Darren: On this week’s episode of The Engaging Marketeer, I’m speaking with Brian Mayne. Brian grew up with his father’s travelling funfair and couldn’t read or write until around the age of 30, but is now a multiple published author, a speaker, and a trainer, and works with people like Tony Robbins.
So I’m going to be speaking to Brian about how he wrote a number of books, how he got them published, and how he got to where he is today, even though he said when he first got his sales job, he was absolutely useless at it.
So let’s get into the world of Brian Mayne.
Brian, you’re a multiple published author. You’ve got, I think, four separate books listed on Amazon. Is that correct?
Brian: Yeah. Four books.
Darren: What was the process like you found in writing your first book? Everybody thinks they’ve got a book in them, but not everybody is able to actually get that out onto paper.
Brian: Yeah, it’s a long time ago, but I had an idea come to me, and I suppose that’s how it is with a lot of people with a book. I thought, oh, I can make that into a nice book.
Actually, my first book, the one I wrote, was for children. It’s a relatively short book. It’s about my understanding of positive thinking and how that works, and I put it into a little story for children. I wrote it in a way that if the child was young and the parent was reading it to the child, then there was a message there for the parent also.
Darren: Oh, clever.
Brian: I had a really strange experience. I had the idea, and I sort of sat on it for about a year. I would think it through in my head, the analogy that I was going to use.
Then I took a long holiday with my girlfriend at the time. We went to Egypt and ended up in Sinai, in the desert. I wrote out the complete book by hand while I was there in the desert. I drew little pictures of the chapters and the different scenes, how I saw them in my head.
Then when I got back to England, I started the process of writing it up on a computer. This would have been 1997 or 1998, so it was a while ago.
Darren: Yeah. It wasn’t so much that you would have had a laptop with you at the time.
Brian: Although I did have one. I just didn’t take it on this backpack trip that I took to Egypt.
My other books were much more conventionally written, in that I knew exactly what I wanted to do and why I wanted to do it, and set about it in a more logical way.
With the first book, I self-published it because I didn’t think anyone would be interested in it. Basically, I had a lot of self-doubt, and so I decided, all right, no point sending it to a publisher. I’ll just pay for it and get it printed.
I printed up 3,000 copies, and they all sold really quite quickly. But it was difficult to try and get them into shops. This would have been around about 2001 when I self-published.
But one of those very first copies that I self-published landed on the desk of an editor at Penguin Books Random House, and they contacted me and said, “We love your little book, but you’re sort of playing small. Why don’t you sign a contract with us and rework it and play a bigger game?”
So I did that, but I was very naive, and I signed a terrible contract where I only got 7% royalty until they’d sold 20,000 copies, and then it went up to 10%. I wasn’t so smart, but I was just pleased to get my work out there.
Darren: It was a bit of flattery being asked by Penguin Books if they could publish you.
Brian: So there are different reasons for writing a book and different reasons for publishing a book. Sometimes a book, if you’re in training, coaching, wealth building, marketing, something like that, the book’s going to give you a bit of credibility, a bit of edge.
My main reason for writing my books was to get out there what I thought were important ideas around setting goals and personal development. I didn’t really write them for profit, but they have been profitable over the years, and in more than one way.
Sometimes the profit from writing a book doesn’t come immediately from the book. It can be that the book creates interest for someone who then wants to buy something else, and the profit comes from that something else.
I’ve had people fly from the other side of the world to take the certification programme I run on Goal Mapping, just because they read the book and liked it, and they got on the airplane, came to England, and spent quite an investment in taking the certification.
So there are different reasons and different benefits with books. I’ve coached quite a lot of people to write their book.
My books were written mostly in the evening because I was busy in the day. If I wasn’t busy with work, I was busy with kids. My two kids were both very young when I was writing the last couple of books, and so I would often write late at night.
I think what I discovered that’s an important principle when you’re writing a book is you can’t always find the time to say, “I’m going to take three months out and write,” or “I’m going to go to this idyllic location where I’m going to be really inspired and write.”
This was sort of knuckle down, do a little bit every day. Make yourself do a little bit every day. I found doing it in the evenings late, I’d turn the telly off and write instead once the kids were in bed. Gradually, over the course of a year or two, you’ve got your book.
Darren: So it’s not quite what you see in the movies then? You don’t go and sit on a beach for a month or go to a secluded hunting lodge?
Brian: I have done that.
Darren: You have done that?
