0:01 [Music] who are you and where are you going what do you want for the next 24 minutes we're going to design and attain your ideal life [Music] on the way to wow show together we'll find the ideal path to get you back on the track to success and happiness
0:36 on the way to wow show with your host kevin bemel when it comes to building a resilient mindset one of the most important capabilities we can develop is creativity now i know about you but when i think of creativity i think of mozart or picasso some kind of artist but creativity is crucially important in all aspects of our life and our guest today kara macklin
1:14 is going to show us how to touch get in touch with our creativity on our way to wow so i am very excited to have kara macklin as our next guest cara comes to us of course via zoom all the way from northern ireland making us now we're an international show way to wow goes international so cara has been an entrepreneur since
1:51 she was get this folks five years old and we're not talking lemonade stand here we're talking no kidding entrepreneur she was part of her family's business for many many years i think she'll be telling us a little bit about that and now what she's doing is working with entrepreneurs and business professionals helping them get that mindset that really allows them to take their businesses to the next level so cara welcome to the way to wow show thank you so much for having me so
2:26 tell us tell me a little tell us a little bit about your earlier background i mean starting as five years old and then becoming you know a multiple award women award-winning female entrepreneur female business person how do you go how did you go from one to the to the other so as you say kevin five years old my parents had businesses so i always say i started my education around the kitchen table in northern ireland and my first i suppose unofficial business was at eight or nine i was making jewelry
3:01 and i always say it was great fun but i didn't make any money and i was selling it to my friends and family and but my first proper business i suppose where i made money was 15 so i used to run coaches like bosses to local nightclubs for our town and village and friends and school and so that was a very profitable business for me during my school year so that was the start of my own business with with my big brother 15 years old you were running buses what we call them america two clubs for your friends wow wow i assume you didn't drive the buses
3:37 you must have no no we can't we're not allowed to drive until we're 17. okay in northern ireland we used to so the bus cost and 100 pounds there was 52 states on the bus so my brother and i had to go free and the other 50 seats we charged five pounds so over 20 years ago we were making 150 pounds profit every few months for our pocket money [Laughter] wow so then what was the next step on your journey from there so i did the usual um school
4:12 in the university or college and did business studies i then went and worked in london for a year in marks and spencers which you guys may or may not know it's a really more luxurious food retailer in in the uk i worked for them in their food trend studio so that was when my start of my professional um journey in terms of innovation creative thinking best practice and to see it in a huge organization like that and then i came back to the family business so my first role i was 24 at that stage my parents our family
4:47 businesses health care and hospitality so i would have worked in the hotel my parents have a four-star hotel which i grew up in working and my first role was managing an elderly care home um at 24 so we had 80 residents and over 100 staff so i was responsible for that at 24. 24. 100 staff wow and um you you actually as i recall from talking to you previously you repositioned that home to really make it a first in
5:22 the industry is is that correct um well so not that specific home so i managed three of our homes i opened two businesses and i i redeveloped the hotel with my family that we we doubled the size of it so i was 15 years in that business and we we went from about 200 employees and three businesses to over 600 employees and seven businesses in that time and then i was very lucky i got a scholarship to go back to london and do my mba and so that was in 2015 and then when i came back from london i had this idea of
5:57 of really disrupting the elderly care market um in ireland and i created the first ever lifestyle care home in ireland in 20 17 and 18 so that was a three-year project so that was the disruption of the of the elderly care market here and a lifestyle care home so share with us just a little bit what is what is a lifestyle so people get because i think of you know retirement homes like my my aunt is in a retirement home i'm telling you it is it is horrible and i've tried calling the management on her behalf several times and all you can do is leave a message
6:32 and they don't call you back so there's no intention of of making it better i think so what's a lifestyle um retirement home then i came up with the name lifestyle care home for for that reason you know whether we like it or not in the industry the perception is all care homes are like the whom your aunt is in as you've said and and there are places where unfortunately people think you just go to die they're horrible places and no one wants to go so i wanted to create somewhere that was the complete opposite of that and i wanted to create somewhere as well that's you know one of the things that's
7:07 really i suppose disappoints upsets i don't know what the right word is that it's very hard to get grandchildren to go to care homes because for that very reason and the the loss in society between grandparents and grandchildren when they go into those facilities for me is huge so with the team i had around me um i said we want to look at this project not just through the eyes of elderly people we also want to look at it through the eyes of children so we came at it from two angles and so to give an example of some of the things we put into the facility so we put in a hairdresser's a nail bar a
7:42 cafe uh spa a cinema and of course in ireland we had to put in an irish pub absolutely and it was you know it wasn't the building is really important that you put people in a nice facility but it was actually the whole i completely transformed the culture in the industry the the outlook that the staff had so we had a medical team and we had a lifestyle team and they integrated so that you know the focus for me wasn't just on medical care as in physical care and on tablets and personal hygiene it was actually your lifestyle and your social care because
