In this episode, hosts Brad and Michael are joined by Cameron Atlas, a keynote speaker, performance coach, and musician, to discuss how business owners can stay focused, avoid burnout, and lead with intention. Cameron specializes in helping leaders and teams enhance performance, improve decision-making, and effectively navigate change. Tune in to learn how a career built on performance and precision can contribute to burnout, and discover how regularly evaluating key decisions can help you build a more resilient business.
Listen to the full episode using the player below, or by visiting one of the links below. Contact ByrdAdatto if you have any questions or would like to learn more.
Transcript
*The below transcript has been edited for readability.
Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. Legal issues simplified through real client stories and real world experiences, creating simplicity in 3, 2, 1.
Brad: Welcome back to another episode of Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. I’m your host, Brad Adatto, with my co-host, Michael Byrd.
Michael: As a business and health care law firm, we meet a lot of interesting people and learn their amazing stories. This season’s theme, Brad, is Unintended Consequences. We sometimes find ourselves in a situation that can be traced back to a seemingly inconsequential or unrelated decision.
Brad: Yeah. Michael, I’m real excited to bring on our second guest of the season, but before we do, I thought we could do a deep dive as to where our guest is from.
Michael: Oh, you just want to dive right in and get into Australia talk I can see.
Brad: Yes. I find it very fascinating. The population density is just fascinating to me. For those who don’t know, most of the people in Australia are crammed [00:01:00] on the coastal cities while the rest of the continent pretty much is practically empty.
Michael: Yes. We had a lunch a few weeks ago with two other Australian friends and they did share this fun fact. And of course you just adopted as your own, like you always do.
Brad: Yes, obviously. So after the lunch I actually got kind of excited and I started reading about all these different cities and the different flavors they have in Australia. And I do want to visit, so full disclosure, and if I do, I’ve decided at least I have to visit both Melbourne and Sydney. Sydney is known for their beautiful beaches and their obviously iconic opera house. And Melbourne is known as like more of the artsy artist vibe thing going on over there.
Michael: Well, Australia’s definitely on my bucket list as well. And I’ll have to say going to the Australian Open Tennis Tournament is when I would want to make that happen because that’s on my bucket list as well. Any other fun facts you have on [00:02:00] Australia before we bring in the expert?
Brad: Obviously, the wildlife is crazy there, but I mean, the kangaroos alone just fascinate me. They seem super cool. And then this article I started reading about talks about how these kangaroos are known for stealing tourists’ bags, especially if they have snacks in it, so I thought that’s pretty funny. And then I started really wondering, is the boxing kangaroo a real thing or is that just something you see in cartoons?
Michael: I’ve seen some YouTube videos that make me want to encourage you to try it out.
Brad: I don’t think I’m falling for that because I don’t trust you with that statement. I could see myself losing badly to a little kangaroo and you would just probably watch that over and over again.
Michael: That’s true, yes, Brad. Any other Australia fun facts?
Brad: Yeah, I think the last thing that fascinates me is the Great Barrier Reef. I mean, it’s so unique in the wonders they have there. I’d love to go scuba diving or snorkeling there, especially just the vibrance of all the different fish they have there. It’s incredible. And of course you have this [00:03:00] desert and then you have this great reef, and then of course the giant great white sharks. I’ll hear the Jaws theme music the whole time I’m snorkeling there, but hopefully I’ll survive well.
Michael: Okay, good. Well, I think it’s time that we bring our real life Australian guest on. What do you think about that? So joining us today is Cameron Atlas. A little background for him. In 2002, Cameron left the farm he grew up on in the Australian outback to chase his dreams of playing music. After a long journey and many countries later. Cameron now lives in Texas. He has written more than 300 songs.
Brad: Is that more than what you’ve written?
Michael: It is. It’s 300 more.
Brad: Yeah, I thought so.
