Podcast
The Thought Leader Revolution Podcast
Hosted by Nicky Billou · EN
MAKE THE DIFFERENCE YOU WERE BORN TO MAKE
The Business of Thought Leadership podcast is about building your thought leadership around your expertise, your brand and your name. To become well known and highly regarded in the market place for the results you are able to produce for your clients.
Our guests are top thought leaders who have done it. They've become widely known for their expertise and results they're able to deliver for their clients. They all love what they do and get paid very well for doing it.
You'll meet entrepreneurs that have leveraged thought leadership in driving business revenue, coaches that were unknown and barely making ends who later became celebrities and took their income into the 7 figures, consultants that transformed into best-selling authors and built multi-million dollar firms and senior executives who followed their passion, left their day jobs and are changing the world.
We've had interviews with notables such as New Times Best-Selling Author Seth Godin, success and investment coaching icon, Raymond Aaron, a personal coach to billionaires, Alex Charfen & Tony Robbins' Director of Coaching, Marc Von Musser.
Steve Jobs once said "The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."
Are you crazy enough to join us in making the difference you were born to make. We want you to 10x your impact, your income and your influence every 12 months.
Financially successful people with purpose and passion are changing the world and we want to inspire you to be one of them.
51episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
EP801: Rick Rosenfield - The California Pizza Kitchen Story
2w ago00:42:21Tap to summarize"It's not the concept that got us there. We were blessed to have created barbecue chicken pizza. But if we didn't know how to trust and empower and manage people, we would have died with one restaurant." Most people who know California Pizza Kitchen know the barbecue chicken pizza. Fewer know that the two men who built it were federal prosecutors who had never run a restaurant, borrowed a quarter million dollars, mortgaged their homes, and lost their first chef after one month. Rick Rosenfield, co-founder of California Pizza Kitchen, joins Nicky to tell the full story — from a single Beverly Hills location in 1985 to a 14,000-employee national brand sold in 2011. What he describes is less a business story than a people story: how two lawyers with no industry experience figured out, on the fly, that culture was the actual product. The barbecue chicken pizza brought people in the door. The R.O.C.K. values — Respect, Opportunity, Communication, Kindness — brought them back, and kept 32 regional directors on board for an average of 14 years each. Rick and Nicky get into the mechanics of a 40-year partnership that worked, including the one rule Rick credits most: they never said "I told you so." They dig into high standards as a hiring filter, the decision to go non-smoking before any other national chain, what it means to be a work-with company instead of a work-for company, and why a great concept is not enough without the people to carry it. Rick closes with three pieces of advice drawn from four decades of building something real — all of them applicable well beyond the restaurant business. Live by R.O.C.K. — Respect, Opportunity, Communication, Kindness. Let these four values guide your hiring, your culture, and your daily decisions, not just your mission statement. 2. Commit to perseverance over momentum. The path is rarely a straight line — it stalls, crashes, and restarts. Stay true to your vision through the cycles rather than abandoning it when circumstances get hard. 3. Do the right thing. It is not always easy to do, but it is almost always easy to identify. Build the habit of acting on that knowledge even when it is costly. Learn more & connect: Rick Rosenfield: https://www.rickrosenfield.com The California Pizza Kitchen Story (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com Resources mentioned: The California Pizza Kitchen Story by Rick Rosenfield — https://www.rickrosenfield.com The War of Art by Steven Pressfield — https://www.stevenpressfield.com The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield — https://www.stevenpressfield.com Jack Carr (foreword author) — https://www.jackcarrusa.com R.O.C.K. culture framework — discussed in The California Pizza Kitchen Story Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.