Brian: I have done that. But you’re not really going to turn out a book in a month. Maybe now with AI people will. They’ll turn it out in an hour. But for me, it takes me quite a while.
I tend to write and then rewrite the same thing several times, gradually defining it and attempting to get my thoughts and ideas to essence, so it’s not waffly or too padded out, that the lines have meaning but also are easy to read.
I think there’s a balance between wanting to give detail and also keeping to the essence so that it doesn’t ramble.
Darren: Of course, now if you wanted to self-publish a book, it’s relatively straightforward because you can do it directly through Amazon. Presumably, when you did it, and it was Sam the Magic Genie, I presume you were talking about the first book that you wrote, self-publishing that was more difficult back in the 90s?
Brian: Yeah, it was. But not so difficult. I found a freelance editor and proofreader, found a freelance graphic designer, and then we went to a printer.
Between those people and myself, I also got quite ripped off by someone with one of my other books that I decided to self-publish, and that sort of put me off a little bit the self-publish route at that time.
All of my books are published through quite big publishing houses because, as you’ve just pointed out, it wasn’t so easy back then. Amazon has certainly made it easy. Everything’s there. It’s never been easier.
When I self-published my book, part of the limitation was that if you didn’t have an outlet to sell it, you were wasting your time going to the bookshops and asking them if they would take a few copies. If you weren’t a known publishing house, people didn’t give you any attention.
Back then, of course, there wasn’t really social media. So if you wanted exposure, it needed to be through some marketing campaign in some way. Again, having a publicist through a publishing house was essential back then.
My goal was get the word out. I wasn’t so bothered about the profit. They do take a lot of money for what they give.
My books have never been out of print. They’re in 17 languages. They’re on sale around the world. The two most important are in their second editions, but the direct money that I earn from those books is not so great, and that’s because the royalty is 10%.
If you are self-publishing, you’ve got much more control over the book, and not only, of course, are your returns higher if you’re self-publishing, but you’ve also got the freedom to do deals.
When you’re in a contract with books, you really haven’t. Once you sign the contract with the publishing house, they effectively own your book. You own the words inside and the title, but the book with the name, the words and the cover, that belongs really to the publisher.
One of the limitations for me has been I do a lot of work with charities and schools where we often give the content freely, and there have been some Christian publishers that have wanted to publish the book and make it available to their communities, and my publisher wouldn’t allow it because they weren’t making a profit out of it.
Darren: Yeah.
Brian: So sometimes you’re a bit restricted.
My main work isn’t writing. My main work really is speaking at conferences and running training programmes.
A lot of speakers and trainers will self-publish a book because then it allows them to give that book. They will print up in bulk, so they’ve got their price right down, and they give that book as a bonus or a loss leader to get people into their seminar and then maybe upgrade to one of their other programmes.
But if you go through a publishing house, it means that you’ve got to buy your own books, and so you’re very restricted on what sort of discounts you can give to a client maybe.
I recently had a client that booked me to run a workshop for their sales team, and they wanted to give all of their sales team a book each. I had to explain to them, I don’t have the margins to give you a huge discount like some of the other speakers may do because I’m not publishing my own books. I can’t print up 10,000 copies so that I get them at a pound apiece or something.
Darren: Yeah.
Brian: I’ve got to buy them at a 50% discount from the publisher.
So there are pros and cons. My advice to anyone out there thinking about publishing, who has got a book inside of them, is go for it first and foremost, and then decide what’s best for you in what you want to do.
Do you want to try your hand with a publisher? There are lots of good agents that will help get you with a publisher. Or do you want to self-publish through, like you say, Amazon or someone? They make it really simple.
You’ve just got to decide what is best really.
Darren: But finding a big publisher like that, you were lucky that your book landed in front of Penguin Books. Getting in front of Penguin, I imagine, is not that easy unless you’ve got contacts or luck on your side.
You mentioned that your second self-published book, you got ripped off on it. So that people listening to this know what to look out for, can you tell us a little bit about what happened there?
Brian: I’ve got to set the context a little, which is that I grew up in a travelling funfair family, and I didn’t go to school very much, and I have dyslexia.
So I dropped out of school around about age 12 and a half. Pretty much the tradition within the travelling communities of my generation.
When I was in school, I was only there for about five months each year, divided between different schools because we were always moving with the funfair, and my father also had business on the Isle of Wight. So we would go there for the summer and we’d travel with the funfair. Between all those things, I never really went to school very much.
