Yoke van Dam

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Intro: Welcome to another edition of Expedition Business, where we talk to inspiring South African entrepreneurs about the highs and lows of their business journey, and how on earth they manage to keep the flame of business adventure burning. Of course, facing your day with a smile is sometimes the toughest thing you have to do. My name is Christél Rosslee Venter, your host and the one privileged enough to be talking to 

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Yoke van Dam, the Kintsugi Queen. But before I introduce you to you, I would like to remind you to subscribe, like, comment, and share this podcast with as many of your friends and family as possible. Without your help, we cannot continue to share the amazing stories of our South African entrepreneurs.

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This episode is proudly sponsored by AddShine, corporate gifts, clothing, banners and flags. If they can’t add shine to your brand, no one can. Check them out at www.adshine.africa. But back to why we are here today. Yoke van Dam is the Kintsugi Queen. Because of her ability to join, repair and transform teams to find their optimum flow.

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As NLP and behavioural change specialist, Yoke is guaranteed to transform your team. If she isn’t coaching you on your next big pitch, training a team or inspiring you on stage, you will find Yoke hiking up a mountain or jumping into a waterfall. Yoke, welcome to Expedition Business.

02:32

Yoke: I’m so happy to be here and I love your setup. Thanks for inviting me. 

Christél: It is such pleasure. And I must say for our people at home, I’ve met Yoke at the Professional Speakers Association where she is one of the key figures there. And what a privilege to listen to Joerke when she is busy with a speech. But that’s not all you do. 

Yoke: No, I also do team transformation work.

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So where teams are going through that storming phase and where someone has perhaps left the business and they’re really struggling to get along. Then I do some leadership development work in South Africa and Dubai. And I also do presentation coaching. 

Christél: Wow. But tell me a little bit, you come from Nelspruit. How on earth did you end up in Joburg?

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Yoke: I, after leaving school, I went and studied at University of Pretoria. You know, you’re moving up to the big city life. So I was in Pretoria for quite a few years, started off living in a residence, jasmine. And after varsity, I started working at Oxford Publishers, which was in Mid-Rand, then literally jumped the fence to Pearson Publishers in the streets in 16th Street, New Road.

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to work there and from there I moved to Entrepreneur magazine and that brought me to Johannesburg. So that was basically 2010 during the soccer world cup. That was the year that I arrived in Johannesburg and I’ve never looked back. 

Christél: Wow and no plans to go back to Nelspruit? 

Yoke: I love visiting Nelspruit. When I was growing up and especially at Varsity I felt so sorry for people that

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whose parents live in terrible locations because I could always look forward to visiting waterfalls and, going hiking and you know just really immersing myself in nature because my dad used to be working in the agriculture space so he used to always take us to these little random waterfalls that no one else had access to and that’s what we used to do on weekends and I didn’t understand that that wasn’t the norm for everyone else.

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Christél: Wow. And is that why you are still such a big hiker? 

Yoke: I think my parents really brought us up loving nature, but my dad was quite ill. So he wasn’t really that physically active for many, many years. And he passed away in 2012. And my mom went through this process with The Artists Way. I don’t know if you’ve ever read that book and you know, you’re actually looking at your entire life and you’re actually realising what are areas that are lacking. So you’re looking.

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spiritually, financially, emotionally, relationships, all the different areas. And she realised that she wanted to get, to be more active. So she’d always done yoga, but she wanted to be more active and get more nature. So she actually joined a hiking club very late in her life. And now she’s the fittest amongst all of us. So a month ago, we actually went hiking with the family in Mozambique. It was like a Mozambique.

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Camino, it was a bit hectic, like 18 kilometers per day, twice and then a break and then another nine kilometers twice and it’s on a beat. So, you know, the operation on your feet is a bit rough, but I was like, how fortunate am I to spend time with my mom and my sister and my cousins and their partners and some other people from a hiking club and to be active and to be alive. So.

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very fortunate so my mum didn’t introduce me to hiking. I had hiked with friends off to Varsity already that it’s something amazing that we can now do together. 

Christél: Well, but that is a privilege. I think to have a mum that is active and do things with you is something that you really need to be proud of. 

Yoke: Yeah, and she’s 72.

06:40

Christél: Oh my goodness. 

