In the 62nd episode of "The High Profit Event Show," hosted by Rudy Rodriguez, the spotlight is on Paul Blanchard, the founder of Whole Body Mindset. He has spent the better part of the last two decades studying, researching, practicing and coaching over 10,000 hours with thousands of clients in all aspects of the human experience. Everything from affective neurology, psychological archetypes, quantum mechanics, love & relationship dynamics, and even entrepreneurship, leadership, and strategic business practices.

The episode unfolds in a series of insightful discussions, shedding light on various facets of event planning and management. Paul Blanchard shares his rich experiences, focusing on the delicate balance between order and chaos in live events. This balance, as he describes, is crucial for creating events that are not only successful but also leave a lasting impact.

The conversation then shifts towards the significance of mindset in both personal and professional realms. Paul stresses the importance of self-awareness and personal development, particularly in leading and managing events. 

Moreover, Paul delves into the impact and engagement aspects of events. He emphasizes how the internal state and intentions of an event leader can influence the overall success and the depth of connection an event can create with its audience. This part of the discussion moves beyond the usual logistics and planning, exploring how events can be a reflection of the leader’s personal journey and philosophy.

Overall, Episode 62 combines practical advice with philosophical insights. The episode is a must-listen for those looking to deepen their understanding of event leadership and personal growth. 

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Welcome to today's episode. We have a great guest with us, Mr. Paul Blanchard. Welcome, sir.

Thank you. Good to be here, Rudy.

Paul Blanchard, you're just a gentle, powerful giant, man. I know the audience is just meeting you now for the first time, but I had the opportunity to meet you serendipitously on the side of a road, on our way to Burning Man. There was a truck stop, a flat tire, not knowing how we were going to get where we're going to go. It's funny how fate would bring us together that way and how we've connected and become so close over such a short period of time. You are a powerful human being. I mean, your background is remarkable from having worked with Jack Welsh, known as the most successful CEO of all time in America. You had the opportunity to work with him for four years as the Director of Management Institute. You led several events as part of that role. Then you went on to work with the Oghma and Dino Leadership Institute after that. You were the president there for 10 years. Some people may know that now as the Habit Finders. Outside of that, for the last several years, you've coached thousands of entrepreneurs. You've had over 10,000 hours of coaching experience with entrepreneurs and several of them running their own businesses. Now you are running your first event in your new business or, it's not a new business, but for your Whole Body Mindset business.

This is your first event with the Whole Mind Body Mindset business. So you're in the thick of it, man, when it comes to events and entrepreneurs and just knowing what is holding people back from having success with their live events. So super excited to hear what you have to share with us today.

Thank you. It's exciting to be here. The parallels between the external events that we all get ourselves into and wonder why we keep opting into doing them is unbelievably similar to the very complex audience and events that are occurring inside of us as well. So I love getting to dabble and play and explore and guide people through both the external events and the complexities of the multifaceted audience of our internal events as well.

You are a multi-dimensional being and I know we can take this conversation so many levels and I'm curious to hear from you, the founder of Whole Body Mindset, share with us what you feel. You going through it yourself, what is the golden nugget that if our listeners only had the next two minutes, what is the thing that you feel that they need to hear that you think makes the biggest difference for them?

That's a great question. I'll tell you the first place that my mind immediately jumped to when you started to tee that up. That was a place that I think is important to go in constructing, building, pursuing anything, whether an event or a new habit or whatever it is. That is, do your best to let go of the need to do it right. I don't just mean that from an analytical standpoint in terms of, oh yeah, of course, loosen the grip on the golf club kind of thing. Don't get into analysis paralysis. No, I mean embrace the chaos of it all.

Nothing great has ever been created, whether astrophysics to the event you did last year, without equal parts chaos and order. I see a lot of people trying to build their event purely in order and then almost trying to manufacture some synthetic chaos for growth and disruption rather than just allowing the organic chaos to dance with just enough structure to keep it from burning it all to the ground. If you can find that balance, so many of the challenges we have in building events, whether it's finding the audience, drawing them in and finding them in terms of productivity, getting them to actually show up, the engagement during the event, what happens afterwards. If you can find the tip of the scales of having just enough structure to be able to dance with the chaos without it burning the whole building down, that's where the magic occurs in terms of people finding you for your event, regardless of how skilled you were in the marketing of it and in the other tactics. It's not that we're getting to a place where we disregard those facilities and those things, but where we're sitting there going, oh, my gosh, we're only X number of days out and we're not on track to meet our threshold for a tent. Then all of a sudden tons of people start showing up or certain introductions are made that open yourself up to new networks. That's the dance of order and chaos opening those doors. There's so many of us that feel like order is what makes that happen. If you want an event that makes impact, be careful about getting really married to making things happen, because if we build an event, create an event, execute an event with that kind of force versus the flow that we have all experienced until that moment that we're in flow and we kind of snapped ourselves out of it and then got back into it.

