What do music and triathlon have to do with sales, leadership and language?

I began my singing career at the age of 41 when I woke up one day and simply declared to myself and the rest of the world, "I want to learn how to sing". And I did! I hired a vocal coach in NYC and began to practice scales and began to learn. I was a total novice with not one music lesson of any kind in my 41 year old bones. After about three years of practice and relentless singing in karaoke bars around the NYC area, I was ready and so my girlfriend Doreen (my wife now) and I started a band called Strange Brew. (Cool name right!) We did an Eric Clapton Tribute because people thought I was Slowhand. At the time, if I was in a blues club in NYC, people would be tugging on Doreen's arm, asking her if I was in fact, EC. It was bizzare and it was fun. The important piece here is this, when we advertised an Eric Clapton tribute, the band had to deliver and I had to deliver vocally. And we did. Here's a video, which surfaced on YouTube from a rehersal in 1994:

We played all over the NYC doing about 100 shows from 1994-1998. The last show I did as a front man for a rock cover band was in 2000 with the band being called The Strange Brew Rock-n-Roll Review. There was a new line-up, new songs and new look, here's a poster from this version of the band.

As my consulting business began to grow I needed another creative outlet and so I decided to take on the sport of triathlon by following the same path I chose for music. That is, I declared that I wanted to become a triathlete to myself and to others and then began the process by learning. Again, I was a total novice in a new world, so I enrolled in a triathlon training camp in Florida in the spring of 2007. And so began a quest that I'm still very much engaged in. To the right is a photo from the camp in Florida; to the left, a photo from the Philadelphia Triathlon which I came in first place (age group) this past year.


What does all this have to do with sales, customer service, management and leadership?

In music as with sports a good coach will break down what you need to learn into bite size activities which you need to practice over and over and over and over... until you have embedded the new skill into your nervous system and it is now literally part of you. You own it. Musically, when it's show time, there is no time to think about the song, you need to 'be the song'. It's much the same in triathlon and other sports. When the race starts, it's too late to be practicing because it's show time. All your moves, swimming, running and biking as well as the two transitions, need to be totally programmed into your body and your nervous system.

One of the main reasons I started Molloy BDG in 2001 was because it became very clear to me after having worked with some amazing vocal coaches and athletic trainers that in the world of business, sales people, CSRs, managers and leaders, simply don't know what to practice. I mean where do you begin to practice leadership skills or how to handle 'inbound' sales calls or 'irate' customers?

Stay tuned and I'm going to get into the way we break down each of these disciplines into bite sized linguistic 'acts' or 'moves' which make learning possible in a new and exciting way.

See you next week!

Dan