As a Pulitzer Prize nominated author, Frederick Buechner said, "To find your mission in life is to discover the intersection between your heart's deep gladness and the world's deep hunger." This is exactly what our guest tonight has been doing. Scott Martineau is co-founder and president of ConsciousOne. With over 600,000 active members, ConsciousOne is now the largest Internet based personal growth course provider in the world, offering courses with such visionary leaders as Neale Donald Walsch, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Dr. Nathaniel Brandon, Sonia Choquette , and so many others.
Early in life, Scott turned his entrepreneurial passion into a desire to help people. After graduating from the University of Minnesota with a degree in Political Science, he stormed into the business world ready to make his mark. His early career was in sales. Marketing and management positions quickly followed. His interest and pursuit of knowledge in new ways to live life to the fullest was evident early in his career. He took courses and programs whenever he could. .
His leadership positions in the glass and packaging industries provided great financial success, yet left him wanting something more. Today, in addition to running www.ConsciousOne.com, he is the author of The Power of You!: How YOU Can Create Happiness, Balance, and Wealth, which was released a week ago and immediately became a Number One Best Seller. .
JANET ATTWOOD: We have some great questions tonight. You had a successful career in the corporate world; how did your passions, the things which are most important to you, play into your decision to start your own company?
SCOTT MARTINEAU: That is really a great question. You mentioned in my biography that I have a political science degree. You know that I actually took the political science degree because it was something that I was interested in, but I knew that I would never practice it. It was just something that stimulated my interest. I knew that I was going to be in business all of my life, but I still chose to study something that just really peaked my interest.
When I got into the business world, I had some good success but I was always doing the personal development work. Tom Hopkins was coming into town. I was going to learn how to master the master of selling anything. I was going to learn everything that he knew. If someone else was coming to town, I was going to find the way that the best people did it. I always was doing that. As a result, I ended up fairly successful at a very early age of running a $10 to $15 million dollar packaging company at the age of 27. We sold it for $10 million and at 29, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next.
I had all this success, but I hadn't quite made the connection between how much I enjoyed pursuing the things of my real interest and passion versus what I had some skill at, which was growing companies, selling the widgets or the products that they manufactured, involving the people. I hadn't yet made the connection to what was my passion. Even though I had met with success, I was still left wanting more. I still needed to learn more. It finally came to me, probably about seven years ago when I had done a couple of entrepreneurial activities, sold those businesses, and I finally realized that I need to quit monkeying around, and I needed to self-disclose and really reveal myself.
Revealing myself was following my passion. That was the personal development work. I needed to make that my focus all of the time, not just 10% or 20% of the time, like I did in my other businesses. My businesses allowed me to practice some of my personal development work. You couldn't lead a company without doing some of that. Some of my own interest and my reading allowed me to do it. I had to stop screwing around, doing it only part time. I had to go all out.
When I decided to go out and make it my passion, make it my business, is when we started ConsciousOne. The amazing thing about it is, as soon as we decided to make it our conscious choice to have our personal development ideas, passions, be our business, to be our all consuming, all dedicated life's purpose, the business just took off. It has never looked back.
JANET ATTWOOD: Would you tell us the story of how you made the transition from the corporate arena to becoming co-founder of one of the largest personal growth sites on the Internet?
SCOTT MARTINEAU: I had been doing a couple of entrepreneurial activities, and in 1999-2000 the Internet kind of crashed. The dot com bust came about. I had been doing different things and I finally came to the realization that, with my partner, Steve Amos, he is the co-founder with me in ConsciousOne, we looked at each other and said, "Wouldn't it be great. Could you just imagine what our lives would be like if we could make our passion, our personal development interest, we could make it our business?"
I remember where we were when we said it. I remember what he was wearing. I remember what I was wearing. It was like a crystallized moment in time where the energy, as soon as I uttered those words and he looked at me like, "Geez, we have to do this. We have had success. Now we have to pursue this."
