When you are excited about a program that improved your life, and you want to share it with the world! I found out about Life in Sight when I was hired to turn the face-to-face workshop into an online course.
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“Well, we’re talking about moustaches, and I’m saying I can’t wait for our next guest to remark on it. And our next guest was also a guest of our last Boiling Point Process live event in Moncton. In my opinion, I thought went very well.
We pulled it off with many different potential pitfalls, and we actually did it, so high five on that. And I think we’re going to be doing many more of these Boiling Point Process tours.
Our guest high-fived us as well.
Yes, it’s good.
So Tammy Perry. Oh, there we go.
Tammy Perry is our guest. Welcome into the booth, Tammy.
I feel like I should be growing a moustache, and I can work on it, but I don’t think I’ll.
No, I don’t.
It might take a little longer. I think I should do the opposite, Movember. I should just shave the moustache and have the Quaker beard.
Don’t do that.”
“I think that would be good. So Tammy, you wear a lot of hats in your CV, if you will. I know you from the Shaping Purpose team, from being an expert in e-learning and courseware and all these different digital email marketing, because you and I met probably a year and a half or two years ago or something of that nature and always admired your expertise in this.
And this is why we wanted you to be at The Boiling Point process, talking about different platforms and your platform being the ability for businesses to actually create courses and sell them and connect with their potential clients.
And just one thing to point out, like for guests or for listeners that aren’t aware of what The Boiling Point process is, we do live events, we have an online training and it’s just how to be heard in a noisy marketplace. And so Tammy came to the last live event.
Because we’ve been trying to create our own online training, we really invited Tammy to come on so we could learn ourselves.
Yes.
So Tammy, first of all, let’s get your introduction. I only skimmed the very top of your robust history and your essence. Tell us about you.
That’s a big question.
She’s like, finally I get to talk, these guys.
By the way, I’m a big motorbike geek as well. Unfortunately, I sold my motorbike about five years ago to my buddy, but I do have rights of first refusal to get it back.
Excellent, what was it?
It was a 77 GS550, which was the same motorbike, the very same bike that my dad took me on when I was about six years old. I was on the back of it. Maybe it was five years old.
I can’t remember, because his friend owned it that many years ago, and I bought it from him in 1995. Yeah, and it’s gone now, but I can always get it back. And Tammy’s a motorcycle enthusiast.
Well, I know she’s going to talk about that.
All right, back in, can I start from high school?
Wherever you want.
I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, just like everybody else in high school. So I listened to whatever the school people said, and they said, you know what? You’re good in math.”
“You’d be good at computer programming. This was in 1984, right? When computers, people didn’t have computers.
The school had one room with two floppy drive computers. So I said, well, I don’t know what else to do. That’s what I’ll do.
Well, I did it for a year. I came second in my class, did really well, really good at it, hated it. Did not want to ever punch stuff into a computer and read computer paper.
I can relate, by the way.
I’d rather be riding my motorcycle or doing something outside. When you’re young, you want to be doing other things than sitting in a room looking at code. Plus I thought computers should be doing this.
Why are people doing this? You’re looking for tiny anomalies in large bits of data. Isn’t that what computers do?
I was blown away that we hadn’t invented a computer to do what I was learning how to do, blew me away. So I decided to go, what do I love to do? I love to do photography.
I’m going to go study photography. So I went to college and did a two-year diploma in communication arts, photography, graphic design, journalism. And then to round it all off, I went to Loyalist in Ontario and did television production.
So I got to do all that fun stuff, loved it, really enjoyed it. Came back to St. John for a medical issue that I had and ended up picking up a job at a photo lab. And within a few months, serendipitously, met somebody in a bar who was going on maternity leave and needed me to take her place as a computer instructor.
Because there weren’t a whole lot of people in town that were good with computers, right? And I said, wow, that’s a really good opportunity. I’m going to give it a go.
So since then, I’ve been teaching adults how to use computer software. And very quickly, I transitioned into teaching desktop publishing because that was my forte, photography, graphic design, journalism. So I started putting together courses for people that worked for newspapers and newspaper offices and magazines and communications companies on how to use graphic design programs and software.
So from there, I got into online learning and development when I started working for Memorial University in Newfoundland for the medical school. So for
“So for the medical school, I used all the same skills to build online programs and got really involved in instructional design and started working towards my degree in adult education. So I started doing more instructional design, multimedia development for online courses there.