Michael: Written about topics including purpose, resilience, courage, and overcoming adversity. His music has been heard millions of times across 195 countries. Besides his passion for music, he provides keynotes with a grand piano and acoustic guitar [00:04:00] on insights on high performance leadership, creativity, and innovation. And finally, Cameron also enjoys coaching and training founders, leaders, and family offices. And we’re excited for Cameron to share his journey and the impact it can have on our audience. And really, I think you need it too, Brad. I mean, yeah. Well, welcome.
Cameron: Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Brad: Well, we’re going to throw a very hard question at you right away. Do you have a favorite city in Australia that you think our audience should visit?
Cameron: I mean, usually it is going to be the East Coast – Sydney, Melbourne, the couple that you mentioned. I really, really love Brisbane though. My aunt and uncle were there growing up, so we spent a lot of time there outside of the time on the farm. So yeah, the East Coast is going to be a good one because you get Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, all in one hit.
Michael: Awesome. Okay, cool. Well, let’s jump in. I’d love to start by having [00:05:00] you tell us about yourself and your background and how you ended up here in the United States.
Cameron: Yeah. You alluded to a couple of those pieces. I grew up in Outback Australia. It’s a long way from any of the cities that we started talking about. The closest city was Adelaide and it was about a nine hour drive away. I had 11 people in my graduating class and had singing lessons over the phone because there wasn’t a singing teacher anywhere near where I grew up. I feel like one of the major lessons I learned early on is that growing up out there is that if you really want something, it’s up to you to go and make it happen. No one’s coming to save you, no one’s coming to rescue you, right? And so as you mentioned, I left in 2002. We still had – just saying, we had a kangaroo as a pet, so the boxing kangaroo thing isn’t that accurate. Very, very rarely that might happen. But yeah, she was pretty timid but awesome. [00:06:00]
When I left there was this moment that happened how I got to the US. It came about a bit over 10 years ago. And I went through a breakup. It was a heartbreaking time for me. I think the thing that was more confronting for me was that life just wasn’t really where I wanted it to be at the time. There were these two big questions. I’m a massive believer in the power of questions. And these two big ones I asked: what do you really want to experience? And are you really living? And soon after I sold everything that I owned, I went on this big journey around the world and staying in places with grand pianos in them as I went. And it wasn’t until about six months into the journey there, there was this other beautiful question that I asked myself of what haven’t you done that you wish you had yet? You know, I’d been on this incredible journey so far. I’d already been coaching and training folks back in Australia and delivering talks, but I hadn’t found a way of bringing the musical component to [00:07:00] the talks that I delivered. And I had this answer straight away that day of, I really want to give a talk with the grand piano on stage. It was just this unfulfilled dream of mine that I’d had for a bunch of years. And I got booked for one in Australia two years earlier, and I think it was about two or three days before the event itself, the whole conference got canceled.
Brad: Oh, no.
Cameron: And I was like, yeah, I know, right? I was crushed. He was this little boy from Outback Australia finally making his dream come to life, and it was like, nope. And so there was doubt that crept in about, okay, maybe I just keep the two separate and I’ll continue coaching and training, continue speaking, and then continue creating music over here. But I don’t know, there was just something about that day in South America. I was in Argentina at the time, and it was just a moment of like, if you really, really want it, go and make it happen. And so I just reached out to anyone who’d listen and eventually stumbled across after a bunch of rejections, stumbled across someone who gave me a shot. It was in [00:08:00] Burlington in Canada. And yeah, there was 700 people at each of the events, two events on the same day and opened up one, closed out the other. And it was this beautiful experience following that of, all right, if that’s possible, I wonder what else is. And it’s just fueled this creative drive to really challenge what’s possible and help others do the same. Soon after, I got my first visa, work visa within the US and moved here, and yeah, I’ve loved it here ever since.
Brad: Well, that’s a cool story. I can’t believe that you’re in Buenos Aires and then you gave speeches in Canada that had to be a long flight. But I guess coming from Australia, you’re maybe used to it. But going back to what Michael said in the very beginning of our show, our season, really the theme is about Unintended Consequences. And so, can you share some decisions in your life that, or some unintended consequences in your life and what that led to.
