The Bill Gove Speech Workshop/Public Speaking Coaching Welcome! You've just found gold. If you're into networking, speaking, network marketing or public speaking.

	Who is Mark Victor Hansen? And why is everyone talking about him? Mark Victor Hansen has a lifelong mission: to save lives, fortunes and futures. For more than 25 years, he has influenced society's top leaders and the general public on a global scale. He is the man who built up a speaking and writing empire spanning some 63 separate publications of audio programs, training videos, books, articles, special reports and specialty items. And he earns millions of dollars every year just from speaking engagements and book royalties alone. Mark Victor Hansen is also the CO-creator of the widely successful Chicken Soup for the Soul series. The series TIME magazine calls "The publishing phenomenon of the decade" has collectively sold over 30 million copies in North America alone, making it one of the most successful publishing "franchises" in America.
GS:	How did you get started in your current line of work?
MVH:	I went bankrupt. It was 1974. I was building geodestic homes in New York at a giant clip. I was building out of plastic when the oil embargo hit. I was feeling awful. I thought about what I really wanted to do, which was to become a speaker. I got some tapes of speakers, and I called Bill Gove, who was flying cross-country, and he agreed to meet me at the airport in Boston, where he spent an hour helping me. I wrote to Cavett Robert and he helped me. I also called Chip Collins and he helped me work into the insurance market, where I still work today. I've never turned back since.
GS:	What were the 3 biggest obstacles you had to overcome?
MVH:	I suppose the biggest obstacle that people have to overcome is themselves. Sir Edmund Hillary wanted to climb Mount Everest and after three failures finally did it. People said, "You've conquered the mountain," and Hillary said, "No, I've conquered myself." Conquering yourself is the most important thing you can do. I had to learn how to market and sell. In the speaking business I had to learn how to market by understanding the language of the industry. I learned to do this by watching the greats in the industry like Bill Gove, Bob Proctor, and Larry Wilson. I literally used to go out and knock on ten doors every day. Nine would say no and one would say yes. The first person who said yes to me was from Metropolitan Life, and when he said yes, I said, "Reallydo you mean it?" I started doing four talks a day. I'd do a breakfast talk at 7 am, go and sell for a while, do another talk at 10 am, 1 PM, and another at 4 PM. I was ingratiated in the book of fire!
GS:	The famous book As a Man Thinketh by James Allen tells us when we "Conquer doubt and fear.we conquer failure." Let me ask you.What is the biggest thing you do to help you conquer doubt and fear?
MVH:	I confront it everyday. Confront your fear and make it disappear. Every one of us has to confront our fears, just as Napoleon Hill wrote for the fireside chat for FDR. Most fear the bogeyman. Most fear doesn't exist, except in your own head.
GS:	What 2 books have influenced you the most? Why?
MVH:	Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill. The second is The Magic of Believing, by Claude Bristol. Somehow I believed what he said and it worked. What he said was you have to go to bed with a mantra. Back then I wanted to make a hundred grand a year. If you divide 250 workdays, that's 400 dollars a day, so I would repeat "400, 400, 400," every night. That year I made over 200,000 dollars. The deal is you can rock really fast if you're ready and you enculturate your mind at a deep and profound level -- which I did because I wanted to speak more than I wanted to breathe.
GS:	What is your greatest Bill Gove story you could share with our readers?
MVH:	Bill Gove, when I met him that first time at the Boston Airport in '74, for whatever reason, took a liking to me and said, "Look kid, I think you've got potential and I want you to come up to my house in Wiscasset, Maine." So I went up to Wiscasset, and not only did he let me stay in his house, and hang out with his kid, but he took me through the whole city and then he had me stand up and he said. "Give me your best stuff"and I didn't have any best stuff! I was really pitiful, I'm afraid to say. At some levels I was intimidated by him. I watched him and thought to myself, "Someday I want to be able to do that." As a result now, I help one person launch their speaking business every year, so Bill is getting the reflected glory of having spent private tutelage with me, and I've launched 26 or 27 people who speak in the business and do very well. I'm elated and thankful to Bill Gove for befriending me early on when he had no need to do so. He has a heart as big as America. If everyone had a heart like Bill Gove, the world would work at a different level.
GS:	You have already made your first million. What advice can you give the rest of us who may still be looking to make our first million?