Yoke: And she’s hiked in Greece. I think she did the Greek Islands hike twice, which is very intense. She did the normal Greek hike that we did inland. She’s hiked a portion of the Camino, which she said was too easy. OK, so so I’m like one day when I grow up, I want to be like her. 

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Christél: Uh huh. That is a very good aspiration to have.

But you could tell me quickly what made you do what you do. What was your big motivation? 

Yoke: There was so many that I was working in corporate and really frustrated as I was looking around and seeing passive aggressiveness. I was at that stage, often moving out of sales. I had actually merged into becoming a sales trainer at a company and…

07:34

While we were doing the sales inductions and training these sales teams, I noticed that a lot of the departments were fighting of each other. And even though they were certain core values that we were teaching people and holding them accountable to, it was actually very fake. It was against the walls. And I didn’t see a culture in action. And my manager at the time wouldn’t allow me to go and speak to certain people. So on the one hand,

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you would find that they would speak about a certain culture, but it wouldn’t be lived out. So there wasn’t a lot of psychological safety. There wasn’t clear communication. There were a lot of people in jobs for many, many years and they’d become stagnant and they were just not moving. So there was no opportunity for growth for people in the business and that kind of thing. So I think for me, and then looking at other,

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job environments that had been before, which were more toxic in the media industry, where their people were outright yelling at each other, like really creating that toxic environments where a lot of people would, you know, find their solace and alcohol, drugs, bad relationships, all of that. I noticed that.

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I wanted to bring change and empower people, whether they were in leadership or not, to bring positive change in a business. I wanted to bring, my original thing was bringing behavioural change. And, and I think that’s where the, the team transformation came in, because I noticed that sometimes a person will leave their job. So in big companies, for instance, in my husband’s big companies.

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person would move because of a project to another project, suddenly there’s a gap in that team and they just don’t gel anymore. Or someone immigrates, or someone migrates and suddenly they are not in the office anymore. So often it’s not a toxic team necessarily, it’s just due to natural things like people fall pregnant and they go on maternity leave and they actually don’t equip people to step,

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into leadership. So for me, it was all about how do you get these teams to chow again, to communicate well. Sometimes the teams are, they’re just different people and they almost like hate each other. So even if you don’t like someone, how can you have the emotional intelligence to work with them? And then on the other hand, it was the leaders. If you equip one leader, it has a massive knock on effect to everyone in the office. So that has been very rewarding for me to seeing,

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from a leadership development point of view, that massive ripple effect, once one leader or a group of leaders change, how that impacts everyone around them. So I would say that’s been part of my journey. 

Yoke: But you left, technically left for corporate world. You started your own company, Y-Connect, in 2017?

Yoke:  2017, yes. 

Christél: So what made you decide to go on your own?

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So I’d been wanting to go on my own for a while when I was still at Entrepreneur Magazine and I never had the guts. So I spoke to our CEO at the time and said to him, I want to start a training speaking business and he laughed at me. And I was trying to negotiate to work half day but I would have had to still achieve the same sales targets while also running a business and I couldn’t actually foresee doing both.

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And so what I started doing was actually side hustling. So during my lunch hours, I would coach people in my flat. I would sometimes leave a little bit early and do a leadership development program from four to six over two days at a specific venue, weekends. And then my boss who I had at Entrepreneur magazine knew that I had done NLP qualification and I’ve been doing,

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coaching for years and I’d been doing training through Toastmasters for years for free. So when he moved to AutoTrader, he created a job for me in sales training at AutoTrader. So that was the first exit out of sales. So being at AutoTrader, I then basically developed all my material. People started asking me to do work with different departments. So where we were first.

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In sales marketing came and said, we need something, corporate governance, accounting. Everyone wanted work or coaching. And then at the end of, I think 2016, they retrenched three quarters of the sales team and they saw the sales trainers as part of the sales team. And I’d only been married for six months and my retrenchment package was going to be a three month package and my husband said,

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if this is not God’s way of closing the door and forcing you out to open the door of entrepreneurship, I don’t know what it is. So he encouraged me and said, let’s bank the money and just start. So I actually unofficially started before I originally registered the business in March 2017. So, but I was doing a lot of

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soul searching at the time before I decided that I was going to start a business. I also went and saw recruiters and one of the recruiters and life coaches said to me, I think it’d be better for you to have a business. You have too many varied interests and specialisation fields to satisfy what you can offer people. A job will never fully satisfy.