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TTLR 800: Susan Winchester - The Heart Of Healing
3w ago00:37:32Tap to summarize"I would have to say that at least 30 of those years, my success was fueled by my underlying belief that I wasn't good enough. And that's a really dysfunctional way to live a career." — Susan Winchester Susan Winchester built one of the most decorated HR careers in corporate America — 36 years in the field, 16 and a half of them as a chief HR officer at Fortune 150 and Fortune 500 companies. She did it while quietly believing, for most of those decades, that she was not good enough. That contradiction is the foundation of her book Healing at Work, co-authored with Martha Finney, and it is what makes her perspective so unusual: she has seen this dynamic from the inside of the C-suite, from the coaching chair, and from her own life. The conversation moves from the ACEs research — a landmark Kaiser Permanente and CDC study showing that nearly two-thirds of adults experienced at least one adverse childhood event — to the practical reality of what that means in professional settings. Winchester introduces the concept of "bumper car crashes" at work: those jarring moments of conflict or upset that feel disproportionate, because they often are. They are old wounds being activated by present circumstances, and most people going through them have no idea that is what is happening. Nicky brings his own experience to this one, sharing a moment from a recent men's overnight retreat where a trusted peer offered him Viktor Frankl's insight on the space between stimulus and response — and what it meant to actually sit with it. It is a candid exchange, and Winchester handles it with both precision and grace. Susan closes with three concrete steps anyone can start this week — including one deceptively simple question that can interrupt a reactive spiral before it takes hold. 1. Ask yourself "Am I sure?" the next time you feel upset at work. When a colleague seems cold or critical and the story starts building in your head, stop and question whether you actually know that to be true. 2. Start a journal and track your own bumper car reactions. Note your limiting beliefs, your behavioral patterns under stress, and where you tend to land — fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Awareness of your hardwiring is the first step to changing it. 3. Practice self-compassion over the next five days. Choose one concrete act of kindness toward yourself each day — not as a reward, but as a discipline. Learn more & connect: https://www.susanwinchester.com Resources mentioned: Healing at Work — Susan Winchester and Martha Finney A Changed Mind — David Bayer The Language of Letting Go — Melody Beattie Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl The ACEs Study (Kaiser Permanente and CDC) — https://www.cdc.gov/aces Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.
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EP799: Terri Lonowski - What Is Soulful Listening
3w ago00:28:26Tap to summarize"One deeply connected conversation can change the trajectory of a life and the world forever." — Terri Lonowski Most frameworks for communication tell you to speak more clearly, ask better questions, or manage your body language. Terri Lonowski's Soulful Listening does something different — it starts with how you listen, not how you talk. And after 14 years of developing, testing, and teaching it, the results she can point to are hard to dismiss. Terri traces the framework back to her grandmother Helga, who had a rare quality — a quiet, solid presence that made everyone around her feel completely seen. Growing up above a chaotic family restaurant, with a high school guidance counselor who told her she'd never leave her small Nebraska town, that presence was a lifeline. It became a model. After coaching human-centered design teams whose work was presented at the White House, and after months of sequestering herself to understand what made deep connection work, Terri arrived at five elements: self-care, full presence, quantum listening, inspired action, and circling back. The framework is grounded in neuroscience as much as intuition. Gallup's most recent global engagement data shows 80% of employees feel disengaged at work — a $10 trillion annual problem that Terri argues traces directly to the breakdown of genuine listening. What happens in the body when you don't feel heard isn't just emotional. It's physiological. Her TEDx talk, "Nobody's Listening and It's Killing Us," names the stakes directly. The most vivid proof point is her son Jacob — raised inside the culture of Soulful Listening as a single mother, who at fifteen stood in a cornfield and articulated a vision. Terri listened. She took inspired action. Before the end of his junior year, he had earned a full scholarship to Georgia Tech as an offensive lineman. He is now a doctor of physical therapy working exclusively with Navy SEALs. Terri closes with three concrete steps anyone can begin this week — no prior training required. Expert Action Steps: Take a breath and listen. Before entering any conversation, take a few intentional breaths — in through the nose, out through the mouth — to arrive present rather than distracted. Get quiet and listen to yourself. There is a wisdom within you that can guide you toward your next step and your highest path. Give it silence to speak. Be there for others. Show up fully for the people in your life. Human connection isn't a luxury — it is foundational to who we are and how we thrive. Learn more & connect: Terri's website: https://www.soulfullistening.com Connect with Terri on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terrilonowski Terri's TEDx Talk — "Nobody's Listening and It's Killing Us": search "Terri Lonowski TEDx" on YouTube Resources mentioned: Gallup Global Workforce Engagement Study — https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx TEDx Talk: "Nobody's Listening and It's Killing Us" by Terri Lonowski — search YouTube Soulful Listening framework — https://www.soulfullistening.com Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.
