Episode 75 – Bo Eason – Athlete, Speaker, Performer, Author

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up guys Xavier katana here with the human experience and wow what a fascinating episode that we recorded live at the bulletproof conference with mr. Bo Eason it’s such an amazing individual with a unique story he just had such a great stage presence and we were able to capture that energy in the conversation cuz he had just gotten finished doing his speech at the conference and so we got him live for you guys truly fun we talked about

leadership storytelling you love this episode guys we survived on your support if you enjoy what we’re doing the human xpcom / donate to help us keep going also find us on youtube facebook twitter or all at the human XP thank you guys so much for listening that you will enjoy this one Oh Ethan thank you so much for being here sir yeah you’re welcome what here what a pal we are at the bulletproof conference live and I’m sitting next to mr. Boies and Bo what

what incredible touching speech delivery performance I mean I don’t know how to really call it was just so profound and reaching and please for for the people listening I mean I was so touched personally by your story and it really really made me think about myself and the things that I’ve experienced and you know for for the people that might not know who you are yeah if you could just you just give us a short little introduction yeah well thanks for

having me Xavier it’s great to be here and and and I’m all warmed up because I was just onstage so we’re doing this right after I left the stage so you know I was a former NFL player that was my dream and and i ended up fulfilling on that dream it got to play in the NFL for five years and then from there I went I wanted to be the best play right I wanted to be the best stage performer and and so I did and I started training at that and it was no different than

playing football the train was pretty much the same and has spent many many years doing it got to go to Broadway got to do a one man show and and then that led to speaking yeah and that’s where we are today I manage a lot of speaking and a lot of training and help people do what I did what I was what I was trying to do which is to be able to tell my own story right and that’s what I do now yeah it’s I mean it’s really incredible

because you had such such drive and ambition you had a pretty tough upbringing the process in which you became as excellent as you are now was I mean kind of crafted through how hard it was for you in the beginning would you would you say that would you agree for sure it’s it’s you know what when when I was I was raised in a way and taught to be the best at what I do no no matter what the occupation is so with that comes a lot of pain because if you’re

aiming to be the best like if you and I were aiming to be the gold medalist this year not just a medalist we want to be the gold medalist we got to go through a lot more pain than the silver medalists or the bronze medalist because it’s just harder yeah to win it all to be the best and so you the minute you have a dream like that you have just invited in a lot of obstacles that are going to come to you which is great because obstacles

give you a great story to tell and that’s the only the people the people that you follow the people that you love I’ve had a lot of obstacles and they’ve had a lot of big mountain to climb and that’s you and I are no different yeah yeah I mean that’s it’s beautiful you know you really you really present it in such a conceptual way that I you know people can relate to you know in the speech that you just gave there are these three main core kind of tenants of

your your being your philosophy and I would love for you to give our audience a taste of that yeah well the you know the first thing that the onions need to know is that they have a story most people me included we just don’t think we have a good story we because we lived this life so it seems mundane to us but it’s not to other people so everyone on who’s listening has to know they have to surrender to the fact that they have a

great defining moment story that define them for the rest of their days and it usually happens in between the ages of 9 and 12 whether you get cut from Little League or you get dumped at the prom those are the years where your life is defined based on what happened and it’s usually painful yeah for the most part so the first critical step is the more personal your story is you know and I want people sharing their story because

this is the only way people know how to follow you and the only way that you can lead is by telling your story so you gotta surrender to the fact that your story has got to be personal if it’s not personal no one will care it’s got to be personal to you second thing is it’s got to be physical we live in a world that it’s lost it’s physicality because we’ve been in the technology age for two generations but my theory is and I think

I’m right about this is the leaders who are going to emerge are going to be the ones who aren’t more in the closest touch with their own nature with mother nature and you know if you think of human beings were predators you know they know we don’t like to be think of ourselves as predators but we are and predators are actually great and printers are actually noble and trustworthy but also their lethal they can do some damage so as long as your

predatory instincts are doing the right thing I want you to use that in your storytelling so number one I wanted to be personal number two it’s got to be physical you’ve got to re remember what it’s like to be physical in your life moving like a predator hunting that kind of movement if you think of the occupations that you cannot look away from whether that’s elite athletes or watching the Olympics maybe it’s watching Mikhail Baryshnikov to do the

ballet right maybe it’s a leet military man charging a beachhead right those kind of occupations you can’t look away from because they don’t apologize for their predatory instincts well I don’t want anyone listening to us today I don’t want anyone apologizing for their predatory instincts either definitely yeah the number of two would be you know yeah physicality of your story number three would be the generosity of your story you and me are in control of how

much we’re willing to give of ourselves usually we don’t we give our effort out in teaspoons I don’t want that i want the floodgates to open and i told the story on stage about a guy named Jerry Rice who is the greatest football player ever to play yeah and he and I were teammates and he taught me so much about how much spirit he was willing to give of himself on a football field but it changed the way I’m married it changed the way I parent it changed the way I