I never sat any exams. I have no qualifications. So I left school without qualifications, but also unable to read and write.
I only learned to read and write properly at age 30.
Darren: Wow.
Brian: What helped me learn to read and write was discovering positive thinking, goal setting, personal development.
I found this great coach who helped me overcome my learning challenges and learn to read well, and then learn to speed read, and through all of that immerse myself in personal development.
I didn’t actually go to him to learn to read. I met him because he was teaching positive thinking and self-motivation to a sales team that I had joined, and through that I was immersed in it.
When I got into personal development on a professional level, and I was recruited as a personal development speaker and trainer from the sales team that I was in, I’d only been reading and writing at that time for maybe two or three years.
Although I could read and write fairly well, my understanding of grammar was really, really limited.
I came up with this good idea of how to set goals in a powerful way, which is Goal Mapping. Everybody that I presented it to, everyone that attended the workshops or the presentations, said, “You should write a book on this.”
I knew they were right, but I also was sort of quite terrified because that was a big acid test for me in have I really overcome my learning challenges. I didn’t think that a publisher would be interested in a book from a gypsy boy that had only learned to read two years earlier, three years earlier.
I was talking to a friend one day about this, and he said, “No, it’s simple. You get a freelance editor and they will lay out the book for you, and they’ll do all the proofreading, and all you’ve got to do is give them your ideas, and they’re going to structure it in the form of a good book.”
I was recommended this guy who was involved in teaching personal development, so I felt quite safe with him. He charged me an enormous amount of money, thousands of pounds at a time when I really didn’t have it, but I felt so strongly it was an important thing to do.
I worked with him for a year, and it got close to time of print, and I just got this really, really awful feeling that something was wrong. It’s like a deep down in my gut feeling. Something is wrong.
It was the night before the print, and it was going to cost me another £10,000 on top of what I’d paid this guy to print up 10,000 books, and I was going to sell these books in my workshops and seminars that I was running.
It’s the night before the print, and I just couldn’t sleep. I felt so sick. When I got up in the morning, I phoned the printers and I stopped the print run, and I cancelled the print run. I just said, “Put everything on hold.”
Then this guy, this editor guy, he contacted me midday and said, “How’s the print run going?”
I said, “I’ve cancelled it.”
He went ballistic at me. He said, “What?”
I said, “I had this really bad feeling something was wrong, and I’ve just told them to put it on hold.”
He said, “We’ve worked for a year.” He’s swearing at me, shouting at me. He said, “You don’t believe in yourself. You don’t deserve to have a book on goal setting because you don’t even believe in yourself enough to follow through with your own goal.”
I felt so absolutely awful, and I parted with him because of the extremeness of how he was.
Then over the coming weeks, I had meetings with various people that were saying, “Where’s your book?” And I said, “I don’t have it.”
I had a meeting with the promoter of Tony Robbins in London. I’d arranged to speak at all these European seminars that he’d put on, and we were in the foyer outside in the hotel because he was the promoter for Tony Robbins at the time.
He said, “Where’s your book?”
I said, “I ain’t got it.”
He said, “Well, you haven’t brought me a copy?”
I said, “No, we haven’t printed it.”
He said, “We’re going to sell it at all the workshops we’ve arranged for.”
I said, “Yeah, look, I had this horrible feeling something’s wrong.”
He said, “You need to get in there and listen to Tony Robbins, don’t you? Get some more belief in yourself.”
About a month later, I’m in Italy running a workshop, and there’s an amazing lady in Italy. Her name’s Bruna Ferrari. Over the years, she’s been like a second mother, but a spiritual teacher to me.
I went to her almost in tears, saying, “Here’s a sad story, and there’s no book.”
She said something really good. She said, “There’s a very fine line between self-doubt and intuition.”
She said, “I don’t feel what those other people are saying, that you doubt yourself, don’t believe in yourself, is right. I think you picked up on an intuition that something was wrong, and you had the courage to listen to that.”
She said, “I think when you go back to England, give it enough time. If it’s a good goal, then it’s not important to achieve it by a certain date. If it’s a really good goal, the important thing is you keep going.”
I went back to the UK, and I think maybe just a few weeks later I was contacted by the guy who set up the British Coaching Academy years ago, Jonathan Jay. He was running a magazine at the time called The Achievement Report.
He said, “I’d really like you to write an article about goal setting.”
