The Place: Starbucks on 5th and Lamar

The Cup: Honoree was making the most of her time at Starbucks and had a meeting before I got there, so her cup was full and I failed to ask what was in it.  I believe I may have seen a tea bag tucked inside though.  I do know what I had – it was a double espresso (my third of the day – but who’s counting?). Yum!  Starbucks does a fine job on that little guy.

Background: Last week after Thom Singer (Cup 17) and I had a cup and a visit, I posted a link to the blog on Twitter as did Thom. And lucky for me he did because I got a note from Honoree telling me she enjoyed reading it and wanted to meet for coffee.  Hooray for me.

While I’m normally an advocate for preparation, for this project I purposefully do zero background digging on the person I am about to meet with. My feeling is that the more I “know” about the person going into the meeting, the less it’s like meeting with a stranger. Plus, all the stuff I’d discover might color my view of them and has the potential to direct the line of questioning. Or I might even skip over certain questions thinking I already know the answer.

Why do I bring it up today? Well, it’s because of a side-effect that I hadn’t anticipated. After meeting with Honoree, I checked out her blog, her bio, her books…and I tell you what – I would have been intimidated as hell if I’d have known half the stuff this woman has accomplished before I met with her. So my no preparation policy really saved the day this time.

I’m a little obsessed with success. I am curious how people accomplish it, I ask tons of questions on the subject, I read everything I can find, and  I am always impressed by those who achieve it. Especially when their success is earned and paid for with hard work, sweat and at least a few sleepless nights. Hey, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I just feel success on the heels of a hard fought battle is way better than easy peasy. When my team is playing football, I don’t want them winning by five touchdowns.  That’s not a fun game to watch. I prefer a nail biter, fight the the finish, leap off the couch in the final seconds declaring victory type of game.  So I’m about to tell you a story of success and as you’ll learn, it is the well-deserved kind.

Honoree shares with me a bit of her background. She grew up with entrepreneurial parents, which meant they moved a lot. She describes her teenage self as tall, unattractive, awkward and with a funny name. Bundle all of that together and what you have is someone with few friends and lacking skills to effectively make any.

After graduating high school, she moved from Albuquerque to New York City to pursue a modeling career (take that mean high school girls!). She did some commercials and to pay the bills she began doing administrative work for the Commissioner of the NHL. I got the sense that while she didn’t mind it there, it wasn’t her life’s passion. It was during this time though that a life passion did spark for Honoree.  Two passions actually, but only one proved life-long. The first was when a friend told her about a guy and the second, well, was when a friend told her about a guy.

The first guy was Tony Robbins and the introduction was in the form of his book, Awaken the Giant Within.  She picked up the book and for the first (and only) time in her life, she stayed up all night reading. When she went to work the next day, she was still reading.  She joked that her boss came in to ask her to type something and she was thinking, “Uh, can’t you see I’m busy reading?’ The book was not only the start of a life long love for Mr. Nice Teeth, but also for learning. She moved on to other authors such as Napoleon Hill, Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy. Without necessarily intending to do so, she had embarked upon a journey toward personal development, a concept previously foreign to her.

I’d asked Honoree about an event that shaped who she is today and she selected four.  We’ll get to the other three in a moment, but the first was growing up in an abusive household.  When Honoree was 16 years old her father broke her collarbone, cheekbone and several ribs in what she describes as an attempt to kill her. So as you can imagine, personal development took a back seat to personal survival. As horrifying as that must have been for her, she is quick to tell me she’s OK. “It was 26 years ago. I’ve healed and I’m OK.”

We talk for a bit about self-esteem and Honoree describes where she was at the Tony Robbins point in her life with an interesting analogy. She compares her self-esteem with debt.  “When you are covered up in debt, you just want to get to zero.  All you want is to not owe anyone a penny.  That’s how I was with my self-esteem.  I wasn’t trying to feel good about myself, I was just trying to get to zero.”  Tony Robbins and the others she was reading were opening up opportunities to look at herself and her life differently. She was learning skills that would prove helpful for life. And not just her own life.

I did say there were two guys, didn’t I? The second guy  introduced her to by a friend ended up being Mr. Right (for the moment) and the introduction led to a wedding, a wonderfully amazing daughter and eventually a divorce. I mentioned a bit ago there were four events that Honoree named as life-shapers. Surviving an abusive childhood was one, becoming a mother was the second and the third was her divorce. At the age of 31, Honoree found herself a single mother, living in Hawaii reeling from the shocking loss of her marriage.

In Hawaii she had built a successful network marketing business (one of the hardest kinds of businesses to build) and had found a passion and talent for coaching others to achieve the same success she’d achieved. After the divorce she moved to Las Vegas where she focused her energy on building her executive coaching and corporate speaking/training business. While she was finding success professionally, she was feeling pretty miserable in most other aspects of her life.  She’d lost her partner and was trying to parent by herself. She was lonely and frustrated. But rather than sit on the couch throwing herself a pity party, she decided to use her coaching techniques and all she’d learned on personal development and turn things around.

Honoree tells me later on, “Everything is good. Everything that happens has the seeds in it of amazingness.” But she’s quick to add, “But when you’re in the shit, it is difficult to see your way out.” And luckily for many people, they have Honoree to help them through the shit.  She’s has walked on fire, she has survived abuse, she has felt alone and abandoned and yet, she triumphed. And this triumph is the fourth event she names as life shaping. She has gone through so much and yet managed to find success on the other side of it all. These are lessons too valuable to keep inside, so she shares them.

Honoree’s impact goes beyond the lives of those she coaches thanks to a chance encounter with Chicken Soup For the Soul author, Mark Victor Hansen whom she met in the back of the room at an event they were both attending. He began asking her some questions about what she was doing and then asked her if she had a speech that people loved. Yes, she did. “Well, turn it into a book then,” he advised.  So she did.  Much like with her reading, one book lead to another, which lead to another.  She’s now on book nine with no end in sight. Honoree’s Golden Rule is “to leave things better than I find them.” We are of the same sisterhood on this one. I knowingly nod as she describes picking up toilet paper off a restroom floor, or stopping to chat with someone who looks like they need some uplifting. It’s something I strive for myself. Strive, fail and strive some more. I’m glad to have found someone who shares the desire.

The best thing that’s happened to her in the last five years? Her new marriage. As she talks about her husband, her face changes. As bright and animated as she is already, she lights up even more when she talks about her husband and her daughter.  It’s obvious that these are the two loves of her life and they make all the success in the world that much sweeter.

I ask her about the things on her bucket list.  She tells me about learning foreign languages and talks about traveling the world. And then she says, “And I want my life to have mattered. I want the lives of the people I meet to be better because I touched them.” I know with 100% certainty that this one needs a check mark by it, because in the 90 minutes we spent together, my life is positively better. She’s an inspiration, a breath of fresh air and a ray of sunshine. And as we part and she tells me we’re now BFF’s, I laugh along and secretly hope she’s serious. Yes, she’s that cool!

To learn more about my new bestie, check out her website and then stalk her on Twitter.  Go ahead, she doesn’t mind!