Cameron: I think on both ends, there was [00:09:00] this massive lesson that I learned, which was at least, and this only over the last couple of years, that intentionality – well, discipline in the absence of intentionality can be a severe disadvantage. You can be disciplined all you like, but if you haven’t got the intentionality behind it, then that can impact in a negative way. And I’ve had both sides. On the side of deciding to sell everything that I owned and go on this crazy journey around the world, like the positive unintended consequences of that – there was a TEDx talk I gave in Rome with a grand piano on stage, and this project with people from 40 different countries around the world. That was wild. There was a National Geographic explorer project that I got to go back to Colombia for. So there were these beautiful moments and I had no intention of moving to the US at the time. Like, that’s what’s crazy about all of this. I just had this vision of going and again, just maybe just challenging what’s possible. I had some form of clarity, but not full clarity. [00:10:00] And as I started realizing from a speaking standpoint that I really wanted to do that, there was further clarity of the North America market is by far the best speaking market in the world. And so if I was really going to challenge it, then here was the place to do that.
So there were a few unintended consequences, but I’d say on the negative side, I mean, I lived a very nomadic life for a bunch of years. There was an element of loneliness that came in as a result of that, I’d say, on both the friendship side and on the relationship side as well. I was single, ended up being single for about 10 years before I met the woman that I now get the pleasure of calling my wife. She’s an incredible woman, the person that I’d been looking for and searching for. But yeah, I mean, that’s part of that of building community and building belonging and building a [00:11:00] life with somebody has, for me at least, come from being more settled, and I needed that in order to be able to really step into that version.
Michael: I’m curious too, you, you led this conversation, this part of the conversation, you talked about discipline without intentionality. I’d love for you to break that down a little bit for the audience. Talk about what you mean when you’re talking about having discipline and then how does that pair, and what do you mean by the intentionality?
Cameron: Yeah, definitely. So if you think about it, if you are disciplined, but you’re not being intentional, so you could be disciplined all you like, and you could be actually going in the opposite direction to where you’re really deeply wanting to go faster than a lazy person who’s sitting on their butt doing nothing. And so the intentionality comes in because it’s one thing to be disciplined. You can work hard, there’s plenty of people that work hard, but that intentionality around how am I getting better? [00:12:00] The intentionality about ensuring that my actions on a day-to-day basis line up with my overarching purpose. From a mission standpoint, from a value standpoint, how intentional are you going about executing? And that can be work and within a personal life as well. And I think a lot about this – as we go through this massive technological evolution of what we’re experiencing with things like AI and otherwise, we have more things and opportunities at our disposal to take our attention.
And so the intentionality becomes even more important when, back in the day, thousands of years ago if there was a bush of berries, you go and eat the bush of berries, because you never know when the next one’s going to come. Now we’ve got “bushes of berries” in every single aisle of a supermarket. The same goes within a work environment, is that we’ve got something in our pockets that we can [00:13:00] utilize and it can take our attention in so many different directions. I’m a massive believer in the power of technology. I utilize it to my advantage, but it is about being as intentional as I possibly can. And I’d say one of the big lessons I learned only again recently, and I, because we continue to learn them over and over is the power of, of recharging, of taking time away from tech and away from work, because that’s what enables for sustained performance to occur. And so, yeah, just the intentional component is an incredibly important piece, especially when there’s, again, so many things that could potentially take our attention away.
Michael: I wonder too, from an application on the business side, thinking about our business practices, our health care practices that are listening, that there’s a little bit of application to this concept to your vision for your business. And so you can be disciplined and you can be working hard and showing up every day. [00:14:00] You might even be focused in your work, but if you don’t know where you’re going, the intentionality part of it, you could to your point, be going the opposite direction and someone that has no discipline get where they’re going faster. Is that a decent correlation?