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EP798: Kevin 'The Connector' Thompson - The un-AI
4w ago00:40:33Tap to summarize"There is not a person on the face of this earth that gets too much appreciation. We all crave more genuine appreciation." — Kevin Thompson Kevin Thompson is back — and this conversation goes places his previous appearance didn't. Kevin is known in entrepreneurial circles as a connector in the truest sense: someone who has spent decades building relationships not as a tactic but as a way of being. The results speak for themselves — nearly 600 strategic partnerships and over $16 million in course sales over 12 years, built without a single ad campaign. His story starts on Alaska's Bering Sea, where he spent six years as a commercial fisherman after leaving the Army. He nearly lost his life to a rogue wave in 1995, came home, and started a cleaning and restoration business that promptly cost him $300,000 before he found his footing. A mentor named Joe Polish helped him rebuild it into a referral-only operation. A mold-remediation website he built on the side started generating $15,000 a month. One 50-minute talk at an industry event produced $35,000 in course sales. He sold the cleaning business the following year and never looked back. What emerges in this conversation is the framework Kevin has been running on instinctively his whole life — and only recently been able to articulate: trust in competence, trust in character, alignment of interests, alignment of values. When those four things converge, business becomes easy. Nicky and Kevin also explore what they're now calling the Un-AI Conference — a deliberately curated in-person gathering for entrepreneurs who believe human connection is not a soft skill but a strategic edge. Kevin closes with three concrete steps anyone can put into practice today — starting with a challenge involving your phone, 10 contacts, and zero expectation of anything in return. Send appreciation texts to 10 people today. Pick family, friends, or business contacts and text each one a single thing you genuinely appreciate about them. Ask for nothing in return — not even a response. Notice what comes back. 2. Ask questions you actually want answered. In every conversation, listen for the real answer and ask a follow-up based on what you heard. The experience of being seen, heard, and understood is rare — and it builds more relationship capital than any pitch. 3. Open yourself to receiving. Being a generous giver is a strength, but closing yourself off to receiving — or refusing to ask for help — limits how much you can ultimately give. The two sides of generosity need each other. Learn more & connect: Connect with Kevin Thompson on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kevintheconnector Resources mentioned: Joe Polish — marketing mentor and creator of the Piranha Marketing system for the cleaning industry: https://www.joepolish.com Get Mold Solutions — Kevin's original mold remediation content site (the foundation of his publishing business) Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.