And then I had one of those big midlife epiphanies. That was why am I sitting in a building with no windows every day, day in, day out, and not being happy. And I decided to completely change my life, sold everything, gave the rest away, hopped on my motorcycle and took off to Guatemala.
From here? From Newfoundland.
How long did that take to get down?
A month or so. I had to do a stopover in California. I was speaking at an event there, so I had to do a stopover.
So it sounded like you came to a position of big decision.
Big decision.
What am I about to do? Is this my purpose? Is this what I’m here to be sitting in a windowless environment the rest of my life?
And it sounds like what a lot of people do is you kind of find headspace. And for you, it was the
“motorbike and going on an epic trip. So what was the result of that?
There were many results of that, but people’s first question is, why a motorcycle? Where did that all come from? And like you, my dad taught me to ride when I was a teenager on his little Honda 450, and we made plans to do a cross country trip.
He was going to do early retirement. He was going to retire at 55. So he had this big gold wing, had it all outfitted.
He had his whole big trip planned, and I was going to ride the 450, and we were going to go to Vancouver and back on these bikes. Well, my dad didn’t make it to 55. He died at 50 of lung cancer and had never left the city on his bike.
He may have done one trip, I think, maybe to Trois-Rivières in Quebec, but yeah, he didn’t get to do that. So when I hit my little midlife thing, when I was thinking, you know, this has got to be more than this. Is this all there is?
And I had great people to work with. You know, I
“had great people around me. But there was something huge missing, and I had to make a decision.
Am I going to stay here, or am I going to go? And the first thing I thought of is, you know, my dad never did get to do that cross-country motorcycle trip. So that’s why.
That’s where the motorcycle came from.
What a gift from your dad to you.
Big time. Yeah. Don’t make your decision.
Don’t procrastinate and put it off and wait till things are perfect, because they’re never perfect, for one thing. You know what? And things didn’t work out perfectly when I went to Guatemala.
You know, some, you know, my house sale fell through. So I’m in Guatemala, and you can’t do anything. You know, you can’t sign any papers from Guatemala.
My house sale fell through. The guy pulled out at the last minute and decided not to buy it, so I had to figure out, you know, I had to find people to rent. I had to, all that from another country.
That contract, I had actually decided, taken a contract to work on a Adobe and Microsoft project while in Guatemala, and
“while in Guatemala, and that fell through. In the meantime, my teenage daughter, who had been on her own, was having some troubles and really needed my help, so guess who came with me to Guatemala? Right?
Who ended up in Guatemala with me for three months. So a lot of things didn’t work out because I had to, it was a reaction, right? And it wasn’t really as proactive as it could have been.
There could have been better planning, there could have been a lot of better ways to go about making this happen.
So it feels like a real natural segue to the course that you’ve developed. So you’ve got all the technical skills over the years and you’re a natural trainer. And you personally went through a massive decision.
And I still love to hear what the next chapter of that was. But why don’t you tell us the next chapter, but also position into the course that you’ve developed on helping people to figure out if they should stay or go. Because like I said, as I walked in, I’m excited to take this myself.
And I think, Dave, you can probably relate, because Dave”
“and I talk about this stuff all the time. It’s like successful businesses, great families, all that stuff. But it’s like, what’s next?
And it’s not a bad thing. It’s people who want to live a full life, really want to live a full life. So where do I go from here?
Like, how do I make that happen? It’s not just people who are in a slump, or maybe are depressed, or maybe a lot of people who are depressed really need to make changes. But there’s more people like my dad who are going along just great, who weren’t making decisions in a good way.
They were making decisions based on a future life that may or may not happen. So my trip to Guatemala, I ended up spending about a year there, met some wonderful people. I ended up getting online contracts, doing course development for a company in Ireland, and our clients were in Saudi Arabia and other places around the world.
It was really, really kind of fun work. And, you know, I did tons of that kind of work, and I did tons of motorcycle trips. I went to Cambodia for a month or”
“two months, and I brought laptops into a mountain village to help them build a school there, and I did all kinds of work in Mexico, doing, what do you call it?
I don’t want to call it charity work, but volunteer work to work with other nonprofits who were looking to build online courses but didn’t know how. So for free, I’d be doing my regular online work, and I’d help them with their project management and show them what they need to do to build an online course. And I was constantly looking for other contracts, so I saw this photography company that was looking for someone to build online courses for them, and I decided to investigate.
