#123 The SDR DiscoCall Podcast - John Mason

Welcome to the SDR Disco Call Vidcast and Podcast, a show designed for brand new sales reps working in the world of tech sales. I'm your host, Neil Buyen, and I'm going to be taking you on a journey on the SDR Disco Call Vidcast and Podcast. Did you know that you can watch this show live with the guests on YouTube? This show is available on YouTube at happyselling .

io. Hello, listeners, watchers, fans, and subscribers. Welcome to another chapter of the SDR Disco Call Show. If you're stumbling upon this and wondering what is this all about, well, there is a great profession called sales.

And within that element, there's something called sales development. And this is typically at the beginning of a sales cycle when sales reps are speaking to prospects or potential future customers, and they're trying to convince them to come on board with their solution or product. And what I like to do is find beautiful and interesting interesting people within this industry to learn more about their stories as to how did they get into this what have they learned what have they experienced to a inspire other people to come into this beautiful profession or b to help them realize that they're not alone and my name is Neil Booyan your host if you're listening to this in your local podcast platform if you could do us a massive favor by giving this a rating and perhaps share it with your friends peers or even pet dogs if that makes you happy or if you're watching this on youtube if you can make sure that you like comment and subscribe down below because what you're telling the algorithm is that this is good content and it will help us get our reach out to more and more people across the globe.

Now with this guest this is somebody that I met on a power hour earlier this year and we got the talking and we exchanged LinkedIn notes and I really enjoy this guy's posts on LinkedIn and he talks about a lot of different topics that float my boat and get me interested. So we got the talk and we said come on bro you need to come on to the show. So guest without further ado could you please tell us who are you, where do you work? Where are you based in the world?

Thanks, Dale. That's a lovely intro. So my name is John Mason. I currently reside in Plymouth, although London's very much my future, which we'll get to shortly.

And I'm currently the head of business development at Dynamic Planner. Love that. And welcome aboard, John. Pleasure to have you, sir.

And in terms of Dynamic Planner, at a super high level, what do you guys do? Yeah, so we're a software as a service company, and we provide software to financial advisors to help them understand risk in... their clients pensions that's kind of a blend between the real what we do and the marketing high level answer yeah love that love it and just for a bit of context what would be like the typical personas or job titles that you'd be having daily conversations with john that's great it's one of the beautiful things about working in financial services is those job titles and personas are really very varied for such a niche vertical you know there are only five and a half thousand maybe four thousand four and a half thousand five thousand financial advisors that we consult it and they would range all the way down from i am a sole trader it's my job it's my life all the way up to massive organizations so we come across People that are founders, people that are managing directors, they're just manager of people.

They are the advisor. They are the support staff, operations, compliance, investment managers. You never get bored. I love that.

So you're talking to a complete different spectrum of different people day in, day out. So that I think can keep things fresh and I love that. So thank you for sharing. And John, the question that I love to ask, although I guess because you've got some taste, my dude.

Outside of sales, what are your passions, hobbies and interests, John? Tell us. passions hobbies and interest uh music's a big one there's a few uh nice canvases up behind me a big big fan of guitar play guitar obviously you and i have uh we've sort of connected on music as well as sales as a profession actually was lucky enough to get to play the final song at my wedding recently which was pretty awesome um big advocate for giving back mentoring and coaching so not just in sales but i also work with a charity that help young professionals get into financial services and professional services from less affluent areas in for example southeast london charity called urban synergy nice i also am the assistant coach at my local man v fat football so we help men you know of all ages typically say between 25 and 50 whether or not you're Well, you love football, but you sort of maybe haven't got the fitness you once had in your teens, early 20s.

Maybe you've put on a little bit of weight and you'd like to get together, play football, not be judged. Call bonus goals for your performances off the pitch as much as on the pitch. They are, yeah, I'd say two of the biggest things I love to do outside of work. i love that thank you for sharing and john with any of these sort of organizations that you're working with i'd highly recommend like after this show if you want to share the links and we can put these in the show notes for our listeners and subscribers if they want to learn more about these things so feel free to share that with us but thank you for adding a bit of color to yourself there mate so what we like to do at this point of the show is go to our guests linkedin profile so if you're watching this on youtube you can see this here And again, if you're listening to this on the podcast, I've just had a thought.

You can listen to this on Spotify and Apple and you can go to LinkedIn. So by all means, go into the show notes on your podcast platform and have a check out on John's LinkedIn profile. So with John, he shares a lot of really cool content and it's not always just about work, but he talks about mindset and other things going on. And he's also a fellow fan of New Tonic.