speak onstage it changed everything about my life because of what I saw he was willing to give of himself so those are the three critical steps that I would have everybody in part on their storytelling number one it’s got to be personal number two it’s got to be physical and number three it’s got to be generous you got to give all of yourself Wow I i love i love the three tenets of your philosophy and you know it was it was so interesting to see you on stage

and come you were you had this command of the stage like a military general when you stop talking there wasn’t a whisper I mean you could it was like a pin drop do you know like you had full control of this presence on stage but you started your career with this dream of being really the best football yeah and then you suffered a knee injury and you moved into play writing and performing what was I mean was the parallels like what what are

some of the parallels with that even though they’re completely contrasting opposite things I know I remember doing an interview with the new york times when the play was opening in New York and the the guy wrote down in a sentence in an ex-nfl player turned Broadway playwright and any stop the interview goes I’ve never written that sentence before and I said yeah it’s true it’s funny they seem like they’re 180 degrees apart those two disciplines but the

principles to be in the best remain the same which is you’ve got to have a dream you got to have a plan you got to execute that plan and you just got to be unrelenting and in going for it so I used the same work ethic that I had to be the best safety in the NFL to be the best play right in the world just I just applied the same kind of work I trained Al Pacino became a mentor of mine in that world and he told me what to do he used the best stage performer of his

time he told me exactly what to do so I just did what he told me to do because if the best tells you what to do then guess what you get to be the best to all you got to do is follow the map the problem is no one follows map everyone goes well I don’t want to do all that work yeah well I know but why what why not do all that work what are you going to be doing instead of all that work right right that’s always been my philosophy so even though stage

performance football performance seem like they’re polar opposites the principles of being the best and those two disciplines are exactly the same yeah yeah it’s I mean it’s it’s so coherent and it makes so much sense I mean it really it fits into the larger paradigm of just who who are we and I mean what are what is what our role here yeah and what are we supposed to be doing or are we supposed to be taking commander of our and why haven’t we been taught this why

haven’t be we’ve been given this in school why isn’t this taught and no it makes what you do all that more worthwhile is that you’re giving people this message of self-empowerment how to really take back their lives in in a powerful way but was something that in all this time between the the NFL and your play work but was something that challenged you the most hmm well there’s you know when you’re attempting to be you know the best safety in the NFL you

get a lot of challenges because there’s a lot of other guys wanting to be that too and there’s a lot of guys trying to beat you so there’s huge challenges in that and then you know along the way on that journey I had seven knee surgeries you know I mean so now you know I’ve got to be able to use these legs if I’m to be the best safety and now I can’t use them because they’re injured so you face those challenges all the time and that’s

tho those challenges are actually the best thing that can happen to you they can because that’s where your story that’s where people they gravitate to people who have to face those those challenges they just do that’s why you and I love people who attempted to scale Mount Everest we just were attracted to them we just are because we know that I don’t think I can do that that seemed impossible yet they attempted it or they did it we love and more attracted to

people who have faced all the obstacles our world like our educational system our media in the United States especially really teaches us to those obstacles are bad this this life should be easy no it shouldn’t I think that’s a complete lie I think those obstacles give you story give you power and that gives the impetus for people to follow you and then you’ve got to lead them hmm please go on I mean how how does one become an effective leader yeah well

here’s the thing you know I think everybody would agree that leadership is really a start in our world it’s you don’t see much of it or what we’re told is leadership we think is somebody standing at a podium pointing their finger at us and you know ranting at us that’s not leadership most leaders so-called leaders want power but true leaders that I mean the true pure leaders they don’t want power already have power they’re call that a necessity they see a problem

and they know how to fix it and so they end up leading and they’re reluctant to lead that’s why the best leaders are always reluctant to do so people that run for certain offices and stuff like that they want power they have no idea how to lead because no one’s attracted to anyone who wants power they’re only attracted to people who are taking the call of necessity and taking it on now they’ve done a study on leadership and the study dated back to Julius Caesar it

starts with Julius Caesar and it goes all the way up through 2012 the number one ability that all of those leaders had to have every leader from from Julius Caesar to Lady Gaga to Osama bin Laden to our last presidential election so every leader in between this is who they studied every one of those leaders had to have one ability and that ability was they had to have the ability to tell their own story Wow because unless they

did someone else would tell their story for them and their constituencies or their audiences would not know how to follow them unless they laid out that connective tissue which is your personal story so imagine that in your own life people are waiting for you to lead they’re waiting to follow you they just don’t know how until you share who you are so that they now have the connective tissue to go ahead and follow you oh wow that’s that’s so profound I love that

