Breaking the Mold: Following Your Passion

The Free To Lead Podcast by Will Steel. A career decision to major in Spanish with Richard Blank. In this episode of Free To Lead: Journeys of Leaders Driven by Passion, Inspired by Purpose, Will Steel interviews the CEO, President, and Bilingual Telemarketer Trainer of Costa Rica's Call Center, Richard Blank. Richard recounts his unconventional decision to major in Spanish, his transformative experience teaching English in Costa Rica, and his eventual success in the call center industry. Embracing Failure: Turning Setbacks into Success. He emphasizes perseverance, learning from setbacks, and the importance of building relationships. Richard also offers practical advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and discusses his future aspirations of writing children's books. Richard concludes with reflections on the joy and fulfillment found in both personal and professional life. Advice for Struggling Entrepreneurs Everyone will definitely want to come and hang out. Great. Great. All right, good. What would you say to someone who's started their own business? They're struggling right now. With all your years of experience in building that business and obviously being quite successful, what would you say to someone who's struggling right now? Define struggling. Would it be financial, physical? Do they have time? Do they have a wife that's just yelling at them? I don't know. But this is my thing, my friend, is stay the course. You don't need to do it through leaps and bounds. It's one step without sounding cliche-ish. But if you also have a job, then keep that job. Be responsible. Do something 80 hours a week is a normal time for a CEO. 40 hours is part time. So if you could find the evenings and weekends, telling you to go out and if you have trouble public speaking, go to certain places, network. It's easier said than done. So why don't you do the thing that's fun? Breaking the Mold: Following Your Passion I think we've all grown up in families where there's some serious expectations, scholastic, cultural tradition. I wanted to break that mold. Don't call me a black sheep. I'm the one that shines. I didn't want to study finance or law or go into medicine, like what my friends and family did. I gravitated towards languages, especially when you guys speak Queens English. Oh, NVSMI. but it was the easier class. I tell you what, Will, whenever you do something above and beyond dedicated practice, like the gym or arts and languages, I knew that I had something. So when it came to that really responsible decision, where you go to school and what you study, I didn't want to feel like a rainy Sunday night cramming session. That would have broken me. I didn't want that sort of pressure. I didn't want to live in that box. So I said, listen, let me be a Spanish major. It might make me marketable. I could get a job. Put seabla espanol on a business card. My parents thought I was crazy. I said, hold on. My great grandparents came to the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Great grandpa Louie couldn't speak English, moved to New York. Look what he did during the depression. https://youtu.be/AbjVlr7xiok https://youtu.be/JVz9J4MbV6g https://youtu.be/7v8nAZprAdU Will Steel, The Free To Lead Podcast, Richard Blank,Costa Rica's Call Center, Outsourcing, Telemarketing Call Centre, BPO, Nearshore Contact Center, Sales, Entrepreneur, B2B, Business, Podcast, Gamification,Leadership, Marketing, CX, Guest, Money, B2C education, BPO trainer,call centre, contact centre, contact center,trend, trending Introducing Will Steel As one of the world’s most highly regarded transformational leaders,Will spent 21 years leading one of the world’s top personal and professional growth, training and development programs. About Having coached individuals from all walks of life - including CEO’s, top business executives, entrepreneurs, rocket scientists, politicians, senior military and civil service personnel, psychologists, world champion athletes, celebrities, musicians, and religious leaders from all denominations including Tibetan monks – Will has developed the unique ability to quickly identify what blocks people from being effective in producing breakthrough results. Listening from the ontological perspective, Will is able to guide you to see and conquer what you have been blind to and blocked by, enabling you to act free from your limiting beliefs and constraints. Earlier in life Will graduated from the Royal Air Force College Cranwell with the Leadership Trophy, flew as a military pilot for 10 years, and as a commercial pilot for a further 2 years. While fully able to think on his feet in highly challenging real-life dangerous situations, the sensitivity and listening skills needed for the civilian and business world got honed in the Personal Development arena. With his ability to listen from the ontological perspective, Will delivers unprecedented results that will far exceed your expectations. Will has led to over 90,000 people in 26 countries. Will believes your unidentified past decisions limit what’s possible for you. With his coaching you can free yourself from those mental constrains, leaving you with limitless possibilities. When you see what’s been blocking you, it’s so obvious. You won’t believe you couldn’t see it before. A great analogy for this work is the fish who does not know it is swimming in water; it is just swimming. You need to pull it out of the water bowl and put it back in to have it get for itself, “Oh my Gosh, I’ve been living in water!” After that, the fish’s life is never the same again, even though it is still in the same water bowl, the experience is now a new one. Once pointed out, the previously ‘unseeable’ is now seen in such a