That's not a plug, but we both love the drink. And that's one of the posts that we tell her. James, if you're listening. yeah james mr smith if you're listening you know a bit of sponsorship would help out but um if we look at this like you've had a colorful career like if we go back to way back in the day you've worked at companies and organizations such as bt you've worked at mdc global and for the past near enough seven years you've been working at dynamic planner um and you've done a lot of different roles within that business and grown with them so you know what we like to ask is obviously like in your own words sir like tell us How did you get into this profession from the beginning and get to where you are today, sir?

Great question. I think nothing unusual. I think I fell into sales. I jokingly said I woke up and decided that I needed to have a real job in my early 20s.

I couldn't continue the gig economy, living for the weekend. I needed a nine to five. I needed a salary. Not a zero.

A contract in shift work. And a job came available at my local BT office, which I'm super grateful. They obviously took take on people that didn't have any necessarily direct experience with sales. But if you look back at my earlier CV, you'll see there would be definitely transferable skills.

I've done a bit of, you know, door to door knocking. I was quite fortunate to go out on the road during the summer of the digital switchover, which might possibly age me. So for those of the listeners that aren't in the UK, or that might be a bit younger than me and you, annual TV basically was switched off roughly. Not 20 years ago, but not far off it.

So instead of pointing your area on your roof or in your attic in the direction of your local transmitter station, you're encouraged to get free view boxes or satellite. I remember this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So real big time.

Here's a bit of an irony for you. I was working for Sky that were doing broadband TV and phone for the first time, the trio. And our easiest wins were against BT customers that were paying about £30 for broadband. And I'd offer all of them everything for sort of like 25 pounds.

You go knock a hundred doors, hopefully get two or three sales. You learn a lot of transferable skills from that. Working in pubs and McDonald's, you cross -sell, up -sell, you know, you learn, communicate with people, active listening, all these things. You don't realize that you take all these things, you start working at an organization like BT, they put you on some sort of training path.

They put you through a little, apprenticeship to get like a level two in sales wow through the back then it was the institute of sales management which has now been combined with the association of professional sales to make the institute of professional sales so my relationship with them goes back all the way to the beginning of my career love that and yeah i found sales as my home and then progressed through bt fell out of love with bt right this is around the time that they're sort of billing and operations went brilliant this is before their merger with ee we're going back 13 years yeah people knew who we were but they didn't necessarily want to contract with us so it became a bit disheartening i do the work and maybe the after sales wasn't as good when we had it left our office so i was like i need a new challenge i've been here two years let's throw something new yeah i moved to mdc completely different vertical completely different thing that i'm selling completely different industry but I think I am the person that if I get my teeth into something and I love it, I'll do it.

So very quickly became pretty proficient at this, got to see the world. You know, I went to Dubai, I went to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, different trade shows and conferences, face -to -face with people. Back to those sort of door -to -door sales skills, you have to go to approach people cold, face -to -face. When's the last time any of us approached anyone cold, face -to -face?

Suppose COVID, do you know what I mean? And then my career. changed to dynamic planner uh it's for love my now wife yeah we um we decided to no longer be friends and to sorry i decided i don't know what to be friends and i wanted to be in a relationship with her i had this wonderful epiphany after a gig that i'd performed next morning and um i heard her tell my housemate she was moving to oxford she works in the nhs she took a job up there and so we did the long distance thing and then i was like I've done four years at MDC.

I need a remote job. And this is before COVID. This is 2017, 2018. So I remember very well before going on holiday with her in the summer, I did three interviews in one day.

But anyone that knows the Southeast and Oxfordshire, Berkshire and sort of around High Wycombe way, I basically went from Oxford down to Abingdon, down the A4. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Down onto the M4, across to Reading and then up the A40, M40 up to High Wycombe. Any of your non -UK listeners will have no idea what I've just said.

Well, yeah, no, no, do you know what? Funny enough. I used to do gigs in High Wycombe and Rambarkshire and stuff like that. So I'm familiar with the roads, but yeah, that's a bit of a mission, mate.

Yeah. Well, obviously looking at your stats, there's 800 cities nearly that listens to podcasts. I don't think they're all in the UK, but that was a day of interviews, you know, like a sort of 10 a .m.

, 12 p .m., 2 p .m.

sort of scenario. And I picked on my planner and that was August 2018. Here we are. Here we are.