I wrote an article on Goal Mapping. I took extracts from what I was going to have in the book, and it was amazingly successful. It was reprinted and other magazines printed it, and people really liked it.
A short while afterwards, I got a phone call out the blue from a guy. He said, “My name’s Michael Mann. I’m the chief editor at Watkins, and we’ve read your article on Goal Mapping. Have you ever thought about writing a book on it?”
I said, “I’ve got one.”
He said, “Bring it over. We’ll get it straight into print, and we’ll pick up on all this good publicity you’re getting from your magazine article.”
So I photocopied up 10 copies from the original manuscript that went to the printers, and I turned up at their offices. They’re all sat around this big table, like a boardroom table. I’ve given them each a copy of the draft manuscript, and they fell off their chairs laughing at it.
It was riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. The man was a complete con artist. He hadn’t done any of the things I’d paid him for. He hadn’t proofread it. It was horrible.
I was too naive in my journey of learning to read to realise. Now I would have spotted all those things. My grammar is very good now. I’ve written many books now. This was one of my very early attempts just a few years after learning to read, and I was conned by the guy.
The publisher brought in a specialist editor, the editor that normally worked with Tony Buzan for all of his mind mapping books, and we worked together for a year. We created the Goal Mapping book, which is still in print now, second edition, and translated into many, many languages.
If I hadn’t listened to my intuition, if I’d have just pushed with achieving that goal with ego, I’ve got to have it, what I would have had would have been 10,000 copies of a book that were not fit for purpose.
One of two things would have happened. Either in desperation I would have sold those books, because I was really stretched for money, and so I would have sold them, and it would have created a bad influence on Goal Mapping in the world. Or they’d have sat on my father’s garage floor going mouldy because they weren’t fit for purpose.
So over the years, I have learned to find a balance with my goal setting between trying to make it happen, which is the ego way, or sit back, let it happen, which tends to be a bit woo-woo.
There’s a middle ground, and that middle ground is to help the goal to happen.
What my Italian mother taught me with that is you need to hold the intention. If you hold the intention, you’re not forcing, but you’re not just sitting back and hoping. If you hold the intention, then gradually you start to see the opportunities, and the right person comes along, and the goal eventually is achieved, not always at the time that we would like.
In total, from first deciding I wanted to write a book on Goal Mapping to the book being published and being in the shops was probably about four years. But it wasn’t four years of working on the book. It was like working on the book and waiting, and working and waiting, and noticing the opportunities when they come.
There’s a lovely quote by Louis Pasteur: “Chance favours the prepared mind.”
If you know what you want, and you also have patience, knowing what you want programmes your reticular activating system, your subconscious autopilot. You spot the opportunities, or you attract them if you believe in law of attraction, and eventually you find a way to achieve your goal, and persistence pays off.
But it can be very disheartening when you’re trying and hitting blocks, or hearing that word no. Your book proposal’s been rejected. I had a couple of rejections on book proposals.
I think it’s a great thing to do for yourself, regardless of what you may sell.
My nephew, who is also in the travelling community, he’s just written his book and got it published. They’re not selling a lot of copies, but the sense of achievement and the thought process that he’s been through in writing that book, it’s taken him forward in himself, who he is as a person.
I think often when you’re writing a book, I spoke to another lady the other day, she’s one of our coaches and trainers, she’s just written her book. It’s a process I think that is good for people, to get their thoughts down on paper in that way.
Darren: You definitely learn a lot about yourself doing it, and you probably learn a lot more about the subject you’re writing the book about in the first instance because you have to research it more and understand it better.
Brian: Yeah. You’ve got to think it through, and it takes you deeper, which is one of my concerns with AI. It’s not making people think for themselves.
I use AI because I think it comes up with some really good angles, but then I rewrite it and I work with my posts. I haven’t used it in any of my books because it wasn’t around at the time.
I’ve got two books that are sat on my computer that I’ve never sent to the publisher. So it may be that in the future I decide to write again and I’ll revive these two books. One of them’s complete, but the other one’s maybe only 25% complete. There are another couple that I would like to write, and AI is certainly making it easier because it’s doing a lot of the donkey work.
But I think if you don’t rewrite what AI suggests, then you’re not getting that deeper understanding, and you’re not getting the same uniqueness because otherwise it’s all going to sound like AI.
