Don’t Lose the Message Because of the Messenger

A couple of years ago, I was invited to a conference on branding that piqued my interest. The topics were aligned to what I needed, and the speakers were people I was curious to listen to. Based on these things, it made total sense to attend.

However, I found the people who were hosting the event to be the ickiest, phoniest, social media-obsessed losers I’d ever seen. Ever.

And, to top it off, when I preliminarily clicked on the “register” button on their site to see how much the conference cost (this wasn’t just available info), I was asked to fill out a questionnaire so I could be “considered” as a potential attendee.

Yeah, right. As someone who’s held dozens of conferences, I know that you accept who wants to come. Yes, you may sell out and then seats aren’t available, but when someone enters their credit card info and clicks that button, they’re coming.

I registered for the event, despite loathing the very existence of the overly bubbly, beyond cheesy people holding it.

The conference kicked off with a video of the hosts (they were dating) walking through Manhattan, posing, making model faces, and looking into the camera at points. Other times, they were looking into the distance, seemingly unaware of the camera nearby.

I texted my wife, “I hate them.”

When the video mercifully ended, the hosts took the stage and invited all of us up onto it for a dance party.

Yes. A dance party. At a conference.

So I found myself dancing to a cover version of Steve Winwood’s, Higher Love surrounded by a crowd of smiling imbeciles.

Here’s the thing: the conference was amazing. No, not the videos or the dancing or the things like that.

The content was amazing. It made me better in myriad ways.

The speakers and presenters had me thinking about branding from an entirely new perspective, the other guests (who weren’t imbeciles after all) were great connections and, in some cases when I needed it, coaches, and the entire conference from top to bottom was professionally done. It gave me a dozen ideas for how our conferences should run since then and going forward.

Also, the female host was the best public speaker I’ve ever seen and a total inspiration. One of her tricks is, she writes a letter to herself every New Year’s Day, congratulating herself for all the things she’s accomplished in that upcoming year (not the previous year). She gets into explicit detail about all her successes, seals the letter, and then writes, “Not to be opened until Dec 31st” on the outside. She then opens it 365 days later and reads a letter she wrote to herself about everything she’s just done.

Talk about taking resolutions to the next level!

I’ve since borrowed this practice.

The male host, while much less charismatic, was a fountain of information about branding, social media presence, and elevating one’s profile. And I’ve adopted much of his coaching on these topics.

It’s easier to dismiss ideas from people we know we’re different from. That’s because change is hard, so we let ourselves off the hook for taking the action to drive change if we say that this person is cheesy or that person doesn’t understand my context. But as one of the amazing coaches on Team Skyrocket says, “Chew on the meat. Spit out the bone.”

Take what works for you. Get better as a result. No, if someone supports human trafficking, don’t take their coaching about anything. But if they voted for a different candidate than you but they’ve also achieved radical success in areas you want to achieve radical success, learn from them. If they want to make stupid modeling faces into the camera, so what. Don’t lose the message because of the messenger. Otherwise, you may only be hearing things you already know and then wondering what you need to do differently.