Global pandemic and everything else later. Thank you for sharing. And there are so many things I'd like to pick upon and kind of revisit there with you, mate. So if we think back to this point of when you were younger and you said, right, I need to get a job, I need to get a salary.

And then you had the introduction to BT. When you were working with an organization that's really recognized and it's a global brand. Right. What were those first couple of like months working with that org?

So you've gone from like, I need to get a job, I need to get a salary. Then you found that job and you found that salary. What was young John's mind going through when you were learning these things? Like what was, where was your mind at?

That's a fantastic question, Neil. I was really lucky. Although I was working for the glomerate that is BT, we were working for the local business office, which was franchised. And I think that's a fantastic model that BT created.

because it it creates someone creates their business in the southwest so our um ceo richard gore looked after devon cornwall at somerset when you have to hit certain kpis um during the year in order to retain your freight franchise you know if you if you're not doing the required kpis you're not allowed to retain your franchise so although i was working i had the support Of the giant that is BT, we had a really nice close -knit office of maybe 30, 40 people. I think they've probably tripled in size now since I've left.

So they've got a lot more territory now across the whole of the Southwest, all the way up to Dorset and things like that. So my team itself was relatively small. I think I was one of four or five in the team. So I have that protection of...

Here are my two or three peers and my boss. And then he's got his boss and his boss. And then outside of that, we've got other teams. And outside of that, we've got BT.

So I was logging into systems as if I was some gigantic employee. But it's a tiny office just on the outskirts of Plymouth. And it was brilliant to have. It's almost like a safety net.

You're not just thrown into a big organization and you're just a number. I was still very much a person. They cared enough about the... personal development and training of their staff to put us on apprenticeships to get us that level two qualification in sales yeah in fact i remember the chap that did the training for us actually became the he got hired by pt to be their trainer for nice um more than just the southwest i think he was based up in wales so you know they not only did they have the desire to find a training program for us but when they found the right person they reeled him in I love that.

Thank you for sharing. And also like, you know, you're working within this tight knit team, you're working within this franchise, you've got this job, they're investing in you. For somebody that was, you know, working in that environment young, like, I'll be honest with you, like when I was in my first like sales role, there wasn't any investment. There was like, you know, training and sales days, but it was like, here's a cool list.

Here's a job. Get on with it. And I was working for a big like global brand as well. But I did kind of feel like just another number.

I felt like one small speck within a whole large organization. So I think it was really cool that they invested in you. You had a relationship with the MD of the business. But this other guy that was like doing music and gigs, how did those two worlds like mesh together?

Because you've got an artistic guy because I was also emceeing. on my weekends when i was doing that job like how did you balance life of you know rest life doing work in two different worlds how did that how did how did you balance it yeah yeah um being in my early 20s definitely helped it's a lot easier than being in my late 30s i'm not gonna lie obviously i've just spoke very highly about my time at bt there don't get me wrong i was it was still pick up the phone do 100 calls a day yeah i have really just given that the best light possible but it it wasn't easy it was still hard if you're a young person young professional in sales and you you become a young adult and you've got your own opinions if you're like me and and challenge people when they say to you you know do this why why don't you do it that way why can't i do it another way yeah i could never have gone into the military as a 20 year old because you know Yes, sir.

No, sir. Jump. How high? When can I come down, sir?

It's not me. I'd have to go in as an officer because I just like to challenge and disrupt. But how did a young, I say young, I was 24 at the time, 24 -year -old John balance? I say balance John and balance John Mason, you know, or Mason.

When I was out to my friends, I'm John Mason or Mason because we used to have more than one John at college. Yeah, yeah. Some people find it very strange to call me John, but at work I was John. Yeah, that's John from BT.

Yeah, how do I balance that? Quite difficult. Music was still, music's a thing that I stopped to get a full -time job. I was running my own promotion and sound engineering company and putting on gigs and performing gigs.

But it just simply wasn't producing the revenue I needed. There was quite a lot of us doing it in Plymouth in quite a small and upcoming scene. There's only one guy left now and he does gigs across the whole of the Southwest and books pretty big artists. And I sort of look at it thinking, You were a couple of years younger than us.

You stayed the course and you have the business. The rest of us went off and did something else. Music was still a really huge part of my life. I loved to finish work on a Friday, especially if you got some sales in and you were buzzing.

Go off and do a gig. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, maybe four gigs in a weekend. I remember times at MDC coming back, not being able to type on a Monday morning because my fingers were in bits from playing guitar, acoustic bass. You know, I've got a golf player, anyone that plays guitar and stuff, you know, I'll play like nines or tens on my electric, 11s on my acoustics.