it’s it’s almost as if there’s a sort of neural network that connects all of us and it’s like this synapse of leadership is is you know relationship between yourself as well as the people you’re leading yep there’s a quote that I heard something about real leaders create other leaders yeah more leaders yeah it’s good I want to you know we’ve we’ve covered you know your philosophy that you live by and your your life and what do you what do you think about effective

storytelling I mean how how does a person tell other than other than just being you know the personal aspect of it yeah how do you how do you structure a story to impact and reach people yeah start here’s a there’s a great learning thing as far as telling your stories far as great storytelling goes start at your lowest moment most people want to start at their highest moment they want to introduce themselves with their story by

saying hey I’m the best safety in the world well you can’t do that because no one cares they care about where you started so I if you notice when I spoke on stage today I started with when I was nine years old I had a dream yeah so now everyone in the audience has gone like this oh this nine year olds got a dream trouble is on its way there’s gonna be some fire breathing dragon gonna try to scream and that’s just how it that’s

great storytelling because now they’re with you if you and me think about movies that you love if you and me were about to make a movie today about climbing Mount Everest think about what the first frame of film would be that we wanted the audience to see what would it be would it be us standing on top of Mount Everest with flags planet and us waving it wouldn’t it would be a standing at the bottom of Mount Everest looking up at an impossible task and

looking at each other and going there’s no way in hell we can do this that’s great storytelling start at the bottom so the audience can help you build all the way to the top yeah wow that’s that’s amazing runt went on to do pretty well you were in you were in New York you in Houston you got some rave reviews by that I mean what was the idea of run you were performing as an NFL player on stage no I was I mean I was an act I you know I

was no longer an NFL player so many years had passed I trained for those 15 years and I got good so I wrote the play and it’s a very personal story to me and the more personally story is the more effect you have so the story really started affecting audiences until it just kept going on I’ve performed that thing like thirteen hundred times Wow and it got bought as a movie and it’s going to be made into a movie and it goes on and on and on because the story

is personal that’s what people respond to they don’t care about sports stories that are general they just don’t care about them if your movie is general that you go to into you’ll walk out of it if it’s specific to the storyteller you’ll stay and you’ll love it so that’s what run was all about and that’s what really gave way to this whole speaking and training career that I have now you know something else that you mentioned was

how nature is undefeated yeah I love that yeah i mean that’s such a beautiful quote there was there’s an algae used about how we are we are kind of number one already because we are conceived yeah and just this the sheer odds of conception are still so massively large yeah that nature has put us in line to be number one already yeah can you can you please expand on that well yeah I just you know you have to remember you know our media and our world pretty much

teaches us that mediocrity is as high as we should hope to get and I don’t think they’re talking to us because look if you think of the day that you were conceived there were 300 million sperm delivered on that day 300 million and you were one of them and the odds of you being born was 300 million to one think of those odds if I if I told you hey Xavier how would you like to train for the gold medal in the in swimming in the Olympics you’re going to have to beat

Michael Phelps to win the gold your let’s train for the next 20 years the odds of you winning Xavier are 300 million to one you’re probably going to say you know I bow those odds don’t sound too good to me but I would say to you you’re wrong cuz you’ve already done it you done that anybody won that race yeah why wouldn’t you take those odds you’re already number one so remember who you are not who the media talks to you like you are

that’s not who you are you are you are a one-time phenomenon remember it and that’s why your story is so unique that’s why you’re already number one you just have to fulfill on your destiny of being number one just to just to play devil’s advocate just for a second how can we all be number one how can everyone on the planet be number one right I know imagine that just imagine for a second if that’s the case imagine that’s all your quest and it’s not even

that we have to achieve number one but it has to be our aspiration that has to be our quest right imagine a world where everyone’s quest was to be the best in the world at what they do so say you and me are in a restaurant right now Xavier in world we just ordered our food and the waitress what if the waitress that’s waiting on us or the waiter what if their only job was to be the best waitress in the world what if that was requested how cool would that meal be

four you and me it would be the best meal we’ve ever had right and what if the chef are the cook who’s ever preparing that meal what if his quest was it be the best chefs in the world yeah how would that meal be different that is that is all I’m interested in is the effort is the aspiration to be the best I want to live in a world where people that’s how they treat their lives because that’s what we truly are yeah I love it man i just say and you know you

you talk about humans being predators and how we we are naturally kind of condition to be in the state yeah I knew you made the analogy of motherhood and talked about how there was a line in the room that no one would take there are eyes online and then you then you related back to human beings yeah and how people should be watching you yeah and if you’re not creating this sort of presents mean it my interpreting this correctly yeah where where if you’re if

people aren’t watching you then you’re not you’re doing it wrong yeah that’s right you’re most people walking around in this day and age are apologizing for who they are now they’re not going around going I’m sorry I’m sorry their body is saying it so you and I could not be here if we weren’t survivalist if we didn’t know how to be a predator because we our ancestors would have died long time ago nobody got eaten they’ve got killed by the the next the neighboring