I looked up this one fella who was doing instruction for them, an instructional design, and found his email, contacted him, and it turned out, I was in Guanajuato, Mexico at the time, and he was right next door, about 40 minutes away from me. So that was a fun connection. Added him on Facebook, and it turns out, he’s from St. John, New Brunswick.
And who else was it but?
My brother.
Small world. So Mark and I decided”
“to go for coffee back in St. John, right?
After you connected, did you guys meet in Mexico?
We didn’t meet in Mexico. We just connected online, realized we were so close, decided we were both going to be in St. John in a couple of weeks. We said, okay, let’s meet in St. John.
We go to coffee shop and in walks Don, your dad.
That’s my dad and the guy behind the mixer right now.
Yeah. Don walks in and over here is Mark and I talking about e-learning development and online courses and things like that. And he goes, I’ve got somebody that I need these questions answered.
Do you want to meet them tomorrow? And since then, I’ve been working with this person, Lorne Brett, who developed an amazing course that helps people through difficult transitions. He worked with a lot of really smart people to get this course together, and it’s been researched by the University of British Columbia.
A whole research team has gone through and studied the course to prove that it actually helps people work through life transitions more easily and be more successful at the end.
I know his son”
“son, but he’s a very successful businessman.
Yes. That’s part of his story, too. He was transitioning out of that in retirement.
I didn’t know he was connected to the project.
He was in the car business before transitioning out, as I know, and that would be a pretty straightforward, transactional kind of… I mean, customer service is important, all that stuff, but that’s kind of a hard-nosed business, so it’s interesting to hear of his interest in this.
Yeah, he had a lot of, you know, what do you call it, in the fire, a lot of stuff going on, irons in the fire, and a lot of different businesses that he’s developed, software businesses, he’s done restaurants, he’s done a lot of things, always been very busy. So he was quite excited to turn the keys over to his son and say, I’m going to retire. But when he did that, there was an implosion, you know, he ran out of things to do and lacked purpose and became purposeless.
And it was in getting himself out of that, that he consulted all these people to find a path, a journey, a way to get out of”
“that and into a more directed, like a more fulfilling life.
So you were brought in to help, this course was already built or was it you to, were you coming in to tweak it or build it from the ground up?
So the course was already built by instructional designers and psychologists was involved and all of, as a classroom program, an in-person classroom program, which gets quite expensive for people to be able to fly to a central location and pay for hotels and all that stuff. So Lorne really wanted this to go online so that he could reach more people with it, so that more people could take advantage of this learning process. Plus, a four-day weekend is like, you know, it’s like Santa Claus coming, and then there’s this major crash afterwards, because you lose your support system.
You just had this wonderful group of people sharing deep life transitions.
If you go on site versus, yeah, I see what you’re saying.”
“On site versus, you know, doing it online, because what I’ve done with the online program is broken it down into a three-month program, so that you work in groups and actually get a lot of support, weekly live support as you go. And we stretch it out so that you can actually stay in the group for a year or longer as a mastermind group so that you’re constantly supported in your decisions.
So have we talked about the name of the courses yet?
The course is called Life Insight, and the company is called Shaping Purpose. So it’s the shaping purpose process, and the online version of the course is Life Insight.
Excellent.
And who are you aiming to come into this? Your avatar? Yeah, who’s your avatar, Tammy?
Our avatar. We have three avatars right now, and there’s a potential for many more, but we have successfully taught this course in person to high school students transitioning to university. They’ve done, they’ve made amazing groundbreaking discoveries in who they are so that they can figure out what they want to do when they grow up, or basically.
We have the veterans going into civilian life, which”
“is a huge, huge, huge problematic area. You can’t live in a place where you’re told what your values are, and you’re told what to wear and where to go, and everything’s provided for you, and in such horrendous circumstances in a lot of cases, and then just pop back into civilian life as if, you know. So this course has been so successful with that that we recently got a grant from the Canadian government to study it further with couples leaving the military.
So that’s one, a really strong avatar that Andrew Garsh is working on right now. He’s putting that together, that whole research program together that’s on the go. And I’m focusing on people in midlife transition.
People who are like me, who were thinking, should I stay in this 9 to 5 job and continue what I’m doing and continue on this path and be miserable? Or not miserable, and just be okay?
Not fully fulfilled.
Or do I find fulfillment and make the decision to… So in order to make that decision, to sell everything and take off, you have to know what you want. You can’t do that willy-nilly.”
“You gotta know what you want. So this course, if I had taken this course just before that, things would have been much more smooth.