It's a triple O body. He's on my bass, you know, and both hands are just like, you know, destroyed. Ruined. It was, I'll be really honest.

Music was more of a priority for me than, than what I don't think I actually took my career seriously until I hit my thirties, until the dynamic planner. Because although I had a salary job, it was a profession. It was a way of earning money beyond just my salary. I took very few days off during my time with BET because I was very fearful of being able to take time off based on the manager.

Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, my manager at my next job was a lot more... a casual he wouldn't like me having time off but he was like if you have time off i'm not paying you for that day and you're not going to get sales in so it's your own fault yeah yeah yeah who you know it took me a couple of years to get back to that point of pride of being how without working myself into the ground personally and professionally how do i get back to a position of pride where i don't ever cancel a gig and i don't ever take a day off sick we have to work on yourself mind body and soul you know do indeed you do indeed sir i can i can relate on so many levels where i think when i first started my my first sdr job and it's something i've spoken about on another episode but the main thing was the fear of that company was because they knew that i did music and they were like is this going to inhibit the work that you do for us what happens if you continue music career and you become successful and famous are you just going to like palm us off and stuff like that i remember saying to the person back then i said like me doing music is like a lottery ticket i have no guarantee that i'm going to win but i know that i have to play to be in there right but i said to him you know before coming to this sales job similar to you i could be could be doing four gigs a week right i was actually at one point i was doing I was working for the local authority in the day.

In the evening, I was a Pizza Hut delivery driver on a moped. And on the weekends, I was MC Sniby doing UK garage events. And I've been doing that for three or four years. So I said, I can handle it.

You know, I can multitask, but I was a young 20 something, had a lot more energy and I could handle it. I remember what used to happen to me, John, was I'd run for a couple of weeks and there was this point where I did it for three or four weeks and then it would get to a weekend where I slept the whole weekend and I completely just blacked out. And then the following week I can then just get back on it. Can't do that now.

I cannot do that now. And I'm very selective of gigs, but there is that passion. And I get, I kind of get what you mean where you said music was the priority. And like the nine to five helped fund that and make sure the lights were on so you could enjoy your passion.

And it's very similar to like going self -employed where they say your side hustle, you have to wait till it earns three times more than your nine to five before you can drop the nine to five. And that's what happened with happy selling. You know, I was still doing a full -time job whilst launching my business and doing here and there like little side hustles and gigs. But thank you for sharing that.

I appreciate that. The next bit that I wanted to go on to was where you said with MDC. So you said completely new industry, new talk track. What was the world?

What was it that you guys were selling? And what was that transition like? Transition was definitely different. I've gone from working for the gigantic organizations, BT, to working to a company that across three or four different brands probably has 10 of us.

They have grown since then, but it's an operation that you can get away with less, less bums on seats, boots on the ground as such. It was super exciting. I remember being at BT feeling like it was a shame. In April, I'd been promoted to the education manager, so I was in charge of the education establishment in the Southwest, which then allowed me to start flexing those account management consultative selling skills that I wanted to do.

I didn't want to just be $100 a day. Fortunately, sales 15 years ago, the SDR role was nothing more than that. There was no thought process behind it. It was just make $100 calls a day, knock on $100 a day.

I then joined this organization where I was able to flex those muscles with a consultant selling an account management. You're spending this much on advertising with us. But it was super interesting. It was like, this is a whole world I never knew existed.

And it was... Mike is the... MDC is Mike Diggle Consultancy. So Mike...

owns and at the time co -owned but could possibly completely own by now two magazines that i was working on to one of his four major accounts five major accounts and they were in security and fire specifically in the middle east so if you were a uk a us you know middle east asia pacific company and you wanted to get into the Your products, your services into the Middle East, get some of those contracts, those lucrative contracts, especially 10 years ago, the amount of buildings that were going up across the Middle East, in Dubai especially, massive.

And now we started seeing that with the World Cup of Guitar. We started seeing more sporting events in Saudi Arabia. So the whole Middle East was on our growth spurt. We were partnered with the largest trade show in the world.

And we were like... if you want your products in front of people we have the subscriber list print digital website we attend this event we get to hand our magazines out at this event you know work with us and It was mind boggling. I've gone from being only able to speak to businesses that were not corporate or not public sector in the Southwest to being able to speak to anyone that sells anything related to those two industries in the entire world. I can start my day calling out the Far East at the end of their working day, make my way across South Asia, across India, into the Middle East, and then through Europe.

catch the east side of the usa around two three o 'clock in the uk the start of their working day move across to the west coast of america and honestly a couple of times maybe i've been to the pub on a wednesday to watch them mic night or something i had a client in australia and he knew full well if i was phoning him or texting him it was midnight or one o 'clock in the morning in my country um and i was a musician but you know i think relationship wise he left the fact that i would actually be like You know, you've got any questions about the package I sent you or whatever, things like that.