tribe it would have been eaten by predator Canis that means we’re predators ourselves which means we’re very dangerous which means we know how to take care of business but we think we’re safe we think like we’re walking around like casual like it’s a walk in the park actuality we move like predators and we dude you got to think of the times when you do move like this when you play in the NFL you’ve got to move like this because you’ll get killed

out there if you’re in the military and you’re charging a beachhead you’ve got to move like that or you’ll be dead if you’re a firefighter and you’re charging into a building that’s burning down right you move like a predator because you have to otherwise you’re going to die yeah when you’re a mother and you’re someone’s going to hurt your child you turn into a bear a grizzly bear and you rip the person’s heart out who’s trying

to hurt your child that’s a predator that’s who we naturally are we just gotta re remember who we are and start to bring that to our everyday life and if you do that if you start to access that part of yourself people won’t have the ability to look away from you because no one can look away from a predator it’s just how it works we’re not it’s in our DNA we see a predator we have to pay attention to it because it’s life or death Wow yeah since we’re on

this track your last your last one which is generosity yeah and it being generous with yourself and all the time yeah it’s such a such a beautiful message what does it mean what does it mean to be generous this is how what I mean by it I’m talking about the ability to give all of yourself all of the time now that’s difficult but if you think about it it’s how we’re wired we would just like I talked about the predator piece we know how to give of ourselves we just

don’t we turn down the dial so we don’t get hurt we don’t get our heart broken I want your heart broken so I want you giving all of yourself and I talked about on stage I talked about a teammate of mine Jerry Rice who’s the greatest football player ever to play the game and the reason he is is because he gave all of himself every single time he touched the ball yeah every time not half the time not every tenth time he caught the ball every time he touched

the ball he trained his body to go full speed and get it in the end zone well there’s no accident that he’s got more touchdowns than anyone else in the history of the game because he trained himself to give of himself I just want everyone who’s listening to this to start to train yourself and start to watch yourself how much are you willing to give in your job in your marriage in your parenting in your business how much you willing to give of yourself and

you’re going to put yourself at risk because you know it’s very risky pop proposition yeah because a lot of times there’s a lot of rejection it’s a lot of heartache you know but what are we here to do protect our heart Oh think so hey hey Bo you you strike me as a very hardworking individual and your story touched everyone in that room I mean there wasn’t a single person that wasn’t like wow this is amazing you know I just to kind of wrap up here because I know

that your time is short but if there was if there was one thing that you could kind of go back and rewind in time 20 years to your younger self would there be a message that you could kind of delivered yeah I look my dad woke me up and I four older sisters he woke them up and I have an older brother so I’m the youngest of six he woke us up every single morning by rubbing our backs and he would whisper in our ears that we were the best

and he would say keep moving partner you’re the best and then he drop a few expletives right there this is how he talked but that’s how he woke us up yeah so for all those years all I heard was you’re the best you’re the best get up there keep moving partner you’re the best keep going keep going keep going yeah and if if people would just remember that that that’s actually what they’re here to do is to fulfill on that and you have to also stay true you know

to your dream I do this you know just like my dad I do that to my kids I have three little kids and I do the same thing to them every morning I wake him up I tell them they’re the best and I tell them it’s their job to find out what their dream is and I’ll help them achieve it and so with the rest of the world and stay true to it and so I had that growing up I was lucky and what I’d love to give this world and what I tell all my clients and all the people that I

work with and my kids is you’re the best and I will constantly reminding them that they’re the best and they’re supposed to fulfill on this destiny and that’s their job and if they’re not going to do that then shame on them wow man I i love it i truly love it i wish we had more time Bo but we don’t where can people find your work your website bowie’s and yeah my it is it’s Bowie Singh Kham so it’s Bo my last name is east and EAS o n.com and all my

trainings are on there i do a three day event every year twice a year and i bring people in from all over the world and train them on how to tell their story how to physicalize their story and it’s a really amazing event and people are interested in that it’s something that’s really really want to come to and then you know if people have ever had that inkling you know like that that little whisper in your ear that man yeah that I I was put on at 300 million to

one odds and I’m the one they want to fulfill on that I would go to Bowie Singh Kham and I always start to get involved with what I do because all you need when you have dreams of being the best you got to reminded of who you are because you forget yeah you know with all the things coming at us and all the distractions you forget who you are yeah yeah so I’d love to have thank you so much for making the time to do this this is incredible this is a human experience

my name is Xavier katana my guest mr. Bowie sin but was truly proud pleasure sir thank you thank you so much for taking the time to yeah you’re welcome every rose is a blast thank you you guys we will see you guys next week thank you guys so much for listening