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So that kind of like was a light bulb moment for me. I sat down with Willem Gouws, who’s also a fellow speaker friend of mine. And he said, the only thing you need to start a business is a cell phone. And he’s, there was another main store client of mine who he was one of my clients at entrepreneur magazine, and he said, there’s a concept called worker is he. Where you don’t necessarily start off a business plan. You literally write down what skills do you have? What knowledge do you have?

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Who can you help? And you sell that as a freelance spaces. You just start with like a project. So I did that. I went and I made a list and posted something on Facebook and actually very quickly got sales training clients in the core dealership industry because I had been coaching all of the salespeople at audit rate and visiting these places. They would give me leads and other people in my network.

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I started giving them the same training and building on it that I’ve been doing at AutoTrader, but more things that I loved. So conflict resolution, developing the emotional intelligence side of things. So that’s really how I kind of accidentally started. 

Christél: Okay. So you need to go back to that person that retrenched you and say thank you. 

Yoke: It wasn’t, it’s never a nice moment.

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It’s never a nice moment when something like that happens because you doubt yourself and you doubt the work that you’ve done, but realising that it was purely their shareholders that were cutting down on expenses to actually pay higher dividends to their shareholders. I think two or three months later, they rehired a lot of salespeople for that company again. So it was purely an economical decision at the time. So I…

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At a stage, I actually worked with wellness companies to coach people through retrenchments because of what I knew and how it makes you feel and how you need options and helping them with interview skills and also helping with a bit of the healing. 

Christél: Yeah, but I think obviously the fact that you had experience in being retrenched yourself made you to understand they’re feeling so much better. 

Yoke: Definitely.

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Definitely. So sometimes you have to, I think life is a rollercoaster ride. You can never just have highs. There’s going to be many highs and lows, but it’s about seeing, is there a way that you could make money out of this emotional experience in the future or have empathy for others going through it and turn that into a product? 

Christél: When it comes to business, speaking of highs and lows, what makes you feel on top of the world?

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Yoke: When I, when I get feedback from my leadership training clients, so recently I’ve been training quite a lot of leaders in different places. So there’s some in Johannesburg, there’s one in Uganda, there’s one in London. And when they tell me that they’ve implemented what we’ve spoken about and that they’re actually seeing the results, then I want to jump for joy. So whether it’s about, 

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running the meetings, having assertive conversations with project managers, having accountability conversations with their teams, pushing back to the CEO of a large company. So like really, that really gives me a lot of joy. And also last year I was doing amazing leadership development work in Dubai. And I remember this moment after the training that I had to do five weeks of implementation.

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And as little groups, they had to meet and do further assessments and they had to put a project plan together, which they had to present back finally over Zoom, which was then sent to HR to look at it so that the training wouldn’t just stay theoretical, but actually became something practical. Right. And besides in the presentation, we also then had this casual conversation. I said.

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Guys, tell me what happened, like what’s worked, what hasn’t worked from the training. And one of the modules was all about how do you motivate and inspire your team? And we go through a lot, but this guy literally took one idea and it was all about teams want autonomy. So if you can give them an option or choice to do something, plus you allow them to come up with their own way of team building that can be really motivating.

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So what he did is he spoke to one of the ladies in sales team and said, it’s at a bank in Dubai. Can you please arrange these weekly breakfasts? I want you to come up with a theme and do everything yourself. And this lady went crazy. She got them all to financial contribute. So it wasn’t even costing the company anything. Plus they would almost doing a heritage day kind of breakfast where every week it would be a different culture.

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from one of the team members in the sales department. And he said to me, it became this innovative sharing session where they were really connecting. And he said, oh my goodness, I can’t believe that it’s working so well. And then the rest of the company got jealous, that fear of missing out. And it actually spread to the entire department, not only his teams, and now they have these monthly large scale.

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innovative breakfast. And for me, hearing that where it was one of the concepts that was shared that they had to discuss and come up with ideas in the training to actually seeing that knock on effect was huge. And you instigated all of us. Well, it’s the catalyst that’s when you are in the training space and you’re getting people to discuss and ideate and take it further. It’s up to them.

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So my role is never to be the hero of the story. I’m the mentor, I’m the guide, I’m the facilitator. They are the hero in the story. And my success is really through what my clients do. 