Didn't just leave it to email just because he was literally on the other side of the world. Huge, huge difference. And it made me realize I'm not stuck in sales. I can change to any vertical and I can now go to my next job and say, I've never done financial services and never done SaaS or FinTech.

But I'd never done that at MDC. I'd never done that at BT. Yeah. I'm here.

I've chosen you out of three because I want to work for you and sell your product. That is what I want to do. BT, market leader in telecoms. They are the most known.

You're never going to get someone go, I've never heard of you. Yeah, yeah. MDC Global, it was the partner of the event. It was the most known magazine.

Dynamic Planner is the market leader and has market share of our tech in the industry. We hold the record of six consecutive wins of one award at the Shoda Platform Awards. When it came to five years, we thought we were going there just to get maybe runner -up or just a nod. Like, you can't win it five times.

And then we won it. And I was like, that's weird. And then I saw a message the other day from my CRO. We won it six times.

I went, no, that can't be right. At some point, don't awarding bodies just turn around and go, enough's enough. But evidently not. Look at the Ballon d 'Or, you know.

Ronaldo and Messi shared it for the best part of a decade. So I think... moving from one job to another. You can work for a disruptor.

You can work for a startup. You can work for a marketing leader. You can change verticals. You can change things you're selling.

If you believe you're selling the best thing ethically to that client base, then you will succeed. I couldn't leave the market leader of mobile phone providers to then go and work for a startup mobile phone providers. I could maybe go work for a competitor or a partner. at that level yeah yeah maybe a disruptor you know not to throw you know not shade if gaffer probably what you would refer to as a disruptor in the market yeah you know yeah but i might not go and work for happy mobile yeah yeah no one's got any idea who they are it'd be very difficult sales is a hard enough job as it is don't make it hard to be yourself yeah yeah yeah i agree i agree and you You mentioned an interesting point.

It's something I'd love to educate the audience on is about, you know, disruptors. Because that was a term that I learned in my first startup, right? So working at Zora. So the story with Zora was teen, our CEO was employee number 11 at Salesforce .

com. So Mark Benioff's right -hand man and first ever CMO. And he saw this thing called the subscription economy coming. And from a billing perspective, he knew that Salesforce and Oracle couldn't do subscription billing because it was designed for transactional business.

And he said, the world's moving to subscriptions because you've got Blockbuster, Netflix. You've got iTunes, MP for a song, subscription to listen to as many songs as you want. But at one point in Zora, you know, revenue wasn't great. Growth wasn't going where it was supposed to.

We did get to Series F and, you know, the company did financially go IPO one day. But there was that lull moment. I can't remember. It was either between 2015 or something like that.

But he was telling us that we're taking on the big dogs such as Oracle and we're taking on Salesforce and we're taking on SAP. And those are the big dogs and we're the small little thing. But he said, what you want to be is now you've got, you know, the disruptors and you've got the disrupted. And he said, the disruptors are the small little tech startups that are coming along and they're there to challenge the big dogs and they change the world and they change the industry.

And he said, but typically most of the disrupted. So the oracles, SAPs, et cetera, he said at first they won't take notice and they won't care because they will see them as small fry. But what will happen is these disruptors will come along and they will completely shake up the market. Then the disrupted have to take stock and look at them.

And either two things are going to happen. They're either going to acquire those disruptors or they're going to build something to rival those disruptors, right? and he even said like with mark benioff when mark gave teen the 50 million to launch zora he said to teen go launch zora and one day i'm going to buy you and he said it's not going to happen right um but we took on the likes of sap net suite and all of that and we blew them out of the water but being part of the disruptor can be a very fun experience um and you see it in tech and sass all the time right um because i think one disruptor that i'm seeing at the moment is a company called fathom so it's an ai note taker right um but you've had things like gong you've had things like sales loft where they've got this conversation intelligence but here you've got this free tool that you can connect to your zoom your team's meeting it transcribes it gives you all the stuff and it's free yeah and if you think about it other disruptors that have come along are things like zoom right because i've been using zoom for like 20 odd years but with zoom It's a free platform to do free online meetings.