That's the dance we're talking about. It's a scary dance floor to walk onto and kind of get into that space with because it is our natural tendency to avert or to grasp onto order, predictability. Again, it has its place, but it is there to facilitate the chaos, not to suppress it.

Just enough order to keep it from burning down. Giving room for the chaos. I get that. That's kind of hard to hear, as someone who's leading an event, I want things to go a certain way, but allowing them to not, to have a space to go the way they need to go. How do you feel that that, and you mentioned it, when you do it this way, it helps improve people who show up for your event? People get engaged, people continue. Maybe you can speak to those points and how you feel that it'll help an event leader in having a profitable and impactful event.

It can be really tricky because we're taught from a very early age to operate in dualism. There is a right, there is a wrong, there is a good, there is a bad. Our nervous system gets conditioned for that. So there might be some people who walk away if this is the only part of the conversation they saw going, oh, he's right. We're in chaos or, oh, he's wrong. Chaos is bad or whatever chaos is to them. I use that as a symbolic placeholder. Everyone I think has a slightly different term for that. But what we're looking at is a yes.

So if you are the event coordinator who has all your ducks in a row, everything needs to be in the right order, the right place. I remember going to an event once and I walked in and I got a peek at what she had as her event script and it had Paul arriving between this time and this time. Be sure that this person goes out to greet him at his car and offers assistance for X, Y and Z, has a bottle of water in hand, da da da da da, leads him into this area of the event. It was like a movie script. It was amazing. Reading what I had just experienced and what was written down here on the page was like, wow, and when I got a chance to debrief with this person, who I eventually hired as being able to help me take my events to to the next level in different organizations that I've worked in or led or whatever it was, I found out that she does that so that she can check that box and just know that as many details as I would have wanted to be responsible for, I've been a good steward. So now I can trust that whatever needs to happen, I don't need to be attached to the script. It is there as a safety net that we know what we want to have happen at any given time.

But when that chaos shows up, we can roll with it because we know we can come right back to the script. When chaos has done the magic that it does, when it is properly facilitated, not controlled, I think that's the difference that you're going to want to play with. I wish I could tell you there is a way to do it without experimentation, but there's not. What's nice about that, at least I think you and I are in alignment in this, that if we totally zoom out, that's what everything is. It's what it was supposed to be.

If we can use that as a permission to then go back into this game that we call life, this perceived reality, this matrix, whatever the simulation, whatever you want to call it, and remember, it's a game, then we can play it like a game. We can prepare our events like they're a game. We want to play games. If you've ever played board games or video games or whatever, you want to play them with people who are into it, that care about it, but not that take it too seriously. Mario dies again and that remote is flying across and you have to watch out for it. But you also don't want to play with the person who's blasé and apathetic. So just because we're saying treat it like a game doesn't mean we treat it like we don't care. We care, we get into it, but we're very aware of the attachments we're making so that we can unplug them when chaos shows up to create an impact we could have never manufactured ourselves.

So that's why I think the dance, the flow that we're looking for is important. If you feel resistance to, no, Paul, it needs to be this, then all I would just ask is that's a great indicator. You want to explore that just as much if you feel a reckless abandon of his right. Let's do that. Let's get really curious about why we're so gung ho as well, because it is in those parameters that we can find some of the attachments we didn't realize we had. It's where we can find some of the areas that we could loosen our grip on and some of the areas we should really challenge ourselves to tighten down on and everything in between. I think one of the greatest kind of radars for that is any time you feel a a proof energy, if you feel you need to prove something about the way you do an event, even if you don't actually do it and say it or you're on social media and you see someone saying something about an event or you're listening to one of these podcasts and you can feel that prove energy, that tinge of like that's not correct, that's not safe or that's not ok.