8:17 you know i just came from the angle that if you are socially and mentally better you will be physically better and you know in the world we're seeing it right now in terms of the impact on on all of us and and that transformed actually the lives of our residents we have residents who came from other homes that their medication was decreased their dementia was vastly improved and and we had you know a list of staff who wanted to work for us and you know the team won loads of awards and you know it was a phenomenal project but but like any disruption or innovation years and
8:52 a lot of struggle at the beginning to get people to shift their mindset yeah yeah interesting and and very much in line with the idea behind the show which is we have to look at our life holistically physically meant physical mental spiritual right for our well-being we have to do that for our own lives but you hear you were doing it for for other people as well okay so so now you you went from there and now you're looking to help other people basically do that in their lives uh as as i understand it so talk to us about i don't know if this is cara
9:28 you know 3.0 4.0 10.0 right as they say talk about if you would um that that next uh phase you know in in in your life sure so um because i didn't have enough to do when i was opening that care home i also trained professionally as a business coach so i got my accreditation in 2018 and i just i decided in 2019 to leave the family business and i've always had a passion for because of you know created the success that i've had with my teams
10:03 of creative thinking and imagination and building that alongside you know the business acumen that i've had it you know that i've grown up with and and this year in particular we have seen that you know every business has not been untouched by the ability you know having to think very differently adapt and to survive and and it's for me it's a an art and a science um and it's something you know people say to me oh i'm not creative car that's for the marketing department i can prove and these are the kind of entrepreneurs i work with now everybody is creative and you know i truly believe that
10:39 in business now and if you don't have that creative mindset in the leader and the organization for me that's going to be the most important thing going forward so so i now work with i say big thinking growing entrepreneurs who who want to create a huge impact in their own life with their own families in their own communities but they you know suppose i always had a great imagination but i now i have on the principles of it because i've been through the ups and downs of of creative thinking and innovation and unless you have an understanding and a system that you can use and when i break it down now and help people understand the different
11:14 processes you can really see that organizations you know can vastly improve and accelerate their success so so that's what i do now what i'm hearing is you help people learn to be creative in their business and enter entrepreneurial pursuits is that right yes yes so my focus in terms of my coaching is is creative thinking and success mindset and it's not just creative thinking in your business as you have rightly say kevin it's it's creative thinking in your own life to fit in with your business because you know we all know if we keep doing and thinking the same way we're going to get the same results and
11:50 and actually a lot of entrepreneurs they might have a successful business but they're not happy in their life or vice versa so it's really you know i i wrote a post on social media last week we can't disrupt anything until we disrupt ourselves first um so that's what i help you know i help the leader disrupt themselves and their own thinking first and and then you know i always say in a business imagination is infinite it's probably the only thing in the business that's infinite um but the idea is you get out of people and teams and leaders is just phenomenal when you have the right environment so helping them with that
12:25 so would you give us an example of how you took someone from a place of at least thinking you know he or she didn't have creativity to you know breaking through that that barrier if you will and and realizing that they they can be that that you know disrupting creative thinking person sure i mean i can give you two examples because i have a very strong example from one of my teams but you know when i talk about creative thinking people automatically assume it's like you know what i did in the care home or
13:00 steve jobs creating the iphone creative thinking is constantly coming up with new and better ways to do things and that might be as extreme as disrupting a market but it you know that only happens a few times it's it's in the dna of constantly evolving and coming up with just the you know and the best ideas are the most simple ideas um so i gave an example in the care home when we that idea of looking at it through the eyes of children that came from because we had a team and some of these staff were were in our industry 30 years and actually that's one of the biggest buyers and one of the biggest problems the longer
13:35 you're in a job or in an industry or you're more expert in something that's a bigger challenge for you to think differently about it and there's ways that you need to disrupt yourself so when i say that the people now they get scared thinking god kara all the expertise that i've built over the last 20 years are not useful anymore which they are but anyway so this care assistant in a meeting with us said to me she said you know i just said to them all like what what do you worry about if you ever went into a care home and this care assistant said to me i would really worry when i'm older that my grandchildren would want to come and visit me
14:11 and that's where the idea came from to look at it through the eyes of children and actually when we when i allowed the staff to look at the project through the eyes of children of course that's when everyone could come up with crazy ideas that weren't right or wrong because it wasn't actually them and that's where we got the best ideas because people are scared when they're in a job so long to say anything different because the risk of sounding stupid or getting it wrong and so that was the example in the care home i have another example where i'm working with are really you know forward-thinking accountancy