But back then, you used to have GoToMeeting, Citrix. The old dogs, right? Where are they now? They're gone.

They got disrupted. People aren't buying those things. GoToMeeting is still technically around. Is it?

ISP used to run their webinars through it. And I was like, I was using GoToMeeting at Dial Planner in 2018 pre -COVID. Wow, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you're right.

It only then became two. It was Zoom or Teams. Or Google Meet if you have a native Google suite. But they were basically the only two.

And I still attend GoToMeeting. It's just called GoToMeet now. Because the ISP, the Institute of Sales Professionals, this week, they've just, obviously this week when we're recording, appreciate this, go out at a different time. They've recently just moved over to Microsoft Teams.

So that's it. I can now get rid of another app off my phone. I can go back to just using Zoom and Teams. I'm going to show some age here as well.

Go on. Browsers. You go back to there used to be multiple browsers. There was loads of options.

When FreeServe was the first browser to not have, you didn't have to pay for it. It was a free -to -use web browser. Going further, search engines. I remember in school, you had a plethora of search engines to choose from.

It was Yahoo, AskJees, Google. Yeah, AskJees, oh shit. AskJees, yeah. I forgot about that one, yeah.

Yeah, AskJees. And Donald Claren, native Microsoft users, and I've started to convert myself more and I use Edge now over Chrome. It's taken my entire life of using computers. to get to go back to the microsoft browser you know i've used chrome and firefox for many many years yeah and now i use edge because edge is basically it's on par with google chrome yes with us jeeves and all those browsers and obviously making the change like this is why i love tech john right i know this is a tech sales podcast and we're talking about tech and tools that we're using but you've brought back some core memories of some tech there so i absolutely love that um and as we're kind of coming towards the end of this chapter today john one thing that i would love to touch upon because this is something we spoke about in our intro call a few weeks ago is around neurodiversity right because i have come across a lot of different professionals in sales where i wouldn't say it's becoming more prominent but it's becoming more recognized because i suspect i'm on the on the spectrum not diagnosed etc but i've met a lot of people that have you know autism adhd you know they're they're they've been discovering themselves working themselves again the spectrum is huge and i'm not putting any labels as to say you have to be this or these are these people but as a coach when i come into coaching sessions and i notice mannerisms or you know nuances within people i love it because i'm actually starting to see different sides to people and i'm learning more about them but you did advise that you are neuro spicy You have elements of neurodiversity within your life.

Could you expand on that and just tell us what's your story? Yeah, no, absolutely. You're right. There is a spectrum.

There's a varying degree of spectrums for different disorders. The brain is a really complex thing that I think we are still going to spend, at least our lives and beyond, trying to understand. There are things that we understand today that we just simply didn't fathom 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. around mental health i i think i think i'm quite quite fortunate so another aspect of neuro divergence would be people that suffer with bipolar so and you're starting to see more and more celebrities you know get diagnosed and come out and you start to see maybe some of their traits and their behaviors and how that um it suddenly starts to click oh i see that So it's quite prominent in my family.

My sister is slightly a little bit younger than myself. She has bipolar, does really well with managing her condition with medication. Thank you to the NHS. If only the government could give them a bit more funding.

That would be nice, especially in mental health services. My auntie has bipolar and my granddad had it. So I think I might have possibly won the lottery in not getting it. But I'm not free of something that would sit on that spectrum.

Bipolar itself is something that's being... further investigated i believe there is clinical research out there now to sort of determine there is more than one type similar to autism you know if you go back uh 10 20 30 years there was just one versions of autism maybe and now autism and asperger's syndrome and other um Variations, maybe is the better word, of the disorder and the way the brain works. So diagnosed -wise, I do have clinical depression, so I am medicated. The only way I can describe it is my brain just doesn't work.

It doesn't produce the chemicals that I need to function, and therefore it will basically balance me out. It kind of, going back to music analogy, it works a bit like a compressor. It will bring down the highs and bring up the lows, just squish it together. It's not a gate.

It doesn't cut it off. yeah it'll just squish it together and you know what it does mean that i don't necessarily get as much enjoyment as some of those highs that i might do but i would take that pay off in exchange for not falling you know into the the deep lows because life could just feel great for no reason you can have the perfect life perfect wife happy good job good career satisfaction friends money all of it but your brain could just simply not produce the right chemicals and the right balance, and you just don't feel well.

