaq, Jumbotron and

Times Square. No one looks up. Lisa Nichols is one of our

clients and says, oh, Lisa Nichols, I want to buy her stuff. No,

but she's leveraged it profoundly. It's

all over media. All over her media. Now, let's go to the

point of your question about proximity. We do

events. Proximity again, is saying, hey, I'm in

this magazine with Shania or Nicole Kidman,

or here I am on a red carpet with Lisa

Nichols or Tom Hanks. Or

whomever. That's proximity. When we do

live events, we have red carpets. When

we have events, they usually dress to impress. Not dressed for

success, dressed to impress. Because you're going to be

taking photographs with people. They may not know

you, but if you're standing next to. And I'm just using Lisa

as an example to Lisa Nichols or perhaps

Linda Fisk, who runs Leadership Global, very

prominent people. You have

not fame, but you have proximity because you're with

these people. And that's all red carpet events are about. We

have camera crews, we got video, we got stills. So you get

to leverage that publicity. That makes sense, doesn't it, Yvonne?

Yeah. And what I'm hearing you say is

that in order to grow, you need to

have several different lanes. You know,

your marketing, your ads or whatever those

are, are things that you can measure. They're in the here and now. But

you got to put those seeds out there for long term

so that, so that they're working together. So you,

you've got the proximity, you've got the, the, the,

the PR stuff. Then when people, your marketing comes

out, it's going to land even better because they've seen you in these

other places. All right, so here's my next question.

None of us are, I shouldn't say none of us. I'm not going to be

ready for the red carpet next week. I don't think.

Or invited, which is probably the more important thing. If I was invited, I

would get ready. So

how can we start to build that momentum? So we are

going to be ready. We are going to be invited. So

I'm going to take exception with it. You said that you're not ready. We're all

ready. Where do we begin? I

suspect that you said you're not ready because it's uncomfortable

for you, because you don't feel you can hang out with those people. I assert

you can. Virtually all of our clients, there are a few

who are much larger. They're all like you and me.

Solopreneurs started small someplace.

When I had my first foray into television, quite frankly, I didn't know what the

hell I was doing. I just figured out how to get invited to be on

Sunup San Diego, the television show. And

I figured out as I went, no matter where you are,

ladies and gentlemen, a picture next to

whomever raises your profile,

raises your visibility, gets you ready for the stack.

It's constant, never ending improvement.

And I'll invite you to our next event. It's a

red carpet event. I think

it's I don't even remember. Oh, December 2nd and 3rd

in Los Angeles and it's called Top Talent Hollywood.

We did one a couple of months ago and it was going to be a

standalone event. People said, guys, we want another one. It was a one

day event. Now it's two. Because more and more people want to

come. And that's how you build your

influence, your credibility and get the

exposure by being at these events and then you get

invited back and invited back. So there's

no beginning point. It's now. This is, this

is the beginning point. Fantastic.

Richard, you are amazing. And what you talk about is,

is like space exploration to me,

something that I know nothing about. And so I am so glad that

you're here and, and starting to open people's eyes about what's possible

and what they can actually do. And so

I'm going to ask you my surprise question, and that is,

when was the last time you did something new for the first time?

I love, but I'm going to back up before I answer that.

If it's not your gift, it's not your job. I have flown

God knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles. Probably

you don't want me in the cockpit. I wouldn't, you know, it's

dangerous. I'm the passenger. I defer to

the experts who do that. We're the experts in

publicity. We even produce movies for people. We get people on binge

television. We own the Trailblazer Channel there.

If you don't know what to do, turn it over to the

experts. And what have I done recently?

Well, I used to be there was an organization named

CEO Space. This is business. And then we can talk personal.

At the time, it was the largest business growth conference on the planet. We

launched Chicken Soup for the Soul. We launched Lisa Nichols. Actually,

I know Lisa from before she was on Oprah, before she

took the main stages.

The founder died. Bernie Dorman passed away about five years ago.

And shortly after that, I got a phone call from a fellow named David

Fagan. He and I know one another through CEO Space. And we've spoken

on stages together before, you know, on the same platforms.

He called me up and he said, I want to fly you and

Angela, my wife, out to Phoenix. And he said, let's work together

now. Who's David? Many of you have heard of

Guerrilla Marketing. J. Conrad Levinson. David was president

of, I mean CEO of Guerrilla Marketing. They sold

26 million books. And David's really clear, I didn't sell them

as an organization. We did. So he Brings publishing

into our world together. We do the publicity, the publishing

and all that stuff we've spoken about. The

shift was beginning to work with him.

It's been an amazing adventure on

learning new things. We mentor one another, we grow one another,

we amplify one another. That was

another profound change in my life. On a personal level.

I've always owned dogs. My last two were wolves.

I mean literal wolves. The vet said, yeah, 100

wolf here and in, in our neighborhood

we have a neighborhood lady. She posts everything. It's one of those

neighborhoods. And she had a cat up

for adoption. And Angela said, let's take the cat.

I said, I don't know anything about cats. So now we own an amazing

black cat. His name is Merlin and he brings such joy and love into

our life. So let's get personal and

business in there. Change is wonderful. So does Merlin run the

house and. Have you trained very well.

That I think is the difference between cats and dogs. Cats are like, you

know, you'll do it way or we won't do it at all.

Exactly, exactly. And it's fun and

yeah, so, so. Because we have two cats and,

and dogs. So anyway, so you got both.

It's time for the commercial. If you haven't taken the

time to subscribe and to share this, you know, and

engage on social media, please do. Because one of the reasons I

do this is to help to bring people into your life that can

expand your world and, and your quest for growth and

impact. And so I hope you will continue to join me for the one small

change and embark on this, this journey where, you

know, just some small insight can make a big difference in your life

and help you to dive into, you know, an

innovative possibilities and, and make your vision even

bolder. And so Richard, can you give us your last words

of wisdom that we can, you know, take away and, and keep on

our mind? Yeah. And it.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you Want to explore

talkaboutpublicity.com it takes you to my

calendar link Set up a 30 minute phone call. It's not a sales call,

it's an exploration call. And if you

feel that you are, that's not true. We're all ready to grow.

Talkaboutpublicity.com A takeaway, Yvonne,

is remember, we don't see the world as it is. We see it

as we are. We see it through our lens, through

our filters. And you know, when you're in judgment or

love doesn't make a difference. It's our perspective on

how we see the world. I.

Every time I talk to you, my world gets bigger

and the possibilities get bigger. So I definitely want to

thank you for that. I want to thank you for taking the time. And

for everybody else, remember that change is simple,

but it's not always easy. But it is wild. You

know, it requires courage, some resilience, and it requires

a willingness to step outside your comfort zone. Richard said

this, and I truly believe it. If you keep doing what you're doing, you're going

to what you got. So join us again for the

one small change. And, Richard,

like I said, every time I talk to you, my world expands. So thank you

so much. Thank you for the opportunity, Yvonne.

Goodbye, everybody. And until the next time, stay

curious.