Christél: But Yoke, listening to you, almost sounds as if you’re always on a high. That there’s nothing ever going wrong. Or am I mistaken here? 

Yoke: No, as I was saying, love, it’s a roller coaster ride.

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Christél: So never, never, never the case. 

Yoke: So what would be a low for you? I was reflecting this morning. I actually made a Facebook post and I was seeing this photo of exactly a year ago. I was asked to speak at the new venue at that stage. We were speaking about it earlier at the Rosebank mall, the photo is there.

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I’ve been on the committee for three years, which means that if you’re in the committee, you can never, you know, showcase your own services. 

Christél: Sorry, that is? PSA committee. 

Yoke: Yes, yes. The professional speakers association of South Africa. And for the first time I’m asked to speak there. A month before this, I do adventure bootcamp. And at that stage I was very fit and I was like really excited and we were playing a game and…

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I really wanted to win and I was doing a box jump but it’s outside on a field and I didn’t look what I was doing and the next moment I was doing the ugly cry on the cross so I didn’t know that I’d actually torn the ligaments in my left foot so I still drove home like that I still got a foot wrapping. The swelling was so hectic because I went to physio the next day and she said okay no

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First I went for a scan, they couldn’t see any breaks. When they did the other scans, they couldn’t see that the swelling was just so hectic. So only two weeks later did she send me to a sports specialist and by then the swelling was down and he immediately put me in a half moon boot and I was on crutches and I had to be pushed in a wheelchair out of the hospital.

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Knowing that I have speaking opportunities lined up and I can’t even walk. I can’t even stand without crutches was a very big low in my life. At that time I was doing moderation work online, but like, you know, sometimes the lows are a blessing in disguise and these people were unforgiving. So the one day I was walking with the crutches to the bathroom and

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was a three hour session. I just needed a bathroom break in the tea break. The guy kept on talking to me in the tea break. So there wasn’t really time for me to go to the bathroom. By the time I came back from the bathroom, the alarm had gone off because they have the sound thing. And this guy had a bit of a hissy fit. And that organisation literally fired me from doing work with them.

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And I was in moon boot on crutches and I just needed to go for two minutes to the bathroom. So that was a very big low in my life, but also a very big blessing because I realised that I’d been working with them for four years. They expected way too much. They paid almost a year too late. It was always a ship to get money out of them. So I actually realised that I’d been in an abusive relationship with this company.

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who were expecting so much, but who wouldn’t actually have mercy or have a decent human relationship with you. The guy in South Africa that I worked with, he had a nice exit interview with me because it was more a contract work that I was doing with them, you know, certain amount of hours a month, but it was consistent work that I had. But reflecting back on this, I then realised that…

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I’d been paid way too little, way too late. I’d been emotionally, it’s been, it was a very toxic environment. I always felt worse working with them. And it actually opened me up to then sell to other clients that then paid me five to 10 times more. 

Christél: Wow. 

Yoke: So sometimes those lows actually makes you reflect, is this actually a clash with your core values? And should you actually be doing this work?

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or not. So I think in that way, it’s always, it’s hard when you’re going through it. And there’s a lot of tears and trauma and thank goodness for my husband. They can help bring perspective and the wonderful people I worked with, they were all shocked and saddened to see me go. But you need to actually ask yourself, is this a win-win, uplifting relationship? And I think for me, it kind of made me realise that

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You have to have better boundaries with your clients and you need to really communicate what’s going on with you. Because perhaps I had not spoken about my mobility, the fact that my leg was in the air on a bench, like your foot is now on a cushion, elevated and how long it would take me to get to the bathroom. So perhaps if I’d communicated that, then they would not have given me the gig to moderate that specific session.

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Yeah. So sometimes I think also it was, uh, it was actually a lower level job. So there was a sense of resentment on my side because I am the thought leader and I do the work myself. And yeah, I had to moderate someone else’s work and they were just so disrespectful. Yeah. So that was a low. 

Christél: Yeah. I’m just thinking while you’re talking, one often think having work like that,

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looks so glamorous and so easy. It just happens. But listening to how you speak, it’s not quite the case. 