And the reason why I'm medicated, I'm not a physician, I'm not a psychiatrist, but if this is any bit of advice to help anyone that's toying with this, someone once said to me, and they wouldn't have been the first person to say it, I've been told this thing at least three or four times, but it was this once that it was said in a certain way at the right time that just resonated. If you were... diabetic would you take insulin and i said yeah well then that's because your body doesn't produce insulin you need to supplement insulin if your body doesn't produce the right amount of those feel -good hormones and chemicals serotonin oxytocin etc then if you're medicated stigma around mental health is so great um people that have a neuro divergent streak in them whether it's diagnosed on a spectrum just hints of it you know i'm very conscious of saying i don't have ocd because i know how debilitating that can be as a mental health condition but if things aren't in the right place i will want to move them into the right place they need to look right and just i like things to feel right we just need to be able to talk about it more support each other more remove some of that stigma and just be accepting that people that do have neurodivergent streaks in them tend to be great because your brain works differently you know you see it in the extreme people that have severe forms of autism become savants and things like that you know play piano without ever hearing it hear it once play it draw something from memory you take that extreme and you dilute it down a little bit and you take a typical person and just make some tweaks around the edges And then you get, they maybe lose some stats and attributes.

If you talk about a FIFA card and football in some areas and gain it in others. Well, hang on. If you've got a workforce of 10 people that are exactly the same, or you've got a workforce of 10 people that are completely different, which one's going to help you get your business further and help you be a disruptor, help you be the market leader, help you run your sales team. You know, it's something to be celebrated and understood.

And, you know. That's basically my take on it. I love that. Thank you for being honest, for being open and vulnerable and educating myself and with our audience.

I really respect you for that, John. And I think, you know, like with neurodiversity, it's something that I've learned more about since I've had my son who was diagnosed with autism. And Blake, if you're listening to this, daddy loves you. He always wants me to give a shout out on the podcast because he watches it on YouTube.

But I learned like... all for it support it i have elements of you know being neurodivergent and where my family said no you were odd and you were weird it's those things there right but i've i also have to be honest where i had a level of ignorance on something where i offended one of my friends and i then felt that experience with my son right so to kind of set the scene i've got a really good friend who has adhd and when we kind of like we've known each other since childhood and then when he kind of said i've got ad i think i have adhd i was like okay now a lot of things make sense about you mate right so i kind of learned when i was having conversations with them i had to make sure that i was direct and i kept things concise and that i didn't go around the houses and storytell about things because and when he used to get annoyed with me with my way of thinking i just used to get annoyed with him because it's like because my mind would go so deep into the detail the story and all of that that sometimes will be clashed on ideas and stuff but one day when he did something that annoyed me not by a physical thing but just his mindset on something i made the ignorant remark of well that's just your adhd brain that's the way you look at it and he just kind of said to me like bro it's not because i have adhd that i'm thinking like that he said why did you say that And I said, oh, bro, calm down, man.

It's just, you know, that's how your brain's built. And I didn't understand the ignorance from myself. And I couldn't get his point of view because I was trying to say in a loving way of, dude, that's how you're built. That's kind of where it was coming.

That's the place it was coming from. But I didn't understand the ignorance. But when I did understand the ignorance was, you know, whenever a year or two, whatever later, my son, he kind of had like a while out, you know, an episode at home. And when I was sharing that information with a family member, they just said, oh, it's just his autism.

And then it clicked. And I said, no, it's not because of his autism. It's just, he was being a kid and this happened X, Y, and Z. And it was only then that I realized you have to be careful with, you know, knowing information about somebody, but not using it against them in a derogative way.

And it wasn't until I experienced it with my own kid and hearing that I was like, ah, now I know what my mate. meant right and it's just you know it's learning and sometimes when I meet people who are on the spectrum so I've had to learn you know the spectrum is so wide um you know one person that has ADHD doesn't mean they're going to be like somebody else somebody who has bipolar doesn't mean they're going to be exactly like that bipolar person um so what I've now done is I try to take an interest in learning about so what does it mean what's the makeup behind that and rather than looking at the differences of you know you're like this like this i try to look for the similarities um and learn upon those and then share that information because i think by sharing that knowledge that's where you're able to connect with more people um and i think for myself when my mates are just like well now why are you so weird in that sort of way and i said actually it's because i look at things in a different way and i look at the detail and sometimes i can get obsessed into things but i'm like but that's what makes me cool That's what makes me unique.

So I tried to find those unique elements within people and I'm geek out about it. I want to learn about it. You know, hopefully this is helped something with our audience. And if these are things that you've experienced as well, um, but John, thank you for like coming on board today, like sharing your story.