When you sold everything and went on that trip, did you have any… Were you hoping for discovery or did you have any clue of what you thought you were chasing?
All I knew was that I needed to travel and see the world. I needed to break out and meet more people and see people, more diverse populations.
Where did you grow up, by the way? I meant to ask that earlier.
All over St. John.
Okay, so you’re St. John.
Yeah, I’m a St. John.
Okay, I was just curious about that. Because it’s funny, I talk to, not everyone, but a lot of New Brunsickers have a thirst for getting away. And I had the opposite where I was always, like I was up in the Yukon, but my parents had this value of travel and I was always traveling.”
“And my wife didn’t have that experience. And so it’s just interesting to, the real need she has for our kids to explore the world. So I just wonder if there’s any, I don’t know if it’s part of the psychology around these parts or what, but I just, I don’t know if that applies to you or not.
If you’re from an island community, islanders, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Australians, Yukon, that’s sort of like an island. It’s the same idea. You tend to get wanderlust because you’re in a contained environment, but you always go back or you always find a home after.
They go out for 10, 20 years, and they always come home. The big joke in Newfoundland is how do you tell a Newfoundlander in heaven? They’re the only ones that want to go home.
Right? So I think St. John, New Brunswick is that same kind of area. It’s beautiful, it’s almost magical, and it’s natural beauty and the coastline, and you’ve got access to nature, and you’ve got access to businesses, and you’ve got access to everything you need, but it’s the same people.”
“It’s the same avatar everywhere, and you want to see more.
It’s pretty uniform in the population, comparatively to other regions. So how do people learn more about the course? Because I’m guessing there’s a way you can go in and you can test it, take a test, drive.
So Tammy, tell us, like listeners are going to say, hey, we’re interested in this. And I think we should get Lauren on a podcast at some point. It sounds so interesting to hear.
I’d love to hear her story. I don’t know him, like I said, but I certainly know his son, via you actually, Greg, and great guy. But I’m so fascinated by kind of what would get someone to say, hey, this is my experience.
I’m going to create a course to support other people and then to hear the types of avatars. Particularly the military piece, like, wow, very interesting. So someone listening and maybe they don’t fit those avatars perfectly, but they go, I’m interested, or maybe they do fit it perfectly.
How do they learn more?
Best thing to do is go to bestlifeinsight.com.
Insight being I-N-S-I-G-H-T.
Correct.”
“This is a nice play on words. Thank you for clarifying the spelling.
bestlifeinsight.com. There’s a registration there for a webinar coming up on the 26th, I believe. I hope I got the date right, November 26th.
And it’s a webinar about how to make better decisions. And it also happens to lay out the basics of the course itself.
This is a free webinar?
It’s a free webinar. So you can go register for the webinar. It’s one hour long.
And I explain the process, the shaping purpose process of decision making, which is part of the course eventually. And at the end, I explain also on how you can learn more. So there is an introduction to the course at the end as well.
Just full transparency there. It is a webinar with the purpose of…
And we’re very familiar with the whole funnel approach. You want to give people a taste through the free webinar. And everybody understands.
There’s going to be an opportunity to purchase something further. Are we looking at prices that are manageable? Some courses are so expensive that people can’t do it.
Other courses are so cheap that nobody believes that it’s got”
“value.
Exactly.
It’s really interesting.
And it’s difficult to find that. So what I would like to do is get an inaugural group, so founding members, to start building a community that helps people deal with big transitions in life and how to make their life more worthwhile so that they never ever have to sit there and think, is this all there is? And should I stay or should I go?
If you’re in a relationship, you’re in a job, you’re in a location that you don’t want to be, should you stay or should you go? So we want to make sure that we give people the opportunity to learn how to do that, and you’ll learn how to do that in the webinar.
And just to go back to what you said earlier, the course has, people have gone through it in person, in classroom settings. When you’re saying this inaugural community, you’re just talking about the online version.
Just the online version, yeah.
So people should know that it’s not like the first time anyone’s going through the course, it’s just the first online opportunity.”
“It’s well tested and hugely successful. And it’s been proven, like I said, with that research study, which nobody else has, by the way, that I know of. You can’t go and find a research project done on a course to prove that it works, that the efficacy is there.
It’s not, you know, I’ve never seen it for anyone else. Tony Robbins didn’t start out with a scientific study to see if his stuff worked. He just did it for 20 years and it proved itself.
We actually have a study to show that this works.
That’s cool.
These are The Boiling Point Takeaways.