The idea formulated itself; I told everybody it took off right away. Our very first endeavor that we were going to do was bring Neale Donald Walsch, every spiritual author we could think of, into one event. At that time we were in Los Angeles and we were going to do it at the Staple Center. We were going to have the greatest personal development day that had ever been put together. Bring all the greatest speakers in the world. We watched one of our buddies do it. He brought in Tom Peters and Richard Branson, and the greatest business people that you could ever imagine. He brought them in for one day. This was maybe one month after September 11, 2001, and he lost a million dollars doing it.
We said, "Uh Oh. We still love our idea, but we hate the business model." We had to retool from them and about two weeks later, a young man came in and said, "I have an online course for Neale Donald Walsch. I really don't know what to do with it. I am not a business man, but I like the online course." From that, that is how it started, Janet.
JANET ATTWOOD: That is such a great story. Chris and I truly know what it is like to have this grand vision and then "slump".
SCOTT MARTINEAU: I think one of the big mistakes with people on the call would be that it is going to work out exactly as you have planned right now. I just don't believe that. In fact, this was the first time in my career that I did not put a 40 page business plan together for ConsciousOne. It is the very first time in my career that I had not done every financial statement before I had launched the business. We did not do a mission statement other than the mantra of "we are going to have our passion be our business," and our passion was personal development. That was our business statement. That was our mission statement. That was our forecasting. That was our budget. I wouldn't advise everybody to do that because I know I probably got away with it a little bit because of my and Steve's business skills and all of our training in other areas. We had developed those skills so we knew inherently how to deal with them.
But, I want to share with you that it was most fun that I have ever had. It is still the most fun I have ever had in my entire career because we just followed something that had an energy all by itself.
JANET ATTWOOD: You started with the question, "Wouldn't it be great if we could make our passion our business"? What we talked about in The Passion Test is when you get clear on what you want to have show up in your life, and it does, and clarity is power. Then all of the people, places or things that you need in order for that passion to be realized start to demagnetize to you because you become a passion magnet. That is what you are. You are just living, eating, and dreaming your passion. Wouldn't you say that is correct?
SCOTT MARTINEAU: I am a poster boy for that statement.
JANET ATTWOOD: I am going to remember that.
SCOTT MARTINEAU: Sign me up. I will say that if there is any "doubting Thomases" on that, just come along for the ride. Suspend your disbelief for a little bit. Suspend your inner cynic. I had that inner cynic, and I have to tell you things have been attracted to me, to our business, to the authors that are associated with us, to the members of ConsciousOne and to our audience, in ways that I cannot in the physical world explain. I know, though, in a feeling and in a metaphysical world, it has absolutely happened faster than if I had ever tried to put it in my budget, or my forecast, or a to-do list.
JANET ATTWOOD: Wouldn't you say that the reason why it was so exciting was, you said just a minute ago, you didn't put together a business plan. Would you say that your experience has been that when you are following your passion, it is not as if you are going to know where the next door, or the next person, or the step is going to lead you. That is part of the excitement is that part of what you are going on aside from the fact that you had some ideas about how this would work because of your past experience. You are also going on your intuition, your clarity about your purpose, your own passion.
SCOTT MARTINEAU: In the book, I talk about this, and we are going to get to this. The conscious triangle is an important part for me. There are three versions of this: The feelings part – you know your gut instinct, like you are talking the intuitive level. Then there is the thinking part, the irrational part. Then there is the action. I was very, very good on the thinking and the action part. For me, the magic and the attracter factor that started working, the laws of attraction started kicking in is when I attached my intuition and my feelings and what the energy of someone or an idea felt. When I put that in the mix in my own personal life and lived it in a way that I hadn't done in my previous careers, that is when the joy, the happiness, and the success really took off in a magnitude greater. I would want to reiterate that people were just attracted to us.
There is a charisma that you have when you are joyful, when you are leading a charmed life, when things are happening. It is just amazing how Chris Attwood and I get together through a third party friend. How does that happen? In the old life, I know it did happen but it is happening with a factor of 10 in this world. To me it is because I connected the feeling part into the thoughts and action.
JANET ATTWOOD: Isn't that so great when that happens. It is like total integration truly. Once people take The Passion Test and get clear on what their passions are, the most common question they ask is, "How do I support myself doing what I love?" What advice do you have for that question?