Yoke: Not always. I came up with this metaphor for the, what was it I was expected to do in that session. And I said, it was like, they’re expecting you to ride backwards on a lion’s back jumping through a ring of fire. Because…

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when I was doing work with other corporate clients in that environment because we’re mostly working with clients in Dubai, England, even different time zones, America, so McDonald’s, MetLife, a lot of those that I did wonderful work with. This specific facilitator, they actually needed two or three moderators to do the work that he was expecting one person to do. So he would not even

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So you had to listen for the cues to move the slides. If you didn’t pick up when to move the slides, you would freak out. You had to put people in breakout rooms. You had to also run a competition, do polls at the same time. So it was just a lot of levels of thinking at the same time. And what I’ve realized, if you have support as a facilitator, you need to be very clear. And.

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Perhaps train the people that you work with and help them and make sure that your tone of voice is always positive, uplifting and never passive aggressive. Because the moment you sound like you’re panicking or you’re harsh, the other person panics more. So I kind of realized that his lack of emotional intelligence had triggered me in the wrong way. Especially the fact that I was in pain in a moon boot.

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So sometimes I think going through traumatic experiences gives you more grace with service providers. And I think for me, the big lesson there was I do a lot of work on emotional intelligence and I had to really dig deep and apply all of those self-awareness, calming, breathing techniques on myself.

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that I teach others. So I think walking the talk is very important in your business. And now it’s also things that I can share with others that they can laugh about to know how can they learn from my mistakes as well. I find it’s often easier to teach somebody something but to apply it for yourself in your own life is sometimes a little bit more difficult. You have to really dig 

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deeper. 

Christél: Definitely. But yeah, you mentioned passive aggressive. I cannot imagine seeing you passive aggressive. 

Yoke: So it wasn’t me, it was the facilitator was being passive aggressive. So you kind of pick it up in tone of voice.

Christél: And that never happens to you. Always in control.

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Yoke: I think, I think we all go through our highs and lows and I think we’re always a work in progress. So I think our family members probably sees the worst version of us, but I always joke in my training and I refer to things that me and my husband worked on, whether it was conflict or I did a post today on social media about stonewalling.

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They don’t want to fight, so they just keep quiet. So it’s like they run into the cave, but that can be very, very damaging. And then some people will immediately lash out and fight. So some people freeze, some people run away. So what we used to do is we used to run away. So we had to learn. And that’s what I know. I also teach my people practically is stay in the room.

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Don’t immediately assume the worst. Stop your brain from, so you’re ready and fight and flight mode, but don’t run away. Just do these breathing techniques. Reset your brain. And then even if you’re asking for a break to go have a cup of coffee or go for a walk, but then discuss what happened and ask the other person, what did they mean?

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You might have interpreted in this way. Possibly they didn’t mean it in that way. So, so we had to really learn. And I think a marriage is the simplest form of a team. People that have kids, they would have a team with their kids as well. You have with your extended family. But in the work environment, a team can be two people or more. So you can apply a lot of things that you do in your marriage in work.

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So a lot of people, after my training, they say, oh my goodness, I’ve changed the way that I work with my family now, or my relationships with my siblings have changed because they apply it in their own family as well. 

Christél: Okay, we’re going to talk a little bit more about the ins and outs of a whole conflict management and team in our adventures roadmap a little bit later. But.

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Yeah, it sounds like you have this absolutely amazing relationship with your husband and he is really one of your pillars in your life. Sounds like it. 

Yoke: Yeah, I think being the partner of entrepreneur is not the easiest thing because it’s a roller coaster ride in terms of income. So some years the income would be really stable and some months it wouldn’t.

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So, so that can cause friction, but I think I am very, very grateful that he is providing the stable income and the support that he’s providing in the family and also the insights he has to give. So he’s communication styles very different from mine. And I’m more of an extrovert. He’s more of an introvert and he’s brought a lot of insights that I bring into my training, 

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from a listening perspective, from working with introverts, with understanding the IT industry and understanding agile and a lot of different things. I think if you actually have a partner whether it’s in your marriage or you have people that you’re working with, it’s better to work with people that are different than you because you will have a much fuller experience for your clients than if it was just you in your worldview.

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Christél: I can definitely relate to that, although we don’t always like the opposite. We often prefer to have people like us around us, but it’s not always good for us. But speaking of what’s good for us, what is on your radar in the future that you still want to achieve as an entrepreneur? I’ve started casually doing

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Podcast episodes, but only on YouTube. So the next step would be taking it into the audio world. So literally getting it on the Apple’s podcast, all of that, getting the websites, all of that out and the aim of this podcast. So we actually doing it sneakily in two ways. So a little bit of behind the scenes. I met Thomas Ramstad from Norway.