Um, and a question that I'd always love to ask people, John is if you were to go back to that young John Mason. who was just thinking, right, I need to get a job, I need to get a career, I need to get a salary. What three bits of advice would you give to that young man? Absolutely, yeah.

This is one of my favorite things about your podcast, and this is the first thing I did was prepare these questions. Just before I answer it, the story you just told, though, about that ignorance, had the exact same thing with depression. As a teenager, I had a friend who was in the emo phase when we were teenagers, Mike and I were career mads. and i lost a parent young um so when they said they were depressed i was like what have you got me depressed about your life is fine said that as a teenager 16 year old and then fast forward eight years later when i'm getting diagnosed like oh night bulb yeah exactly i know exactly where you're coming from yeah and that ties nicely into my three things the first thing is something i say quite frequently whenever i'm talking about myself professionally or personally you all know this from being an mc There's a persona.

Neil at home is different to Neil at work, who is different to Neil as an MC. I sort of say like, you know, I've got John, John Mason and Mason. I'm not Jacqueline Hyde. I just need to bring a different energy.

There's a fine line between confidence and arrogance. And when I say this, I jokingly say, and I dance on that line daily. Confidence and arrogance. Be confident is to...

to know your strengths and accept your weaknesses. Be prepared to give yourself, be humble, but be prepared to give yourself a pat on the back. That'll also help you if you have imposter syndrome as well. So that's really key.

It's okay to be unrehearsed, just not unprepared. So I recently did my wedding speech and I did actually write my wedding speech down. I just wrote a few key words down at midnight the night before on a bit of pen and paper, which I had with me, which I quickly opened to the first page of this notebook. as I'm grabbing the glass to raise a toast to make sure I hadn't missed anything.

And the things I've missed were things I put there to fill time if I accidentally spoke at a thousand miles an hour. Because if I cannot speak to a room of people that I know, that I can see in front of me, my friends and my family and my wife's family, I cannot speak about my life and how I got here. And I cannot speak about my wife, then I need to be sacked and divorced. So being unprepared is not the same as being, sorry, it's not the same as being unrehearsed.

You can be unrehearsed. Just do not be unprepared because if you fail to prepare, you're prepared to fail. Exactly that. And that caught me in an interview.

I was a shoo -in for an interview when I was looking for the downtime job. The guy wanted to be my boss, wanted to hire me. I went to do the interview with the CEO, didn't prepare enough. And he went, how dare you waste my time not being prepared for this interview?

And never again will I make that mistake, especially if I ever get an opportunity to be a shoo -in in another role. Yeah. Third and final one. I take this from, again, with me, things might have been said to me three or four times, but it's the one time that it resonated and it clicked that I remember.

So if you've said this to me before, 18, and I'm going to give credit to someone else, sorry, but we are all lifetime learners. Something that my CEO said. Ben Goss, CEO of Dynamic Planner, founded Dynamic Planner over 20 years ago now. Really inspirational speaker, motivator.

true ceo if i'm honest uh but also true salesman at heart likes to control things doesn't like to give it up but he has to trust his c -suite to run their operations and he has to bring that together i'm sure that's been a learning career for him a learning curve sorry for him but we are all lifetime learners you can learn for people below you in their career people at your level peers people above you yep chris arenado is coached not by someone better than him at football And he's arguably one of the best footballers or was one of the best footballers at the time in the world.

So fine line between confidence and arrogance. There is a lifetime of learning ahead of all of us. That's really key. And it's okay to be unrehearsed.

Just don't be unprepared. Love that. John Mason, absolute golden wisdom and nuggets dropped in there. So I absolutely enjoyed that.

So thank you so much for sharing. And for our listeners, watchers, fans and subscribers, thank you for joining us on John's chapter today. If you're listening to this again on your local podcast platform, please give it a rating. Please share it with somebody else because this is helping with the algorithm to get John's story out there.

And again, if you're watching this on YouTube, make sure that you like, comment and subscribe down below. Share this with your peers. Share this with the audience. Hopefully these topics have resonated with you today.

If you've got any comments to add in, please drop them down here on YouTube. But again, John's LinkedIn profile will be within the show notes. So if you want to pick his brain, you know, connect with him, learn more about himself and at Dynamic Planner, feel free to reach out. But John, thank you for coming on.

It's been a pleasure and a privilege. I wish you an awesome weekend. So hopefully one day, well, fingers crossed, maybe I can come see you at a gig or maybe you can come to one of my gigs. That'd be awesome.

But wishing you a great weekend. So most importantly, happy selling, John.