Interviewing Mark Bowden

I had the privilege of interviewing Best Selling Author Mark Bowden, the interview is part of my new “Communicate to Elevate Podcast”. In this interview Mark shares great insights from his long experience as the World’s Renowned Body Language Expert, Trainer and Keynote Speaker. I’ve learnt a lot from this conversation on training and marketing.

About Mark Bowden

Mark Bowden is a body language and behavior expert and the creator of TRUTHPLANE, a communication training company and unique methodology for anyone who has to communicate with impact. His clients include leading business people, teams, and politicians, presidents and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. His 3 books are the bestselling Winning Body Language, Winning Body Language for Sales Professionals, and Tame the Primitive Brain. Mark is particularly honored to now be in the TED community.  Mark was voted #1 in the Worlds Top 30 Body Language Professionals for 2014 by GlobalGurus.org and he is on faculty as the business presentation trainer for The Kellogg-Schulich Executive MBA ranked #1 in the world by The Economist.

Enjoy the Interview

Interview Highlights

What inspired you to become a trainer in the first place and how did your training & speaking career start?

For many years before I started training people in business and politics, I used to train performers, actors, directors on stage, TV and cinema on how to use their body language to portray certain characteristics, engage audiences and tell stories with pictures. And so it wasn’t a big leap for me to take these skills and techniques over to business and politics, whom never really met these ideas before, and I was already very skilled in the area of performance, so when I shifted these ideas across to business and politics there were very few people who had those skills and nobody have moved those techniques to the area of business, so it was a unique proposition and a unique set of skills.

And also I really enjoy helping people get better in their communication. I believe everything can be learnt, everything is trainable. I just really wanted to be part of helping people get better at the things they need to get better at to make their lives more powerful. My passion towards non-verbal communication and its power in helping people communicate has driven me to keep on training people, keep on producing the best content I can, and keep on distributing that content.

How were you able to market yourself as trainer in your early days in the field?

I started training people in business & politics more than 10 years ago, a couple of years later YouTube started and I was one of the first people to start putting videos on YouTube. I decided to get my content up there in anyway possible to let people literally see what I was doing and distribute the content for free to as many people as possible, and that worked really well for me. A year later Google bought YouTube, and it meant that all those videos that I published went to the top of Google ranking, so pretty much when you googled body language, there I was right at the top of the rankings with videos.

And that was a conscious decision, because I understood the way information was going. All information was going to be very freely available, and I should start giving away information, knowing that many people would want to buy more of it. They want to buy more in depth, they want to buy a more personal experience, they want to buy being with you face to face or one on one. And anybody who doesn’t want to buy that, they’re not really your customers, but they might know somebody who is. So I made a conscious decision to market through social media by really distributing content for free.

What makes someone an expert in a specific area or subject, is it reading, studying, acquiring certificates, or what do you think?

You’ve got to read and study in some way, not necessarily through the usual channels, you can study yourself, you don’t need professors around you by any means but that can be helpful as well. Experts would put a lot of time and effort in knowing as much as they can, whether by showing up in universities, libraries, or just getting on the internet every day and watching every video out there by other experts and reading their papers and books. You should do that as much as you can.

And then on top of that, you have to come up with some new ideas, you have to bring something of a unique perspective. You sometimes have to take ideas from other areas and put them together with the ideas you’ve read about, and come up with something new, but more importantly something new and helpful, something that is very practical and gets a job done.

The reason I’m seen as an expert and I see myself as an expert, is that I’ve come up with new models about non-verbal communication, very practical models that work really well, and help people get the results that they want quickly. So when people see value in what you provide, they call you an expert.

What are the key lessons you’ve learnt throughout your journey so far that you consider as the key advice to share with aspiring young trainers?

Don’t Protect Your Content. Give away your best content, give away your best work, give it to people for free. Because people need to get a taste of what you do, and they can’t do that when you’re keeping your content for yourself and not distributing it. I understand that many people will take your content for free and they will use it, and they will get good results out of it, and they will never buy anything else from you. And that’s okay, they were never really your customers in the first place.

But some people will want a closer relationship with you. They want more, they want to get more in depth. They want to know how that content specifically applies to them, or to the people they are leading, or to them as leaders or sales people, or to their organization, and  they will be willing to pay for that a price that makes up for all the other people who got the content for free. One of the biggest things that I have learnt is giveaway your best content for free because it’s great marketing!

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