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TTLR 797: Jesan Sorrells - How Great Books Can Make You Smarter & Better
4w ago01:01:51Tap to summarize"You are made in the glorious image of Jesus Christ and the Son of God — you have that in you, so don't hide your light under a bushel. Tell people what you have learned through the process." — Jesan Sorrells Jesan Sorrells has been reading great books and drawing leadership lessons from them for five seasons now. His podcast, Leadership Lessons from the Great Books, covers the full spectrum — Augustine, Homer, Jane Austen, Joan Didion, Carl Hiaasen — because his view is that you can learn something from almost everything, and that the books business culture tends to dismiss often contain the most honest insights about how human beings actually behave. In this conversation, Sorrells and Nicky go deep on why fiction matters for leaders, what reading biographies of McKinley and Kennedy reveals about the present moment, and how the long game in jiu-jitsu rhymes with the long game in business. There's a recurring thread: real progress takes time, optimization can be the enemy of meaning, and the people most ready to receive help are rarely the ones who seem to need it most. Nicky brings his own journey into the room — 58 pounds lost, a bodybuilding competition at 57, and a four-year commitment to earn his IFBB pro card at 60. Sorrells brings a 15-year jiu-jitsu plan and a grandmother who had no patience for poor thinking. The result is a conversation that is warm, honest, and genuinely hard to skim. Jesan closes with three concrete steps anyone can start today — none of them require a library card, though one will probably lead you to get one. Expert Action Steps: 1. Turn off Netflix and stop doom-scrolling. Put the phone down and redirect that attention toward the people and things in your household that actually matter. 2. Engage with discipline in the small things. Do one hard thing every day — start small, then build. You do not need to be an athlete to practice this; you just need to be consistent. 3. Stop hiding your light. Share what you have learned through the process — first with your family, then with your community. You were made to contribute, not to quietly accumulate. Learn more & connect: Connect with Jesan Sorrells on LinkedIn — search Jesan Sorrells and mention you heard him on this show. Leadership Lessons from the Great Books — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube https://www.leadershiptoolbox.net Resources mentioned: Slouching Towards Bethlehem — Joan Didion The Optimist's Daughter — Eudora Welty Emotional Intelligence — Daniel Goleman The Dip — Seth Godin Undisputed Truth (autobiography) — Mike Tyson Kennedy — Ted Sorensen Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.
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EP796: Geanina Popent - How To Build Muscle After 50
Jul 700:33:40Tap to summarize"Don't be lazy. Don't make excuses. If you want changes, you have to make the change." Nina Popent started her fitness journey in 2017, won a boot camp challenge, used the prize money on a personal trainer, and then built a serious physique at home during COVID with resistance bands and a few dumbbells. Her first bodybuilding competition was five years ago — she walked on stage without a coach, wearing a mask, with only her daughter beside her. What happened backstage that day led directly to a coaching career she is still building today, at 51. This conversation is for anyone who has ever thought that serious physical transformation belongs to the young. Nina is turning 52. She wakes at 5:30, packs four meals every morning, commutes an hour to her day job, and is in the gym by 6 p.m. — staying until 9:30 or 10. She has eaten the same breakfast for five years. She does not believe motivation is the variable most people think it is. She believes in structure, patience, and the willingness to protect your training time the same way you protect a shift at work. Nicky joins in with his own training updates — targeting a pro card at 60, currently building toward a heavier stage weight than his last competition — and the two compare notes on what building muscle in the second half of life actually requires. The aesthetic results are real, but both agree the deeper payoff is energy, cognitive clarity, and the confidence that compounds with every year of consistent work. Nina closes with four concrete action steps for anyone ready to stop waiting for motivation and start building something. Don't be lazy. Don't make excuses. If you want changes, make the change. And above all, be patient — because the work compounds if you let it. Expert Action Steps: 1. Stop being lazy. Treat your training time as a second job — non-negotiable, scheduled, and protected from excuses. 2. Stop making excuses. Every obstacle has a workaround; the decision to change must come before circumstances become convenient. 3. If you want changes, make the change. Waiting for motivation or the right moment is the strategy that keeps most people exactly where they are. 4. Be patient. Muscle at this stage of life builds slowly — the results are real, but they require time that most people are not willing to give. Learn more & connect: Hammer Fitness: https://www.hammerfitness.ca Nina on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coach_janina Resources mentioned: Hammer Fitness (Toronto gym and coaching): https://www.hammerfitness.ca Amor Nikic (head coach, Hammer Fitness): https://www.hammerfitness.ca University of Toronto Faculty of Dentistry: https://www.dentistry.utoronto.ca Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.