Darren: Yeah. And you can tell. I can see posts that people put on social media that I can see from the structure of it that it’s AI. All they’ve done is go to ChatGPT or Claude and ask for a post, and they’ve copied and pasted. There’s no original thought from them whatsoever.
Brian: No, I see it all the time. You start to see the layout and the key words being used, but there are a lot of the same key words being used over and over and over.
Darren: So with Goal Mapping, obviously that’s the process for writing the book, which sounds like a real arduous mission you’ve gone through there to get that book on the shelves. What made you want to write a book about Goal Mapping in the first place? What were your early experiences with setting goals?
Brian: My earliest experiences with setting goals were around learning to read and boosting my sales performance.
My father’s travelling funfair eventually settled on the Isle of Wight, and I stopped with the funfairs when I was around about 18. I expanded on my father’s business by opening a disco. I became the youngest person in the UK to be given a liquor and entertainment licence.
I opened the disco in 1981. I opened up a very unusual place. It was the New Romantic scene at the time, and I was a little bit wild, and I liked to party. We opened up this crazy club, and people loved it.
Short story, people came from all over England. We were in lots of music magazines. We had lots of pop stars and celebrities coming to the club. They made documentaries about the place, and for 13 years that was my life really. I lived it and breathed it every day.
I made a lot of money. I was quite wealthy, had a good life, drove an amazing Italian sports car, lived in a big three-storey house, and I did very well.
But then in the late 1980s, it all came crashing down. What triggered the crash wasn’t anything that we did, such as making a mistake. It was because tourism changed, and holidaymakers stopped taking their holiday on the Isle of Wight and instead started going to the Mediterranean where the sunshine was guaranteed.
It was a change and a trend that affected all the tourist resorts around England. The Isle of Wight was particularly badly affected because it’s quite expensive on the ferry to get here, and it was actually cheaper for people to go to Spain or Italy or somewhere.
So cheap travel, cheap flights, and then cheap programmes like Wish You Were Here and Duty Free on TV, that sort of thing. It was the beginning of Club Med, and my customers for the disco, 18 to 30, they were the early adopters. They were the first ones to hit the trend and not go on holiday in England, and instead go to the Med.
Of course, where most of them went was Ibiza. That’s the big club scene. Within a couple of years, it had just gone. There was no business.
The Isle of Wight is mostly retired people, and it’s not a big place, and so there weren’t enough young people to feed the disco without the tourist trade. Once that was gone, we couldn’t really pick up the disco and move it somewhere else. It was just an inevitable end.
It ended with a million pounds of debt, my home being repossessed, my marriage breaking down, my brother’s home repossessed, my mum and dad’s home up for repossession. I lost what seemed like everything at the time.
In addition, I couldn’t read or write, and I didn’t have a single qualification to my name because I left school just before I was 13. So I was very, very depressed and didn’t know what to do.
Someone offered me a job in their sales team on commission only. So I only got some money if I sold something. I didn’t sell anything. I wasn’t any good at it, and I was really, really sad and depressed.
The truth is, people like to buy things from happy people.
Darren: Yeah.
Brian: So it wasn’t going so well. But the turning point was I met this great guy who became my coach, and he was employed by the sales company I joined to boost performance by teaching how to set goals in a powerful way and how to use self-motivation and positive thinking.
I latched on to all of that, and in addition, he showed me how to apply it to overcome my learning challenges. Over the period of a year, I took my sales performance from the lowest in the group to the highest, and I overcame the challenges and learned to read.
It took about a year, but I learned to read fairly well. I realised, of course, it was personal development and positive thinking that had helped me form new neuropathways and connections that overcame my word blindness and the form of dyslexia that I have. The words came into focus.
I felt pretty amazing learning to read at age 30. I was still in a million pounds of debt. I didn’t have a home or anything, but I was feeling good about myself, and I could see that there was hope for the future.
My manager was so impressed that I took my sales performance from the lowest in the team to the highest that he wanted me to make presentations on all the different techniques I was learning in the books I was reading, and share those with the rest of the sales team, so the team would also raise their performance. And it did.
Then someone in the team recommended me to a training company in London that wanted to recruit personal development trainers. There weren’t so many about back in 1993, 1994 when I was doing this.
I was recommended. They just phoned me up one day, and they had the licence to teach the work and promote Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey, Brian Tracy, Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar, Paul McKenna, Tony Buzan, the man that created mind mapping.