SCOTT MARTINEAU: That is a great question. I get that question quite often. In fact, I had a call on the book the other night of the same thing. I am going to give you an example in my own life that I think will work.
I really love golf. If you say to me, "If I could have learned to love golf at 12," I would be out there trying to beat Tiger Woods. I'd probably be failing, but I'd still be loving it. I have golf as a passion. It is absolutely a passion. I know enough about it to know that it shouldn't be anything more than a great hobby and something that I enjoy talking about, love playing, and get excited about. I don't want to make it my business. In some people's cases, you have to decide that some passions are there just to enjoy and provide you a wonderful respite from some of the other things that we have to do in life. On the other hand, there are some things like you are hearing from me, on the personal development that I wanted to create that as a business. Somehow, someway I just knew that it was going to be successful if I committed to making it happen.
Joanne was on the call the other night and asked me about this. I said, "You have to make a decision early on, at least in this area, about following your passion. Are you going to be one of the content providers? Are you going to write a book like Janet and Chris and be a content provider and start creating content or programs?" That is one way to support your passion. You can sell them on the Internet. You could do membership programs. You could do other things that you see modeled. Or you can say, "Listen, I am not quite there yet. I don't really have a book in me. I don't have a ten page paper, but I really love everything about horses. I am going to be an aggregator of content and data about horses, riding horses, the passion of horses, and I am going to collect that. I am going to be a distributor of that content to others until I can support myself in a full time and really grow my business. I am going to do it just as a side business."
It is my way of saying, "Listen, you don't have to go from 'I don't like my job as an accountant' to trying to become the number one Internet site in personal development overnight." It didn't happen for me overnight. I want to encourage you, though to get started. That first step is so much fun and sometimes you can't start supporting yourself and replacing your present income, or maybe it is too uncomfortable to make that big of a jump right off the bat. I want you to just start with something small.
If you can write a paper on the subject that is important to you, great. If you have a product that you have invented, great. Share it with the world. Start risking some self-disclosure. Get it out there. Do something different that gets it out there. If you don't have a product or a program or a book in you, aggregate the content on a site and share it with the world. Be the person that harbors and has a place for everybody else to come until you are ready to take on your passion and take it to the next level. Does that answer the question?
JANET ATTWOOD: Absolutely. That is just beautiful. It is so practical because so many people think that when they follow their passion, they have to step off of a mountain. They have no idea how far down it is. This way it is telling people to be practical, take small steps. You don't have to risk your whole security, have your family destroyed, et cetera.
SCOTT MARTINEAU: Chris and I have talked about this offline before, is that you do have to share it with someone to see if you actually have a product or a program or an idea that would be receptive, that the world would actually like.
One of the ways to do it is to say, "Well, gosh. I don't have a million dollars, I don't have a website, and I don't have this, so you never start. I don't want you to do that. I want you to start something. Sometimes that is just handing the paper to a mentor or a friend or someone who you know is on your side. They can give you some feedback. From there, you put it on eBay. From there, you put it on your own site. You call up your other friends and say, "Listen, would you share this." That is how it starts. We started with no programs, no members in 2002, and, by the end of the year, we had 7,000 members and two programs.
None of it was ConsciousOne content. It was other authors' content. Sometimes it is just a matter of flipping the switch a little bit and looking at it differently and finding a way to get your start. It won't replace your own income. We didn't draw any salaries or any income for the first couple of years. It was still the most fun thing that I have ever done in my entire career.
JANET ATTWOOD: It is true, though, you never know whether it will or not, do you? Sometimes you just like to rock right on in and all of a sudden, the rocket ship takes off. It is a different thing for every single person, wouldn't you say?