Cameron: Exactly. And one of the things that I’ll do with clients and when I’m delivering talks, well, one of the things I often speak about is what I call a Progress Pulse, right? Which is asking these four key questions on a regular basis, what’s working, what’s not, what are you going to do about it, and what help do you need, right? What’s working, what’s not, what are you doing about it? What help do you need? And you can utilize that in a personal sense as well, when it comes to, let’s say, a relationship, you just soften the questions so it doesn’t feel like a performance review, right? No one go into the kitchen and going, “Hey, welcome! Come on in to the kitchen table, welcome. Close the door behind you.” That’s not going to go down too well at all. I’m not encouraging that whatsoever. [00:15:00] The structure of the questions really work because it enables you to, on a consistent basis determine what changes need to be made, what tweaks need to be made. When it comes to you executing, if you’ve got a 12 month objectives that’s going to help to fulfill on the vision that you have, fulfill on the mission that you have, how are you going about executing on that? And is that leading you towards where you want to go?
And being able to ask those on a regular basis with your team and within your own self as well, enables you, I like to look at it as like a ship, right? If you’re on a ship and you don’t do an exercise like that on a regular basis, you can end up going so far off track that you’ve got to take a massive steering wheel and turn a huge amount of effort to turn it back in the right direction again. That’s going to take energy, time, effort, money, and resources. Instead, if on a weekly basis, let’s say, or a monthly basis, you’re simply asking those questions, you’re able to turn the steering wheel and say a 1%, 2%, or 5% shift. [00:16:00]And Kobe Bryant did this in an incredible way. He’d ask himself on a daily basis, “did I get better today?” And it was never about becoming a masterful basketball player in the course of a week or a month, or even a year. It was over the course of decades. And if we can be course correcting on a regular basis, that enables us to learn the lessons that we need to from the mistakes that we’re making without having to go through unnecessary pain as a result of those mistakes.
Brad: That’s amazing. And while you’re talking, and Michael, to your point earlier, it’s the idea of, and they call it the hamster wheel for a reason. You show up and you’re super hardworking, but if you have no vision about where you’re steering, you’re just going in the same spot. And you can go as fast as you want, but you’re not progressing, and that’s kind of, I think, a great aspect to what you were describing.
Cameron: Absolutely.
Brad: Well, I’m curious too, so talk to us about how you integrate [00:17:00] music into your motivational speaking. So you had this big thing that seems like two separate skill sets, and you had this vision of bringing it all together. I’d love to hear, how do you incorporate your music into your speaking?
Cameron: Yeah, it’s been a wild journey because it’s been a long process to clarify how to do it in a way. The way I like to think about it is it’s got to be unique, valuable, and classy. Like all three of those together. It can be unique on its own, but if it’s not valuable for the audience, then all it is like a gimmick that’s, oh, there’s a piano that’s on stage, so what? But if it’s valuable for the audience as well, and in the classiness component to it, it’s like, it’s going to be a grand piano or it’s not going to be anything, right? So, that feeling of creating a beautiful experience on stage. And so, the two main ways, I mean, I’ve been writing for more than [00:18:00] 20 years now, 24, 25 years, and yeah, more than 300 songs, and a lot of those songs are about the topics that I speak about. So purpose, about overcoming adversity, about courage, about these different topics, and with that, is the ability to be able to incorporate some of those lessons into the talks themselves. So I’ll perform the song live, but I’ll usually share either the story as to how it came to be.
An example is there’s this song that I have called Worthwhile. We started, we were talking a bit about intentionality before, and I wrote that at the start of 2020. And there’s these four questions in the chorus of, what will I become? Is that all I really love? What will I be giving up? And is that worthwhile? And so, there are four great questions to ask ourselves, because life is a sea of sacrifice, and we are giving up things in order to pursue other things in business and in life. And so being able to determine [00:19:00] other things that I’m pursuing worthwhile or not is a key lesson, so that’s what I’ll do there is, and then perform the song either on a grand piano or guitar. And then the other is utilizing music as a metaphor. There’s so many parallels between leadership and performance and music. Like an example when it comes to, let’s stick on the intentionality side, right? When I’m on the piano, I can be playing this most beautiful piece of music, and I’m still playing less notes than I’m playing notes.