When I was recruited by them, I was also put into train the trainer programmes to learn to teach the work of these other people. Tony Robbins would only come to the UK once a year, and in the meantime they would want to run workshops on Tony’s teachings or Stephen Covey’s teachings.
So I got trained up in lots of other people’s techniques, and I would go all around the UK making presentations on the work of Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey, different people, to drum up interest for when they would come and run the main seminars.
When I would share all these different techniques and teachings on personal development, people would say to me, “Wow, I wish I had learned this when I was in school. Why aren’t they teaching positive thinking and goal setting in school?”
The more I heard it, the more I thought, yeah, I didn’t go to school very much, but I never had so much as a single hour instruction. In fact, positive thinking is something I thought either you’re born with it and you can do it, or you can’t.
I didn’t realise it was a science, like goal setting. There are principles. You can learn them. You can apply them. They work.
I was thinking about all of this for about a year, I suppose, while I was working with this training company, Speakers International. Then, driving my car at midnight through the centre of London, I had this flash of understanding about how to set goals in a really powerful way.
A year later, I started teaching it, which is the Goal Mapping system. The thing that is unique with Goal Mapping is the balanced combination of words and imagery that is used to create the map.
The words are always written in the form of affirmation to stimulate logical mind and left-brain thinking. The imagery stimulates creative mind, right-brain thinking. It’s this whole-brain activation that helps people become clear on what they want, but also powerfully command their subconscious autopilot to motivate them towards achieving it.
It’s a series of seven steps. Once I had that idea, and I ran my first paid corporate workshop in 1995, that’s when I knew that writing a book was going to be key to spread the word.
I’d already started capturing my thoughts and ideas about what I would put in the book because I was using those same thoughts and ideas in my workshops and presentations.
That was the original starting place of having the goal to write the book, and it led me into talking to people who then recommended a self-publisher. As I explained earlier, that didn’t work out so well. But maybe that’s just part of the journey, and it’s what led me on to the publisher that’s absolutely perfect for me.
If I’d spent years researching, I wouldn’t have found a better fit in terms of the publisher that eventually found me.
Darren: So as you grew up unable to read and write, and then you say you moved into sales but you were absolutely terrible at it, once you got these skills and you learned these skills, you then started teaching others and doing talks and seminars on it, and doing talks from stage.
How natural did you find that, doing talks and presentations, where obviously reading and writing isn’t necessary, it’s more of performance? Is that more in your comfort zone than writing a book in the first place?
Brian: Oh, yeah, for sure.
The thing that wasn’t in my comfort zone, and I see this in a lot of other people that have found their way into coaching and training, is that at first I felt like an imposter.
There’s that awful saying, “fake it till you make it,” and I felt like a bit of a fake.
For several years when I was first speaking and training at events, I would never, ever share my story or my background like I have today because I was always afraid if someone finds out that I had no qualifications, they’re going to show me the door.
So for me, I was very guarded, and I didn’t ever tell anyone. Then I landed a contract with IBM, and I was particularly charmed off working with IBM. It’s a big brand name.
The sales director who brought me in, I was having dinner with him one night, and he was just a really nice, cool guy. I felt safe with him. Over dinner and a glass of wine, it had just come out, here’s my background.
He went, “Wow. You’ve got to tell all of my team tomorrow.”
I said, “No.”
He said, “Yes.”
He was the boss, and he was paying me, so I did. Amazingly, it had a really positive, motivating and inspiring effect on his team. It was quite a big team.
Darren: Yeah.
Brian: From that place, I thought, all right, I need to understand what it is in my story that’s really important and pull out those key points, and not waffle with the stuff that people don’t need to know. Because obviously there’s something here that is having a good effect on people, but I need to define it.
These days, whenever I make a speech or run a training, my stories are always part of it because it helps to explain certain aspects about how the materials come together. But it took a few years and experience to define that.
The speaking side I was comfortable with, to actually stand up in front of people and speak, because from 10 years old onwards, my father would have me call the bingo numbers. “On the blue, all the twos, 22.”
So I had a microphone in my hand in the summer holidays and would call the bingo with my mother. I would do a lot of it. The old ladies who play bingo, young ladies as well, I don’t want to offend anyone, young men, women, I think they found it cute that a young boy was calling the numbers. They spent more money.
The upside for me was I didn’t have any fear after that of public speaking. But I wasn’t calling out bingo numbers anymore. I’m talking about principles of success and neuroscience and things, and I didn’t feel qualified to be doing that at first.