SCOTT MARTINEAU: Yes. It should be a very unique experience. If this is your passion, I want it to be one of your greatest loves of your life. Sometimes, love hurts a little bit and it doesn't always work out, but it should be a great passion. It should be filled with some great drama as you stretch yourself, and it is successful. It should play like a Copola film, but hopefully a better ending than The Godfather. I want you to just enjoy it, but most of all, I want you to start. I want you to give it a shot because that is where you are going to get the rewards; you are going to get the success. At the worst, you will just get feedback like we did that says, "A seminar event business isn't going to work." If we hadn't got that feedback, we would have still been trying to create an event business. It would have been a staggeringly bad idea.
JANET ATTWOOD: Exactly, and yet you stayed in your passion. You stayed open which is one of the secrets that so often times people miss, because they get hung up on, "but this is my passion, and it has got to be this way." I love that you said right in the very beginning, "we didn't put together a business plan."
You were very open. You left yourself open to what could show up in order for you to be able to live your passions.
SCOTT MARTINEAU: You know, Janet, that is very astute of you to notice that. I said this the first year to a number of people, "Everything I had done in my career, had contributed to me being able to do and start ConsciousOne at this time." I was confident enough in my skills and in my understanding of business, my understanding of personal development, that I did not have to have it all planned out. I also listened to some great people that said, "Just put it out there and let's see what happens." Don't try to control every aspect of it, but see where it goes.
Where it went was wonderful. It wasn't always perfect, but every time we moved the ball forward just a little bit.
JANET ATTWOOD: Let me ask you another question. You talked about the new religion of capitalism. Will you explain this and what it means for our listeners who are wondering how to make a living doing what they love? What is the new religion of capitalism?
SCOTT MARTINEAU: I was thinking about trying to explain this to people. I think capitalism is playing such a huge and significant role in our world today that it is an invisible hand that is contributing to our success, especially those of us who are doing and conducting business on the Internet. In a free market system at its core, capitalism is essentially allowing those who are self-interested to be able to work with each other in a principle, profitable way.
We have to pay homage to the environment we are working in that is allowing us to be so successful. When you are able to pursue your own self-interest, your own passion, without anybody encumbering you in an undo way: A government saying that you don't have the right to pursue this, individuals or companies saying that you can't pursue this. We have kind of unbridled self-interest. My assertion in this is that that always works out. I know that there are some people that screw it up and make bad decisions. We see them paraded off to jail. I am not talking about that.
I am talking about those of us who are doing great work everyday, trying to help each other out everyday, trying to provide great content. The environment that we are doing that is one of capitalism. I wanted to pay homage to that in the book. When free markets work well together. When, Janet, you can pursue passion as a business, and I can pursue personal development as a business and people can find us, we have to say, "Bravo" to an environment that allows that to happen.
Whatever the systems that are in place that allows that to happen that are favorable winds to that, we have got to acknowledge. I think sometimes that we blow past that in our world today, that the environment of free market, the environment of capitalism is contributing to all of our success, and I didn't want to blow past it without saying, "Bravo or Thank you."
JANET ATTWOOD: So often times we take these things for granted. I have until this moment. Thank you for this because I absolutely agree with you.
SCOTT MARTINEAU: If you were in China twenty years ago, you are so thanking now days for the introduction of capitalist ideas and capitalist society. If you are in the Soviet Union twenty years ago, you are just saying, "Hey, listen. There has been a lot of chaos." But your ability to be an individual pursuing your own self-interest, the human rights aspect of capitalism is allowing other people to flourish in so many ways.
I don't want to dwell on the people who mess it up or give it a bad name. I want to dwell on the hundreds of millions, the billions of people that are finding their human potential unleashed as a result of this. Those are the people that are also looking to us to help them guide the way.
JANET ATTWOOD: Thank you for that. It is always interesting. We always have a choice of where we want to put our attention, right? When we put our attention on being thankful, than what I seem to constantly find is more good constantly comes to me. In this arena, I see that that is what you have done and look at where you are. I mean no mistakes. Absolutely no mistakes, Scott.
SCOTT MARTINEAU: Thank you.
JANET ATTWOOD: ConsciousOne obviously puts importance on consciousness in this process. How do you define consciousness and what role does it play in allowing us to lead fulfilled lives?