Consider it, just consider it. That's something we're losing as a civilization, at least in western culture, we have the tendency to believe that the way we think is the way the whole world thinks, because that's kind of how we were raised. This is the whole world. We're the savior of the world over here. But speaking for western philosophy, western civilization, just giving ourselves permission to consider. One of the toughest things about considering something is not needing to decide whether it's right or wrong. Finding value and appreciation in something and being able to differentiate the non-dual yes and that doesn't mean I agree with it.

Can you allow that to be here, whether you agree or not, without it infiltrating and infesting, being able to consider something? Because if you'll do that kind of work, because this is work, and some of us are just here for the X's and O's of an event, if you're just here for the X's and O's of an event, you're going to attract people that just want X's and O's and they're going to want the minimal amount of practical, just get to the point kind of stuff from you. You're going to miss the reason we wanted to have an impactful event that lasted beyond the end of the event in the first place.

So if any of you are sitting there going, wow, this sounds like a lot. Welcome to the show. It's a lot. Doesn't mean you got to figure it all out just by opting to get on the bus. You get to have amazing experiences. Not only that, you get to be someone who wants to do deep work and facilitate it for other people, whether it's a networking meeting or a mastermind or a gratitude dinner or a huge enterprise of thousands of people going through a curated experience that's unbelievable to imagine. That people were actually able to create that. If we can't get in here and do that with the audience of ourselves, be able to hold space for the chaos and the order inside of us, well then what kind of an event are we really trying to create in terms of its heartbeat, in terms of its DNA, regardless of the mechanism of its context, of its subject matter? Does that make sense?

There's a lot. That's like you said. It's getting on the bus. What I'm hearing is there's so much inner game when it comes to events. So many of these external problems, like getting people to your event, getting them to engage, getting them to go beyond the event really starts with ourselves and tuning into what's going on deep inside that is causing us to have the results that we're getting. One of my takeaways, you said is, hey, if we're just approaching our event with X's and O's, what's the checklist? How many people do we have come? How many people are confirmed to come? What are we going to sell? This is very mechanical that way internally, then you're going to attract people who are just going to come for mechanical reasons and they're not going to be there. The heart's not going to be there. They're not going to be fully engaged. They either don't move forward with you or even if they do, they're not going to be the people that you want to hang out with or be with. But if you bring your full self, your spirit, your heart, your desire for impact, then you're going to naturally attract those people to you and to the event.

Well, let's clarify that in the sense that we're talking about an audience that may be watching this podcast, that that impact is a significant part of their vocabulary. I think that's an important qualifier. Not that if impact isn't a significant part of your vocabulary, that that makes you less than an event leader or anything like that. No, we're just talking. The context of this conversation is specifically for the person who some part of them were drawn to leading events, building events, filling events for impact, whether it's impact in good, healthy dental practices or impact in soul moving energy, kind of spirituality or anything in between. Wanting the depth of impact is where this kind of stuff plays in, because I'm not saying you can't pull off a great event with X's and O's. I don't believe that I have the authority to say that.

I just mean, if you speak the language of depth and impact and soul driven life, even if it is in a industry that is traditionally X's and O's, this is what you're going to consider, because I see way too many event leaders sitting there and using their perspective audience in proxy for the depth of exploration. So they're looking for the deep stuff in their audience and they're not doing it in themselves or they're bifurcating. They're segmenting those two things. Oh, yeah, I talk about that with my coach or with my therapist or whatever. But when I'm at work, when I'm working with my team for the event, it's all about them. Marry those two places and magic happens. If you don't have some event coordinating meetings that don't feel like some therapy sessions, you're missing some magic in the impact that could be created and what you're going to draw in from the vulnerability, from that. I get it. Those things can get out of hand. You're going to want someone that can guide you on how to facilitate that without it totally going off the rails. So step into these waters lightly if you haven't been there before, meaning if you are very X's and O's, invite just a little bit of this. Don't go full send. If you've been 90/10 X's and O's in terms of what you've actually invested your time and energy in, because anyone can claim to be 100 percent impact and intention. I mean, look at the evidence. What have you actually spent your time talking about? What have you actually spent your time with your team diving into? Has it been X's And O's or has it been deeper stuff and if you're like 90/10, see if you can go 85/15. 80/20. That will have a huge ripple effect in your event.