Back when I first started speaking and training, there weren’t any coaching academies. There weren’t any coaching schools. In fact, life coaching wasn’t a thing back in 1995. That came later from America before it was established in the UK.
Back when I started, it’s been more than 30 years for me now, it was really about just finding your own way, taking feedback. You’ve got to take the majority feedback because there always are some people that don’t like what you’re saying perhaps.
So you’ve got to take the majority feedback and see where you can improve, and also study other speakers and trainers and what they do. I did that with the books. I looked at the books that I liked, and they were normally the simple ones rather than the really long, complicated ones.
So the books that I liked, I did my best to learn from those and come up with a style that was simple, but also at the same time had depth.
Darren: Do you know, I did suspect as you were telling me your story that your ability to get up and talk in front of a large audience had some grounding in how you were brought up. If you were brought up in a funfair, you would have been speaking to the public. You would have had no problems talking to complete strangers. There’s a certain confidence that would have come from that, that would have stood you in great stead in later life.
Brian: Yeah. I was shy, and my father always said, I’d overhear him sometimes talking to people, he’d say, “My Brian’s chicken-hearted.” That was the term that he used.
Because when we were on the funfairs, part of my job was to mind the hoopla stall.
Darren: Mhm.
Brian: You’d have to do that shouting out at the customers, “Roll up, roll up, spin them to win them, here’s all the prizes.” I hated that.
He’d say, “Have a shout out.”
I said, “No, I don’t want to do it.”
“Have a shout out. Ask them to spend some money. Have a go.”
I never liked that.
The bingo was a little easier because I just had to say, “It’s a blue ball and it’s all the twos, 22,” or “It’s legs 11,” or something. I wasn’t asking people to spend their money.
I think that’s probably also an issue for me when I started in sales.
Darren: Yeah.
Brian: We pick up limiting beliefs in all sorts of different ways.
When I opened the disco, the problem I had for a couple of years was the DJs. They were really unreliable, and sometimes they’d get a really good offer, and they’d be gone and take that offer, and I’d be stuck without a DJ.
I ended up doing it myself. For a while, I just put the records on. But back in the 80s, a DJ was expected to talk also, not just mix records. It’d be somebody’s birthday or some announcement you needed to make.
Again, that got a microphone into my hand and served as good grounding for when I started speaking and training.
There’s quite a famous DJ who’s taken my coach certification training, Brandon Block, and he’s a really, really nice guy, although he’s been quite a wild boy in the past.
Me and him have spoken about this a number of times, that when you are doing a speech to a crowd or running a big workshop, it is a little bit like DJing. You’re not mixing records, but you are selecting and mixing information and stories.
Part of the skill, I think, when you’re a speaker and a trainer is that you need to be able to look at the crowd and know what they want.
Darren: Yes.
Brian: That’s also part of the skill of being a DJ. You can be the best mixer in the world, but if you’re only playing to your own taste, the crowd ain’t going to be moved by it.
I wasn’t the best mixer, but I knew what the crowd wanted to dance.
Darren: It’s a skill in sales as well. Find the right tune. Same with sales.
Brian: Absolutely. Same with sales.
I think it’s a good analogy for it. If you can read the people, if you know what they want, and training is selling really.
Darren: Yeah.
Brian: You’re selling people on ideas, selling people on, well, here’s a different way to perhaps live your life. It’s quite a big sale in some ways.
Darren: Yeah. And you have to believe it, so that they believe it.
Brian: Yeah, of course. Of course. Act as if.
Darren: So when you were doing work for Tony Robbins, for example, and you’re going out and you’re talking to his audience, are you selling people onto his events? Were you earning commission on that?
Brian: In those early days, I was. Not since then.
My work with Tony Robbins has gone through a sort of phase, if you like, or phases.
When I started, although they called me a trainer, really the term is FSR, field sales representative.
Darren: Right.
Brian: When I would make a one-hour presentation, normally to a sales team, like a financial sales team or someone, at the end of that one hour, one hour thirty presentation, we would sell tickets for the main Tony Robbins event.
So I’d make a one-hour presentation. It was often for free, booked by the office that I worked for. They’d contact all the different sales teams around the country and say, “Would you like a motivational presentation for your team?”
Me or one of the other trainers, there was a little group of us, we’d go make presentations. I’d be doing several of these a day. Then off the back of that presentation, say, “Right, who wants to come to the main event? It’s a great investment in yourself.”