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EP795: TL Nuggets #240 - The Power Of Feedback
Jul 300:06:20Tap to summarize"Between stimulus and response is a space. And in that space lies the opportunity for growth and freedom." — Viktor Frankl Nicky Billou is a high-achiever who, by his own admission, spent decades being bad at one of the most important skills in personal development: receiving feedback. Not ignoring it exactly — but going defensive, dismissing it, finding reasons it didn't apply. Sound familiar? Recording from his car during a rare day off on World Cup week, Nicky shares what shifted after two people he genuinely respects told him the same thing within two weeks — the second time at a men's overnight retreat in the Muskokas. Instead of deflecting, he finally sat with it. And in doing so, he found his way to one of Viktor Frankl's most powerful ideas: that between stimulus and response there is a space, and that space is where growth and freedom actually live. The practice Nicky lands on isn't passive acceptance. He's equally direct about the trap of agreeing with every piece of feedback you receive. The real skill is the pause — listening without immediately reacting, evaluating honestly, and then deciding what actually applies. It's harder than it sounds for driven people. It's also more valuable. Resources mentioned: Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl Viktor Frankl Institute: https://www.viktorfrankl.org Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.
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EP794: Roman Bodnarchuk - The Future is Now, And Its AI!
Jun 3000:48:30Tap to summarize"The excuses are over. More millionaires and billionaires have been created through AI in the last 40 months than through any other industry we've ever seen — and this is just the beginning." Most people using AI are getting about 2% of what it can actually do. Not because the technology is too complicated, but because they have never set it up properly — and nobody has shown them how. Roman Bodnarczuk has been working in artificial intelligence since 2017, when a conversation with Dr. Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto changed his view of what was coming. He is now one of Canada's leading AI strategists and the founder of N5R.AI, and what he finds everywhere he goes — in boardrooms, at conferences, on executives' phones — is the same gap: people know the buzzwords, but they have not done the setup. They have not personalized their AI. They have not connected it to their data. They have never had the moment where it stops feeling like a search engine and starts feeling like a co-founder. In this conversation, Roman walks through the setup live, in real time, with Nicky working through his own ChatGPT configuration on screen. He explains why personalization is not optional, how connecting your email, calendar, and documents changes everything the AI produces, and why speaking to your AI — rather than typing at it — is the fastest way to close the gap between where you are and what you want to build. He also shares the story of two brothers who took a $20,000 investment, used twelve off-the-shelf AI tools, and built a business to $400 million in revenue in a single year — with no employees and no outside investors. Roman closes with three concrete steps anyone can take today — none of them require technical expertise, and the most important one takes about ten minutes. Expert action steps: 1. Personalize your AI immediately. Go into the settings of whichever AI you use — ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — and fill in the custom instructions, occupation, and "more about you" fields. Ask the AI itself to generate optimized versions of all three based on everything it knows about you; each section should be around 1,350 characters. 2. Connect your data. Link your email, calendar, Google Drive, and any other apps you use regularly. The AI is only as useful as the context it has access to; connecting your real data transforms generic responses into genuinely relevant ones. 3. Talk to your AI every day. Speak rather than type — it is three times faster and more natural. Use it as a thinking partner, a coach, a strategist. The more you engage with it and ask it to remember what matters to you, the more useful it becomes over time. Learn more & connect: https://www.N5R.AI Resources mentioned: ChatGPT — https://www.chatgpt.com Claude (Anthropic) — https://www.claude.ai Gemini (Google) — https://gemini.google.com HeyGen (AI video and avatar creation) — https://www.heygen.com Super Whisper (voice-to-text app) — https://superwhisper.com Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.