14:46 practice so very entrepreneurial but they said to me at the beginning we're accountants we're not creative and so i worked with them last year and a new partner in the business and show them how to do what i have done and they have transformed their business and actually you know they contacted me and said cara when cove had happened it didn't impact us at all actually we're even stronger coming through this than we were last year so their business is more successful and they said the biggest reason for that was all of their staff were giving ideas instantly how to solve those problems
15:21 and and they said that would not have happened a year two years ago um so that was another example more recently so and and i you know it's interesting i mean my production team we're in a creative business right we're in um you know video production whatever you entertainment whatever you want to call it and yet what i've noticed is um not everybody thinks that they can be creative they tend to say well i'm in this part of the business i need to stay here um and and
15:59 and one of the things i'm trying to foster with the show is having people giving people the opportunity to do things that are out of their comfort zone um and and and i i i'm gonna you know say good on my team that um already i we've been able to create a couple of opportunities where people are gonna be moving into things that are very very different than what they you know were first came to the show to do how how do we and i'll just give real quick i'm going to give you an opposite example when i
16:34 was in the military i tried to get one of my staff to go to a very top-line leadership development program he would have been the first sailor to go to our marine corps leadership program was a huge huge thing and he started having nightmares about going and i was pushing and pushing and pushing him and he finally came to me and i thought he was gonna he was gonna cry and say i cannot do this and i finally heard that he couldn't do it so how do we find that that that midpoint between pushing our people to
17:10 the point where you know we're they're just so far out of their comfort zone that they're they're you know going to break down but not letting them sit there where they're not creating more opportunity for themselves and for our businesses how do we how do we find that meeting point or at least somewhere closer to it well if i use the example from the military how i would have done that so helping that person understand that the reason he is so scared is because he is trained i believe trained in an environment where you cannot get it wrong because people's lives are at risk
17:46 so when you're in an and health care is is the same actually in a different form when you're in an environment like that and you cannot get it wrong you can't take risks you can't do anything very different at the risk of getting it wrong so explaining that first him that he's now going into a different environment and it doesn't matter he sorry he will get it wrong initially he should get it wrong because it's the first time he's doing it so opening up you know and that's what i would have said to my team and that's why we looked at it through the eyes of children and people think that's crazy in terms of a you know it was a multi-million pound investment in business so merely doing something to flip it on its
18:22 head and help those people understand why they feel like that and you know why i say creative thinking and you've used the example of being uncomfortable which is exactly it it's like creative thinking is a muscle the more you stretch it and use it the stronger it becomes but the first time you know you go out for a run or you do some exercise in the military your muscles are sore you know so i always try and use an analogy with the person that will resonate so i'm i imagine i don't know but i imagine the military exercise would have been a good analogy you know the first time you do a different exercise it's going to be sore and if it's not
18:58 sore you're not doing it well now so you know again it's back to the the more successful are the more expertise someone is in something actually the more difficult it is for them to do this stuff because they've had so much success one way so why would they change it so just explaining to them the feeling and how it will be the other way um for me lets a lot of the fear go actually um and they understand why they feel like that and and it makes sense yeah i'm yeah gosh i needed you about 15 years ago because yeah that's a great insight into
19:35 how we are um by sort of taking people off the hook on that they're going to fail and and just saying you're you're going to so just don't worry about it and move on i it could really have changed that situation i didn't i didn't have access to that idea back then last question so i got that you have to wrap it up sign it went so fast um when how how can someone recognize that they're in that place where they're not accessing their creativity how do we
20:12 know where they were in that place so that we need to then figure out how to get out of it um i think the key thing is when you're too comfortable and you're doing the same thing all the time you know when i use analogy you have two choices you make yourself uncomfortable and you disrupt yourself so it's like running a marathon you get up every day and you make yourself more uncomfortable and you do it over time or you get disrupted and abrupted very quickly from the environment and you pull a muscle which is exactly what covert has done to businesses that aren't so you can either take control of it but
20:47 but you will feel uncomfortable and you know it's like the training every day or you wait to something comes along but and my belief is and i believed it a few years ago actually and i've seen it this year every single business is going to be massively disrupted technology in europe and the uk at the minute brexit coronavirus and the list goes on and on so that is why i believe it is absolutely critical for the success of business and leaders um in the future and right now actually as well well and and and i think that's a great note to end on uh perpetually look to make ourselves
21:23 uncomfortable so that we're prepared for whatever the future throws at us exactly terrific cara thank you so much uh for for being on the way to wow show great great thoughts and and wisdom for our viewers thanks a million [Music] that's our show for this week stay tuned next week when we'll talk with dr travis smith the author of super hero ethics right really fascinating book and we'll also be talking to brian ferminella
21:58 who at a very young age has already found his way to wow he's going to show us or talk to us at least about how he did it courage at all times my friends marie you're still my belly [Music]
22:48 you