Sell some tickets, come to Tony’s event. I would then help out at the events, and I’d go to the European events and those things.
I left the company that had the licence for Tony Robbins when I came up with the idea of Goal Mapping because they didn’t want to teach it and I did. So I left and set up my own business in 1995.
Then I got recruited as a freelance contractor, not an employee, to train up other trainers, how they teach Tony’s work for the European trainers.
Then in 2010, Tony Robbins contacted me because he’d heard about Goal Mapping, and he said, “We’d like this for our high-end customers, the Platinum Partners.”
I did that for years, and I still do it. I’ve run two workshops for Tony Robbins’ Platinum Partners just in the last couple of years. It’s been an ongoing thing.
A lot of his trainers also use Goal Mapping, so it’s had a good grounding there. We get quite a lot of people that have been to Tony’s events, and they’ve seen Goal Mapping, and they will contact us and want to do more with it. So it’s been quite good.
Likewise, there are other trainers such as T. Harv Eker, John Gray, the man who wrote Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, and Brendon Burchard, who have also endorsed Goal Mapping or have had it at their events, where I’ve gone and run either a guest presentation or a workshop for their premium customers.
The Goal Mapping technique is in lots of different formats. There’s book, there’s audio, and there’s an online platform, a web app. Plus we have more than 1,600 certified coaches, therapists and trainers teaching it around the world.
So the spread’s quite wide. It’s not just me. That brings in a lot of different unusual opportunity, like an invite yesterday to go to Kenya and be part of a leadership event there where they want to do Goal Mapping for Africa, because we have quite a few trainers in Africa now that have been busy spreading the word.
Darren: I was going to ask actually, because that’s led me on perfectly to it. We’re almost out of time now, so as a final question, what is next for you? What’s next on the horizon? Presumably Africa.
Brian: Yeah. I’ve been to Africa a number of times, and the thing that has been best for me is that we put our coach training certification online, and we’ve got trainers in Africa that I’ve never personally met.
They’ve done their training online, but then they’ve downloaded materials and gone out into villages working with poor children from rural areas that have now set their goals, and the first of them are in university studying to be teachers, doctors, lawyers.
One guy alone in Nigeria has reached almost 40,000 children now. He’s just been crazy with the level of activity he’s taken.
I couldn’t have afforded to have gone to Africa and trained him up for free, and he couldn’t have come to England on his income. He’s a very poor guy really, without some form of sponsorship.
The online programme has enabled me to help all manner of people in remote countries around the world. Some of them just directly, and often in our certification programme where they’re now helping others, sometimes street children, sometimes leadership work.
So what’s next for me is to spread as wide as I can with our new mobile phone app, which integrates with our web app. We’ve had a web app for many years, and now the new mobile phone app synchronises with the web app.
With AI, we can actually create a simple feedback system where somebody can get coaching feedback on their goals, and we can do it at scale to help as many people as we want.
My goal is to reach 7 million people within my lifetime. I don’t have plans to retire at the moment. We are somewhere around 6 million, so quite a long way to go still, but it’s taken 30 years to get to 6 million. Hopefully we’re in that fast part of the growth curve, and we’ll get to 7 million in the next few years.
Darren: I’m sure you will.
Brian: I’m 65, so getting it done soon would be good.
Darren: I’m sure you will. Thank you, Brian.
If anyone is listening to this thinking, I would love to find out more about Goal Mapping, find out more about how I can work with you, what’s the best way for them to get in touch?
Brian: goalmapping.com. It’s as simple as that. We have a lot of free materials there. There are free downloads. Even the web app we have is free to use.
If anybody wants to email me, then my email is [brian@goalmapping.com](mailto:brian@goalmapping.com).
Darren: Fantastic. Brian, thank you very much for being a guest on the podcast.
Brian: Thank you, Darren. I really enjoyed my time with you and me. Thank you.
More about Brian:
Brian Mayne is a speaker, trainer and multiple published author best known as the creator of Goal Mapping. After growing up in a travelling funfair family and leaving school unable to read or write, Brian transformed his life through personal development and went on to work with global names including Tony Robbins. His books have been translated into multiple languages, and his Goal Mapping system is now used by coaches, trainers and organisations around the world.
You can connect with Brian here:
Website: https://goalmapping.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianmayne/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BrianMayneSpeaker/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goalmappingbrianmayne/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/brianmayne
About your host:
Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/
Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com
Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk