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EP793: Joseph Riggio - How To Make Better Decisions
Jun 2600:34:46Tap to summarize"Arrogance is the ability to recognize you own the decision. You own the idea of what to do. I make the decision — and then when I make it, I own the responsibility, whether it works or it doesn't." Joseph Riggio has spent 36 years working where decisions carry real weight — with C-suite executives, high-net-worth investors, and special forces operators around the world. What he has found, consistently, is that the quality separating great leaders from well-meaning ones has almost nothing to do with intelligence or strategy. It has to do with ownership. In this conversation, Riggio introduces the concept of ontological arrogance — the subject of his recent book — and makes the case that collaborative leadership, as it has been practiced and preached over the last two decades, has inadvertently coached leaders out of the one thing they most need: the willingness to stand in their own authority, make the call, and own what happens next. He draws on his background in NLP, his formative training under Werner Erhard, and years of applied work with the highest-stakes decision-makers in the world to explain where the breakdown happens — and what it looks like when someone gets it right. Nicky and Joseph also explore the Vince Lombardi story that crystallises the whole idea: the difference between being someone's coach and being their friend, and why the best leaders know how to be both without confusing the two. The conversation covers the parallels between individual leadership accountability and how great national leaders — Trump, Reagan, Roosevelt — have demonstrated the same pattern of gathering broad input and then making the call decisively. Riggio's path to this work began in architecture in 1980s New York, ran through Werner Erhard's training rooms, and was shaped by years of study under Roy Frazier and alongside John LaValle, Richard Bandler's co-trainer worldwide. His Decision Architecture Correction Methodology is the practical expression of everything that background produced. Learn more & connect: https://www.josephriggio.com Resources mentioned: In Praise of the Ontology of Arrogance — Joseph Riggio Sex, Possibility, and Transformation — Marsha Martin The Sterling Men's Weekend — https://www.sterlingmensweekend.com Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.
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EP792: JJ Virgin - What If Age Was Your Biggest Advantage
Jun 2300:57:38Tap to summarize"People who are excited about aging live seven and a half years longer than people who aren't." JJ Virgin is one of the most recognizable names in health, nutrition, and wellness entrepreneurship — a four-time New York Times bestselling author and the founder of two distinct businesses: one aimed at consumers through her Well Beyond 40 platform, and one aimed at healthcare practitioners through the Health Business Growth Collective. She joins Nicky for a conversation that moves fast and covers a lot of ground. The central thread running through everything is the belief — supported by research Virgin cites and by decades of watching people age well or poorly — that the story you tell yourself about getting older shapes the biological reality of it. The entrepreneurs and practitioners who stay sharp, vital, and relevant into their sixties and seventies tend to share one thing: it doesn't dawn on them to act old. They keep seeking challenge, keep falling in love with what they are learning, and refuse to accept that the best chapters are behind them. The conversation goes deep on the emerging science of peptides and regenerative medicine — two fields that Virgin believes are on the verge of becoming mainstream, and two fields that face meaningful resistance from the pharmaceutical industry. She explains what urolithin A, BPC-157, and regenerative biologics like exosomes and PRP actually do, why compounding pharmacies are more rigorously monitored than most people assume, and how this science first came onto her radar when her son was fighting for his life after a near-fatal accident. There is also a strong thread on sales and business — Virgin's argument that selling is a moral responsibility, not something to avoid, and what happens when healthcare practitioners treat their discomfort with sales as a virtue rather than a liability. JJ closes with three concrete steps anyone can act on immediately — none of them require a gym membership, a supplement budget, or a complete business overhaul. Expert Action Steps: 1. Move intentionally every single day. Daily movement is not optional maintenance — it is the most powerful tool available for extending both health span and mental sharpness. 2. Keep learning and seek out discomfort. Look specifically for challenges that force you to adapt — whether that is lifting heavier, taking on a new skill, or entering a room where you are the least experienced person. 3. Choose your thoughts about age and possibility with deliberate care. The research suggests that how you feel about aging shapes how you age. Decide who you want to be physically and mentally, and orient your daily choices around that version of yourself. Learn more & connect: JJVirgin.com Well Beyond 40 podcast — available on all major platforms Health Business Growth Collective — https://thehbgc.com/ Health Business Growth Show — available on all major platforms Resources mentioned: The Virgin Diet by JJ Virgin — JJVirgin.com The Sugar Impact Diet by JJ Virgin — JJVirgin.com Understanding Women by Alison Armstrong — allisonarmstrong.com Urolithin A / Timeline — timelinenutrition.com BPC-157 — available through compounding pharmacies; consult a functional medicine practitioner Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.
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