way that the experience of life is never the same again. From now on the fish is aware it has something humans don’t have; fins to help it swim, gills to help it breathe, and skin that is sustainable in water. Now the fish experiences a power it didn’t know it had, humans can’t live underwater like this great and powerful fish. With this work a whole new sense of power and transformation takes over, and you, like the fish, find yourself able to take actions you would never have thought to take, producing off the scale breakthrough results. These results can only come from organic coaching. You will look into the areas you choose to go to work on and then delve into whatever else comes up for you during the conversations, and when we say delve, we mean deep dive. Who I Work With I work with people who are looking to see what’s in the way of them producing the results they really want to produce in life. Everyone has blocks, it’s ok. After seeing what’s been blocking you, you will be free and empowered to produce the results you want to produce in the real world. You need a highly tuned race car if you want to win the race. I’ll put you in the driving seat of your life. Let’s go! I don’t just listen to what you’re saying in the foreground, I also listen to what you’re not saying that’s in the background. It’s what’s going on in the background that shapes how you see the world. With my 24 years of coaching experience and being coached myself, I’ll have you see what’s blinding and blocking you from producing breakthrough results. You have all the answers, you’ve just not been asked the right questions… Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. In addition, inducted into the 2023 Hall of Fame for Business. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level. Hired bassist Garry Gary Beers of INXS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieGjN5H4xPQ Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies. We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry. https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/ #WillSteel #FreeToLeadPodcast #RichardBlank #CostaRica #CallCenter #Outsourcing #Telemarketing #BPO #Sales #Entrepreneur #B2B #Business #Podcast #Gamification #CEO #trend #trending Finding Satisfaction Beyond Wealth Golden jewels lose its luster. I've made enough money where I'm comfortable and how many dinners can I eat? And I'm not really into the sort of things to compare myself to others like Rolexes and Lamborghinis. That's not my style. I collect pinball machines. My main thing is self-improvement. If I can get up every day and make my bed, be happily married for 24 years still, hit the gym, which I love, walk the rows and try to pay it forward to the freshmen as I, a senior, it's a great life. It's a fun life. And then I have a luxury trade. I get to write. I get to listen to phone calls. I'm not bored. I still have fidelity. I still feel young. And so you can't crack that glass. You have to be very delicate with your life and your time. And so fortunately for me, my really good friend, I chose something that gives me severe satisfaction. And the market speaks. If people have been with me for 15 years, if people come back to work, especially in the call center, And they say, good morning, jefe. Man, I've done something right. Anyone can have a dollar, any loser and any player. It doesn't mean anything. The True Essence of Leadership When you have a luxury of a track record and they've seen you during your best and your worst times and they judge your character during that, that's when the people come to you and say, listen, you didn't realize it, but that day when you said ABC, that got me out of this thing. And I was able, you have no idea that you even said it. But you made that impression. And so my leadership to me, my man, is not how many tickets I sell at a concert or where I am on a billboard chart or in the top 500 richest people somewhere. It's that thing when the cameras aren't there or someone introduces me to their mother and says, this is the best boss I've ever had. Man, you're going to make me cry. Passion Over Profit: The True Driver I enjoy watching people in their moments, but my mind is always about them getting up early and training to get to that moment. If you see it that way, what's behind the curtain, what's in the kitchen? Seriously, the ones that are the long-term players. Yeah, I can hear if it was a football team that you're invested in those people getting better. Yes, there's the money. But that can't be what has you be as good at what you do. It's not just the money. Money is fine to have the money. If you do a good job and you provide a good service, fine. Totally great. But you can't have that be the driver. It has to be, okay, that's that. And this is my craft. Or this is my... That's the best stage, the honeymoon stage. When you first start making real money, it's the weirdest feeling in the world. It's like a child that walks into a candy store with five bucks and everything's a penny. This is crazy. So what did I do? Besides the investments in the business and the computers, that kind of wasn't fun. True Leadership: Beyond Fame and Fortune But you made that impression. And so my leadership to me, my man, is not how many tickets I sell at a concert or where I am on a billboard chart or in the top 500 richest people somewhere. It's that thing when the cameras aren't there or someone introduces me to their mother and says, this is the best boss I've ever had. Man, you're going to make me cry. So I think leadership, if it's done in a healthy way where it's preserved, the sanctity of it, And you like the truth can do it over and over again. You're not just a one trick pony with a five spot. Then you might have a chance.