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2017, 2018, I can’t even remember when I applied to be a mentee on the Sherry Blair mentorship program. I was matched with him, he’s from Norway, and he mentored me for many years and our relationship eventually evolved into more of a partnership, equal fitting, where we now create thought leadership together. So a few years ago, we did a few episodes on emotional intelligence.

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Now we are focusing mostly on leadership and we’re calling it leadership lyrics. So we’re focusing on different areas and testing out material because we want to write together. So we’re doing it in a way to ideate and to create content and to see, like he says, if we have a fire in our belly for a certain topic. 

Christél: Yes. 

Yoke: So we, we’re doing it in a way to actually. Really see.

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if this is what we want to write about or not and what do we know and then we are fleshing out the chapters so it’s still very early stages but that’s one of the goals and I don’t have any timelines but we we’re doing this approach so we’ve done quite a few of those episodes already and now it’s about taking it further yeah so that’s one of the the bigger projects. 

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Christél: That sounds so exciting. So will there be a book in the future? 

Yoke: Yes, that’s the aim. So our bigger dream is to do launches together. So my ideal would be to go to Norway and for him to come here. I’m not sure if that will necessarily happen immediately but his aim is to also then

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offer courses based on this thought leadership and to do things together or separately. So we can then, you know, sell for Amazon, but also sell printed copies on our own. 

Christél: Okay. 

Yoke: So to actually include it as part of the programs, that’s the bigger picture that I’m foreseeing. 

Christél: Speaking of Norway, you do a lot of work overseas as well, Dubai specifically. How does that happen?

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Yoke: A friend of mine, Michelle Twaits, introduced me many years ago to an agent that she was working with and that was in Pakistan. So in 2018, I went to Karachi, Pakistan to do a leadership development program. So that was my first international work. And that was incredibly rewarding. I think the audience in those environments are very thankful for the work and they are,

36:39

so positive that the most incredible growth mindset, where sometimes I can get frustrated with South Africans that can be entitled and used to too much and unthankful and not willing to do any of their work. In those environments, it’s very different. So then she introduced me to another gentleman that I’ve been doing work with since 2021 and that started off online and…

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Um, you specifically asked for a women in leadership program. So I developed it because I do a lot of leadership work, but now I just added other topics through the lens of women. I don’t particularly like being exclusive, you know, I’m not being inclusive of people. So sometimes people within think that you don’t cater for men, but in the specific training, I encourage women to say.

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You’re going to be working with everyone. A diversity of age, culture, religion, sexual orientation, whatever it might be, you need to be inclusive. If you’re feeling more safe in this space, which is what they do, this is great, but our aim is not to say that we don’t like men, we love men. It’s about working with everyone. And…

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creating a safe space and finding your leadership style that can actually create the greatest impact. So I’ve done that cause many times the women in leadership to very large audiences online and people as vast as Canada, there were people from America as well as well as the East. So Oman, Dubai, Egypt, white variety of places and then

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Um, since last year I’ve been into by twice for him and once this year, and, um, people have flown in from various places. Even this last session was four women, three women from the DLC. So French ladies, that was tons of fun. So I really love working with different cultures and viewpoints. And I think you can, 

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learn so much from people all around the world. So I told you earlier, my parents were Rotarians. So ever since I was young, we were exposed to different cultures and people from different lands. And I think it’s wonderful if you can work with people, not just in your own country. 

Christél: Well, that is something that I can vouch for. Being part of a Rotarian family makes a massive difference to your life.

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And yeah, that’s a topic we can go on for days. 

Yoke: Days. 

Christél: I think, yeah, let’s not go there right now. But yeah, definitely something to consider putting into your life. But for someone listening to us now that want to do what you are doing, going into training, going into public speaking, what would, 

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be your advice. 

Yoke: I really believe in the work of Malcolm Gladwell had said you need to do your 10,000 hours to become an expert in anything. So when I had the dream that this is what I wanted to do, which I realised at a presentation course where a speaker spoke about her career and what she does.