This is not about a hundred and eighty degree flip in the way you've been doing events, the way you've been approaching people. This is making small tweaks and watching the ripples make an impact on the things you've been struggling with, the things you are caught up on, the questions you didn't even you didn't even know to ask. That can shorten the learning curve because you are willing to expand the breadth of the preparation, both internally and externally for an event, it doesn't just become a proxy for your audience. It was a proxy for your own inner journey. Every event shouldn't just be, oh, we pulled it off, it should be, wow, look at what I discovered about me and about him and about her and about the audience and those participating in the event.

This is great, man. So much depth to what you're sharing right now, which, of course, that's who you are, that's what you do. You're all about alignment between mind, body and spirit and making sure that that's happening. All this has been really in-depth. Honestly, I'm going to go back and listen to this again and listeners, I encourage you to go back. There's so much depth to what you're sharing, Paul. This is like a sermon, man. I love it. This is so good.

Going back and listening, if I could say, allow the confusion to be its own really appropriate stage. Don't be in a hurry to get out of confusion. Some of the best ideas I've ever had, event leaders I've worked with have come out of the confusion. I remember being on a message thread and one of our directors of operations said, I'm conflicted about this. Someone else said something so profound, they said, stay conflicted and you'll find the answer.

Sometimes we're so in a hurry to get out of something, to get to the next stage that it's like Ikea. We missed a step in the cabinet we were building and now we have to deconstruct the whole thing just to be able to put the back on the drawer or whatever. So if anything I've said is like that, then maybe that's where you're going to want to be for a little while. Just let it be. That's ok. That's really ok.

That's awesome, brother, it's ok, I think that's how you open the interview, too. It's like, hey, it's ok to not have everything be perfect. Thank you, brother. I once heard the saying that, hey, when there's confusion or frustration, it's typically right before a breakthrough. So it's like that, that there's something on the other side. Oh, I'd love to hear from you for our audience. They want to learn more about you, what you do, maybe upcoming events that you're doing. What's the best way for them to connect with you or learn more about your work?

So they can go to wholebodymindset.com, which is an ever evolving representation of the madness that is me. But I would say probably the most acutely pointed place to start would be to actually go to a page on my site that allows you to take an assessment that is actually a technology that I helped develop with the company I was at previously, with The Augmentino Leadership Institute and Habit Finder. I mean, I'm acknowledging the bias, but having had about 250,000, 300,000 people take it, I can speak for them as well. It is probably the most unique assessment tool on the planet in that it's not a personality test. It doesn't diagnose your aptitude, your behavior, your emotional presets.

It gives you access to about 6.4 quadrillion variables of information about the patterns of your own mindset, how your neural pathways are processing your future, your blueprints for your life, how it's actually showing up, how you feel about yourself as a result. Then we go and look out the window of your life, of other people, tasks and work and structure and authority. With that, we have an unbelievable GPS for how your subconscious, that under the water part of the iceberg, how your subconscious patterns are impacting what you are trying to seek as an event leader, as a human being, as a spouse, whatever it is. That's just whether I'm talking to someone about a partnership, a collaboration, a joint venture or as a potential client. I love having that data on board to just add depth to the conversation and reference to who, why, what and how of our existence. So just going to wholebodymindset.com/habitfinder, all one word. You take it for free. It'll ping me when you've taken it. I can follow up with you and explore some potential conversation. You'd also have my contact information at that point after you submit that assessment and just let me know what you're looking for. What were you drawn to from this conversation? And then we can go from there pretty organically.

Awesome. Thank you for sharing that so generously, that remarkable technology. I can attest that is absolutely the most unique assessment that I've ever done. I did it once back in 2016 and again recently, actually with you. It's just a fascinating assessment. If nothing else, listen to this. If you’re listening to this, you've taken some kind of assessment before. Go take this assessment because it's freaking unique and it's cool and with Paul, so he can help you interpret the unique assessment.

That's super helpful. Especially if you've taken other assessments, you'll have a tendency to look at it inappropriately, I'll say.

I 100 percent agree. You can't compare. It's like apples and oranges, as you say. So don't try to compare it to another because it's not, it's very unique, very distinct. Thank you. Today, brother, it's been a wonderful interview. Do you have any final comments for our guests as we wrap up?

Just thank you for allowing me to be here. And slow down. We tend to get to the places we're going with the same results and more stress just because we try to get there busy, try to get there fast. So take a breath. If you can't take a breath, then take a few.

Beautiful, brother, thank you so much for that. Slow down, take a breath. All right, brother, with that being said, thank you. We'll call it a wrap.

All right. Thank you.