So Dave, we are coming to the end of a very engaging interview that we just had with Tammy Perry. Thank you, Tammy, for this. And talking about the course Life Insight, best life in sight.
Life Insight.
Life Insight. I did it right the first time. And you and I are really excited about learning about online training.
But outside of that, on a personal level, I know I’m going to actually sign up for the webinar. I’m excited to learn more. How about you, Dave?”
“What are some of the takeaways that you have from this conversation? Remember one about the business model or about Tammy’s incredible journey?
Well, yeah, I know there’s a bunch. I mean, I love, you know, we didn’t talk about, but the digital nomad lifestyle that I know a little bit about is kind of very interesting. But that’s not a takeaway as much as just a curiosity I have.
As a coach, part of the beauty of it and part of the challenge is that you’re asking your clients or encouraging your clients, request your clients to build and grow and develop, and it means you have to do it yourself, right? So, and this, and when I say it’s a gift and a curse, it’s just like, I think I’m done working on myself, but there’s new levels, there’s new levels. So as I listen to this and I hear the background, the research, I think that’s a big takeaway is having, you know, like something that’s actually been tested and I’m intrigued.”
“I’d like to know how I’m, how am I making decisions? So I believe I’m a lifelong learner and I’d like to check it out. So my takeaway is that we’re always glaring and evolving and growing.
And, you know, how cool it is to have content that you can be exposed to, you know, it doesn’t mean you have to travel to New York or to Chicago or Tron or St. John or anywhere else. So that’s my takeaway, with my Movember mustache.
You’re looking good. Dave, you’re looking good.
Greg was flipping the camera just in case I didn’t know.
Dave, for those of you who are just tuning in now, I’m spinning around, that’s really nice. Dave is all embarrassed about his Movember mustache. And I think it looks cute.
My takeaway is after, and for those of you who are just tuning in on this video right now, you’ll have to listen to this whole episode with Tammy Perry on boilingpointpodcast.com. Tammy’s adventure, when she realized that she needed to make a decision, was it time for her to stay or time for her to go, she made the decision to sell everything, drop it all”
“all, get on her motorbike and drive all the way down to Guatemala. What we had just learned though, is if she had a little bit more of a focus on what she wanted to, some of the outcomes that she was actually running away from, if you will, like when we try to make a big decision, midlife, and say, I want to quit this job, I want to go do something else.
Well, having some tools to help you make that decision, to figure out, okay, don’t just blindly go, maybe there are ways to make really strategic decisions. And that’s my takeaway is, because I’m very much like Tammy back in those old days, I make decisions quickly, and I don’t put a lot of thought to them, and a lot of times they work out brilliantly, and other times they’re an absolute disaster. So I’m looking forward to taking this course, Tammy.
And Tammy, how about you?
Before we go to Tammy, what about, would this course have been helpful, you know, as your family planning and that sort of thing, do you think?
What are you getting at, Dave?
Well, you and I both are”
“crazy, because we love kids and we decide, well, me, well, to my point.
I have no fear over having a third child at this age, Dave. I’m sorry that you do.
Congratulations, by the way.
I’m saying that because it hasn’t happened yet to me, but it has to you. So talk to me after December 13th, and I’ll let you know if I have a different answer.
That’s a big event. And it will be the best choice you ever made.
The best choice. And Tammy, this is a new audience on the video, so why don’t you do just a quick recap about our conversation? And how people can get involved?
Well, the best way to get involved is to go to bestlifeinsight.com and sign up for the webinar. It’s a free webinar. And what you’re going to learn there is the steps you need to take to make better life decisions.
And Dave, the mustache looks handsome.
Yeah, that was cute. Awesome, thank you.
Awesome. Thank you so much, Tammy. And for all the listeners, make sure you check out more of our Boiling Point Podcast episodes on iTunes and Stitcher, on anywhere you listen to”
“Thanks for checking out this episode of Boiling Point. Remember to rate and subscribe to us on iTunes and follow us on Twitter at BoilingPointPod. To see more from Dave Veale, check out Leadership Unleashed.ca or visioncoachinginc.com.
And on Twitter, at Dave underscore Veale. And to catch up with Greg, visit hemmingshouse.com and at Greg Hemmings on Twitter. Thanks for listening and remember, keep that pot boiling.”
From The Boiling Point: Tammy Perry Can Help You Find Your Best Life Insight, Nov 21, 2019
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/tammy-perry-can-help-you-find-your-best-life-insight/id877783776?i=1000457482108&r=1951
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