40:21

At that stage, I didn’t know that there was a professional speakers association of Southern Africa, but she encouraged me to join Toastmasters. And through Toastmasters, I really did my 10,000 hours. So that was so many speeches, evaluations, training sessions offered. So I think like in that environment, you can get on stage a lot. You can get feedback.

40:48

But I would definitely say get a speaking coach, get mentors. If you can invest in programs, it will get you there much, much quicker. Like I was doing that literally for 10 years after hours and I was in two clubs. I was in leadership for nine years. So I was always coaching training clubs, doing training sessions at clubs, doing club officer training at various corporates.

41:18

So I was literally, you know, immersing myself in the training and speaking world and just doing it again and again and again. So you need to do your 10,000 hours. That if you do 10,000 hours and you don’t get any proper coaching or guidelines, you’re not going to get any better. So it doesn’t help that you just do something and they say if you hit a thousand golf balls, random golf balls, one of it will be a hole in one. What if you have.

41:46

a proper coach and you’re working on specific goals and guidelines, you can get there quicker. So, um, in terms of the training industry, there are various qualifications you could do. I didn’t really do that whole train the trainer. I’m not very much into CETA training. I think it’s incredibly boring. So depending on what floats someone’s boat, they could go the CETA accredited training route, which can also be quite

42:16

pricey and expensive that you can do the train, the trainer become a facilitator, moderator and assessor. So that is a route that people can go on. Then you need to match your qualifications with what would you be able to, to train specifically on based on the outcomes. I’m not the expert in that, but at the professional speakers association, there are some trainers for instance, that are in the,

42:46

importing and exporting industry that earn a lot of money for training and they’re actually doing it as a side hassle. So if you have a very niche industry, I think it can be very lucrative to go that route. Versus some industries are very overpopulated. Everyone wants to do it. So, um, in terms of becoming a speaker, I’m still in that journey. I get some paid speaking gigs.

43:15

A lot of it is more promotional to actually get, for me, it’s more important to rather win larger contracts than just win a once off engagement. So for me as a business owner, it’s more important to get cashflow, get consistent cashflow than always be hunting for another thing, another thing. So for me, where I was satisfied at a stage, I had a lot of retainers with companies that would use me.

43:45

every single month to train their teams, to do consulting, to do business strategy. So if there’s a way to find out who are the kind of companies that could really use your skill sets and actually packaging what you can do and trying to get in as a supplier with them, I would say that is a much better way to go for consistent income if the people depends what they want to do. In the speaking side of things,

44:15

It’s all about, can you actually solve a big problem for a client? So there’s a, um, there’s a book called the millionaire messenger by Brendan Butchard, and I like that model where he kind of says, you can earn an income in various ways. So let’s say for me, I can offer for clients, I can offer a leadership keynote. So there’s a client that I did that for at a leadership conference for that same clients I can however offer,

44:45

a two day or a six month leadership development program plus individual or group coaching. If they sign up for the bigger thing, don’t you think that’s worth more than the hour engagement? So like a move between various things where you can sell various products and they kind of bleed into each other. Sometimes you have a retainer of a client and you could throw in a keynote because

45:12

Cause they will retain a client of yours for their wellness day. So, so you can actually play around with the various things. You can develop online programs. There’s, there’s a lot that you can do depending on how much time you have, but where you actually start earning money is when you can solve the same cause of the same talk multiple times. So if you don’t have to start from scratch, that’s really where you’re starting to be more profitable.

45:42

because it doesn’t take so much time to deliver that product. I would definitely say you need to customise. You need to have a briefing meeting and, you know, see if you can bring things in from the company and make it more applicable to them and maybe adapt certain modules or pull things out. Like you would have a menu at a restaurant, you know, where people can see, do they want extra cheese? Do they want mayonnaise? So you have different packages and options they can choose from.

46:11

But the value really lies for you, profitability. If there’s something that you can do well that people want that solves a problem, and you can scale it. Yes. 

Christél: I suppose somewhere in between, you don’t just want to work. You also want to get to your hikes and all other amazing stuff that you do to just stay a whole person. 

Yoke: Exactly.

46:38

So, um, in the speaking industry, a lot of the speakers, they say they prefer having the flexibility and rather earning a high income with a certain amount of gigs a month and having the flexibility to then still travel and do things. So for me, I, I’m able to take holidays and that, but what I am finding is it does slow down your sales process. If you don’t have.

47:07

external people selling on your behalf. So you need to actually have a pipeline in place and actually solve things in advance so that when you come back, there’s not a complete gap in your diary. So retainers is definitely a better route, but what I’m finding at the moment is a lot of companies are not wanting to go the retainer route.

Christél: But there’s always a way around it. As long as you do all the work and you know you.

47:37

put everything in that you possibly can. People will still love you and still use you. And nothing comes easy. 

Yoke: Yeah, I think it’s the return on luck. One of my colleagues in Australia, Leanne is doing an event in Las Vegas and she’s calling it return on luck. There’s a book written about that as well. And I think Gary Player once said, the harder I practise, the luckier I get.

48:07

And I believe the same thing with sales, the more that you are doing a conscious effort, you’re going out there, you actually have a headless, you having your meetings, you’re following up regularly, you have your CRM or whatever system you’re following, the business will convert. But if you’re not actually putting yourself out there and practising your sales process and maybe getting coaches or mentors in that can guide you.

48:35

If your sales process is actually working, you might be actually wasting your time. 

Christél: Absolutely. But Yoke, I can’t help to think back to that day when you got retrenched. How amazing was it looking back now? Where would you have been if you didn’t get retrenched?

49:02

Yoke: Yeah, I think I, in my NLP coaching work, we work with timeline and that’s what you’re doing now. So very often when a person has a, has a block or they’ve experienced something dramatic and if they’re still stuck there, it’s about going back to those moments and reframing it and saying, if we had to look back at that time.

49:27

If that incident had not happened, what else would not have happened? And that’s what you’re getting to now in terms of having this business, working with these people, I might not have been willing to, to offer up this stable job, the perks of corporate, the car allowance, all of that. And having been forced out of it was maybe an easier way for me to get into starting the business.

49:56

than having to choose to quit. Because yeah, I think for most people, it is quite difficult leaving a stable job. I think going after something that really speaks to your heart. 

Christél: But just quickly before we go, what would be your number one book that you can recommend for our entrepreneurs? 

Yoke: I have a few. I can’t just give one.

50:26

So Alan Vies, he’s one of my favorite speakers and consultants. And he wrote the book, The Millionaire Messenger. And he actually speaks with value-based pricing. So I would definitely say if you’re not buying his book, go and follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and everywhere you can and absorb as much as you can from Alan because that will transform your business. He’s also a contrarian.

50:56

say things that’s not politically correct and trying to divert things around. And the other one is The Alchemist was actually a fiction book that really inspired me as an entrepreneur. And Paulu Coelho wrote it. I actually read it first year of varsity. And I’ve used principles out of that book in my training so many times. I’ll just quickly tell you a little story at a stage.

51:25

The character Santiago, he came to a place that was selling crystals and he just started cleaning the shelves and he wanted them to build a cabinet for display and suddenly the sales just went up. And the next thing that he did is he wanted them to serve tea because he realised that people were quite tired by the time they came to that merchant.

51:54

And they’d actually climbed a mountain. So they actually started turning that business from selling crystal into restaurants. And now people were having tea and then it became other competitors were trying to also now serve tea out of crystal because they saw, oh wow, look how this is. People are having tea out of crystal and then they buying the crystal. Then they turn it into a tourism opportunity.

52:21

because people would then climb the mountain to go drink tea at this place in order to buy the crystals. So I think for me as an entrepreneur, what’s really important is you don’t want to sell only the crystal, you want to sell the experience that tourism experience, the restaurant, you actually want to see how much value can you really add in a business to stand on from your competitors. 

Christél: Definitely a good book.

52:51

to have on your shelf. And in terms of quotes, inspirational quotes, what would be the ones that stand out for you? I assume you’ve got a couple. 

Yoke: So the one is from J.K. Rowling, but it was from Harry Potter. And it was actually Sirius Black. He was Harry Potter’s godfather that said to him,

53:19

carry light and darkness inside of ourselves, but it supports that we decide to act on that is who we truly are.

53:29

Christél: And it almost brings me back to your Kintsugi concept, and being the Kintsugi queen. You can feel sorry for yourself that you’ve broken your pretty piece or you can fix it up. 

Yoke: Exactly. And it’s your choice. Yes. Your choice, are you going to sit and wallow while you’re there in your moon boot? Or are you going to stand up and speak?

54:00

and push through and take it as a lesson. So it’s always a choice.