SCOTT MARTINEAU: I define consciousness in The Power of You and in my own life as awareness. I think it is awareness of yourself – awareness of your environment and of those around you, awareness of what you are doing and what you are avoiding, awareness of things that are in your view and the things that you are not allowing in your view. To me it is a total and complete awareness is my definition of consciousness both apparent and under the surface. You are responsible for all aspects of it, all of your happiness, all of your sadness, all of your strength, and all of your weaknesses. You are also responsible which one you focus on.
To me, the way that pulls into our lives is through the conscious triangle. The power of the conscious triangle is the center, where you are always flowing between feelings, thoughts and actions. Feelings being the artist in you, the one who can feel things that you say, "I feel sad, I feel happy." For those of you who can do that really easily, there is a whole group of people who are the thinkers and the rational that can't say a simple statement like, "I feel happy. I feel sad." The thinkers can reason and rationalize all kinds of things. They are absolutely fantastic, but if you don't have action for both the feelers and the thinkers, then you are feeling a lot of things but not doing much. Or you are thinking a lot about things, and not doing much.
There are action people too. They are just so confused that they might not feel or think or they might do a little bit of both. What I am proposing is, in terms of trying to incorporate consciousness into your life is that you are doing all three all of the time. If you are not prone to feelings, like I wasn't, that you start to develop that. You understand what the power of that could be. If you are the artist and maybe haven't done much of reasoning or rationalizing, but you are an incredible feeler, introduce a little of thinking and thought and reason and rationality to your life. If you have not been an action person, let's introduce some action, some doer activity into your life and watch what happens.
To me, introducing the conscious triangle, the feelings, thoughts and actions, makes you more aware and more connected to what is going on in your life. To me that makes your life fulfilled. At least it has for me.
JANET ATTWOOD: Give me an example. You said an artist will introduce thinking into their life. What do you mean by that?
SCOTT MARTINEAU: We all know a feeler, an artist, someone who is tremendously in tune with their feelings. We all know artists in the extreme that don't do anything other than feel. I have a massage therapist friend who is absolutely fantastic at her craft. She is one of those gifted people. We have all had a massage or two where the person is just incredible. She can tell where you are hurt. She has the gift of being able to relieve it, soothing voice. She is in touch with her emotions and everyone else around her, but she is living in almost poverty in her life. She literally cannot get passed the poverty level.
I have counseled her in the scenario about raising her rates by $5.00 or possibly maybe even having everyone come to her place instead of her driving all over the world. That is introducing some reason and some thought and some thinking about what she wants. She says that she doesn't want to live in poverty anymore. This is an example of introducing thinking into someone who is a great artist who might not have that skill innately. It is not going to be the artist's greatest skill set. I don't ever think it will be or should be. I cherish my artist feeler friends because they have taught me so much. I can help them on the thinking side and even the action side. They help me on the feeling side.
In our own individual ways, what I am proposing is that you need to be able to bring all three of those into your life all the time. Do a little bit better job of it. For my massage therapist friend, it is has been talking to me about it. She gets horrified at the idea of actually raising her rates. She literally physically gets almost sick at doing that. She also doesn't want to live in poverty anymore. So at some point, she will make that transition. She will make a change if the pain gets high enough. I'll share with you that she hasn't yet.
JANET ATTWOOD: Very interesting.
SCOTT MARTINEAU: To me it is clear as day, but it is not to her, and it is her life. We have had the discussion lots of times and at some point she will decide that living in that scarcity mentality or that poverty mentality is too painful and she will choose to move on and take a different course of action. Without in any way reducing her great skill of being able to touch people with her emotions or be able to be in touch with her own.
I have examples of each one of those. How the thinker works and then how the action person works. You might think of those people in your life. Which ones you are, which ones you work with, who is the thinker in the group at work. Who is the feeler. As soon as I say this to people, "who is the artist, who is the thinker, who is the doer," people immediately can identify each other. It is not a label to be slapped around on people in order to hurt them. It is to be able to understand for yourself who you are and what you might want to add in order to be in the power of the conscious triangle. Right in the middle. Fluidly moving back and forth between all three. Feelings, thoughts, actions. That is how you remain and live a fulfilled life.
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