And so, it’s a huge lesson in what are you getting rid of? What are you removing? What are you letting go of in order to be able to fully focus on something, fully execute on something in a way that enables you to create some beautiful music, you know? So yeah, those are a couple of examples as to how go about it. I love as well when like, if I’m delivering a [00:20:00] keynote, I just got back from Nashville, for example, and custom wrote a song to finish off with that everybody sang along to, and everybody’s clapping along. So it gets that energy in the room as well. I find that from a collaboration standpoint and people feeling like they’re part of the journey and part of the experience is a really cool thing as well.
Brad: That’s so cool. And you know, Michael, I was thinking about him when he was talking about unique value and classy. I think we can come up with the first two, but we can never be classy no matter how hard. I mean, I don’t think we have the accent to pull it off either. I mean, I think that helps that you have the grand piano and you have amazing accent. I can barely speak English, and we’re not classy.
Michael: So both of our wives try to pull us away from the classless category.
Brad: Yes, that’s true.
Michael: But it’s probably a struggle. They’re very strong.
Brad: The other thing I started thinking about that I love what Cameron did was, he incorporated his passions together. So I thought we could make changes podcast to incorporate just pure movie talk into the podcast.
Michael: Just skip the law.
Brad: Just skip the law. [00:21:00] You think that would work too?
Michael: Well, we need a new audience. We need to watch some more modern movies.
Brad: And so Cameron, you’re so diverse with everything – hearing your background and everything, I’d love to hear, and as you said, you get to… you’re blessed to have all these different clients that you get to coach. Why don’t you share with our audience some of the most common challenges you see that your clients come to you with as to, what is the challenges they’re seeing right now?
Cameron: Yeah, one of them is on intentionality is, okay, what am I doing and what am I not doing? Clarity of purpose comes first, because once I know and I’m clear about what the purpose is and why I’m doing what I’m doing, and ensuring I’m doing it for the right reasons, that’s a huge part of it, because then we can go about determining what you need to be executing on. Discipline is another massive one, right? And actually, being disciplined in the areas that are needing to be disciplined on, so actually executing on the things that are appropriate. [00:22:00] But also, there’s one that often comes up when working with somebody privately, which is, and I use the term going from outside in to inside out. The outside in, is that I’ve been focusing on how can I live or work or create a business and create a legacy to get approval from somebody else, whether it’s a parent figure or somewhere else, or something else, or to prove somebody wrong. And if we can switch that around to going inside out where the drive can still be there, but it’s coming from internal and it’s coming from what really lights you up. Because often the folks that I’m working with on a private side of things, they could be 40, 50, 60 years of age, for example, and they’ve been through and around a few times, [00:23:00] and the realization that it’s still not generating the fulfillment that they are desiring. That’s a pretty common one as well. But things like imposter syndrome kick in there – that’s a common one of how to work through that and overcome that. But yeah, really it all revolves around continuing to challenge what’s possible and step up to that next level of performance and leadership capability.
Brad: Yeah, and I’ll say the two things, one, having that joy, you’re correct. You’d have to find that joy for yourself, not for someone else, because otherwise you’ll never be happy. But I was shocked. I had never heard the term imposter syndrome until about, what, four or five years ago, somewhere right before around Covid. And it’s the first time I ever heard it, because it just was shocking to me, not realizing the reason why people have that. Can you spend a little bit time just talking about how you work with people about how they get past the imposter syndrome?
Michael: And what it is?
Brad: Yeah. And what it is, sorry.
Cameron: Yeah. A simple way of looking at this, I look at imposter syndrome is it’s exceeding the level you believe you’re worthy of. [00:24:00] That you’ve executed something that has occurred, you might be successful, have generated some kind of success, and it’s succeeded the level that you unconsciously believe you’re worthy of – and so a couple of things with that. One is, I have people celebrate that. Like, if you’re not experiencing some form of imposter syndrome, then maybe you’re not growing big enough, or you don’t have big enough dreams, because you’re maybe playing a little bit too small. So, that’s first and foremost. Second is that it’s imposter syndrome tends to be one of these fears that many of us have. It’s a universal fear at different times. So the fear of not being good enough, the fear of not being able to create or sustain what it is that you’ve maybe created so far.
And so when it comes to that, imposter syndrome is continuing to level up what you believe you’re worthy of. Continuing to generate data points. I had this a great session with a client [00:25:00] just yesterday, and we’re talking about this exact topic, and it’s about continuing to build what I call reference points. Reference points about how you are different to who you were before. Because we are basing our realities often based on who we have been. I mean, we go through growth, but our unconscious mind doesn’t keep up necessarily. And so, continuing to drive home what I call reference points, a structure for that is who I was, who I am, and who I’m becoming next, right? Who I was, who I am, who I’m becoming. I distanced myself from who I was. I align and align with who I am now. And I get excited and am inspired about who I’m becoming next. And so, the more distance that I can create between where I was and how I’m executing now, the more distance I have when I succeed, I have from a previous version of myself that was maybe less than. [00:26:00] The more I’m able to drive home how I’ve been able to execute in this way that’s aligned to the success that I’m having right now, and maybe then even aligned to who I’m becoming next; that’s going to set me up for the mindset that enables for continued growth to occur. So, there’s just a couple little structures there.
Michael: Amazing. And I just noticed we’ve like blown through our time already, and we reached our episode end. We’re so grateful, Cameron, for you joining us on Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. Grateful for you. And what we’ll do next is go to break, and then on the backside we can do a little legal wrap up.
Cameron: It’s been a pleasure, guys. Thanks for having me.
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Brad: Welcome back to Legal 123 with ByrdAdatto. I’m your host, Brad Adatto, my co-host, Michael Byrd. Now Michael, as you said, this season, our theme is Unintended Consequences, and we had incredibly great conversation with Cameron who were able to come in and drop some serious knowledge on us, especially understanding what I loved, the power of questions. And there are so many different ways you can apply it from a professional perspective, a personal perspective, but we started talking afterwards about what other ways could he, it could be applied.
Michael: Yeah, I mean, compliance, which is something we talk so much about. one of the key tools in a toolkit that you, as the audience members can use in your practice, is implementing [00:28:00] this question mindset when you are trying to make sure you’re staying on the right side of things. And you can have this self-reflection question to know when do you pick up the phone to call your health care attorney? Or is there something that’s happened? And then of course, when we’re interacting with our clients, we’re asking these questions. Has there been a change in your staffing? Has there been a change in law? Has there been a change in the services you provide that might affect your business? And then another series of questions we go through whenever you’re looking at making a change to your business, how is this change going to affect you from a compliance perspective? You want to get that answer. How has this change to your business going to affect you operationally? And so, that’s another important question. And then what is the impact of a change to your business or a decision [00:29:00] you’re going to make going to have from a accounting and tax perspective? And you want to blend all of those things together to make sure you stay in line.
Brad: Those are all great points, Michael, and for those wanting to ask the next question. Yes, we will be back next Wednesday as we continue our journey of figuring out these unattended consequences. Will we have another awesome guest, Dr. Kimberly Evans will be joining us. Thanks again for joining us today, and remember, if you like this episode, please subscribe, make sure to give us a five star rating and share with your friends.
Michael: You can also sign up for the ByrdAdatto newsletter by going to our website at byrdadatto.com.
Outro: ByrdAdatto is providing this podcast as a public service. This podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast does not constitute legal advice, nor does it establish an attorney-client relationship. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by ByrdAdatto. The views expressed by guests are their own, and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any [00:30:00] entity they represent. Please consult with an attorney on your legal issues.