MVH:	I would say that if you really want to make it, go to the new website that Bob Proctor and I have, 3percentclub.com. We're creating a million millionaires in this decade. The first year, we teach people how to earn a million dollars in 365 days, and we teach 38 models to do that. We also teach mindset. The second year we teach how to invest that, and the third year we teach how to become a perpetual philanthropist. We just had our first class, and we had 370 people who paid $7,500 each to be there for the first of four sessions. I can tell you that a lot of people are rocking and have committed themselves to making a million dollars not in a yearbut in a quarter! The money is always out there. The idea doesn't have to be yours. I make millions in every one of my businesses, but Bob Proctor came up with the idea for the 3 percent cluband Jack Canfield came up with the idea for Chicken Soup for the Soul, and I just partnered with them. So far we've sold over 68 million books, and our goal by 2020 is to sell a billion. So you don't always have to have the idea yourself, but you have to be on the team. You have to be a serious playeryou have to be an equity player. Going into the Christmas season we will have over 90 million impressions in the advertising media, and I believe we will blow out 10 million books by Dec. 25, and there will be a great big sucking sound of people wanting more Chicken Soup.
GS:	Is it ever hard for you to believe the numbers involved with Chicken Soup?
MVH:	Yeah, the numbers are unbelievable at a level, but you have to remember that I live inside of it, and one of the things I teach is to carry around 3x5 cards, like Bob Proctor does. The card I'm carrying now says, "I'm so happy I'm helping to sell 20 million copies of Chicken Soup for the Soul by Dec. 25, 2000." I sign it, Jack signs it, our publisher signs itso I'm looking at it all the time. The reason it happens is because my belief system is there. It's done unto to you according to your belief. The question is, what do you really believe? I've taken ownership of the belief, just like I took ownership of the belief that I could speak to people who care about things that matter and make a life changing difference.
GS:	How importantly would you rank mental toughness and the ability to communicate as it relates to your success and why?
MVH:	One of the many books I've written is called The Master Motivator, and I wrote it with the Dean of mental toughness -- a guy named Joe Batten. Joe Batten is the one who wrote the books used by Ross Perot to build EDS. I'd say that mental toughness is one of the resolute things. The greatest CEO in America is the most mentally tough guy - Jack Welch, from GE. The second most mentally tough, brilliant guy is Cisco system's CEO, John Chambers, and the third is Bill Gates. These guys are not necessarily in rank order; any one of them will fit the model. All three of them totally admire each other. These guys have 100-billion-dollar problems when most people are complaining about not being able to pay off their credit cards. These guys are figuring out how to do decimal points twelve, fourteen and fifteen range. I'm a great student of all three of them, because they're who to play with. At an individual level, I teach people to make a million in a year; at the corporate level, I take corporations up to billions. One of the tapes I have out is called How to Think Bigger Than You Ever Thought You Could Think. I think the greatest lack in America is the lack of vision. See, I had the vision that I wanted to be a speaker, so then I said, "Well who are the visionary speakers?" They were Bill Gove and Cavett Robert, and maybe 10 to 20 others, and I decided that these were the guys I needed to hang around. If you hang around giants, you become a giant. If you hang around with midgets, you become an midget.
GS:	How important is the ability to communicate?
MVH:	Communication is all there is. Communication has to be clear to both you and the receiver. The real communication in the future will be ideas and agreements. Communication has to be solid, and it has to be solid the first time, so people get it.
GS:	What is the reason most people don't achieve their major goals and dreams?
MVH:	Most people don't achieve their goals and dreams because they don't have enough goals and dreams. I teach that you have to have 101 goals, and as you achieve them you don't cross them out, you write victory next to them in lavender. The reason you have to have so many goals is that different goals have different gestation rates. You can't know the gestation rate of the goal. I'm the only one I know who has over 6,000 goals, with over 2,000 victories. Right now things are showing up at levels that I'd even forgotten that I'd written down.
GS:	Who were your role models/mentors, and what was it that you saw in them?
MVH:	Bill Gove was definitely one of my role models. I mean the guy has such a great sense of humor and timing. What he did was consolidate a really solid message, and he mastered the 45-minute talk better than anyone else. Every audience loves Bill Gove. To make sure you have 100% audience satisfaction every time is a tough number. I'm in the high 90's, I'd say 99.9/100 percentbut there are some audiences that I couldn't figure out how to relate to. I've been with Gove at least 100 times during his speeches, and there was never an audience he didn't satisfy. He's reconditioned his inner knowing that anything less than perfection, as a platform professional, is unacceptable. It's just not a place that he will go. And that's true no matter what. I've been with him when he's missed 2 days of sleep in a row, and he still delivers. He is a consistent deliverer, and that is rare. Cavett Robert is another role model. He was the Dean of speakers. He loved speaking so much he thought everyone should learn to speak. He was the master's master.

		Contact Info.: Mark Victor Hansen & Associates, Inc. P.O. Box 7665 Newport Beach, CA 92658-7665 Phone: 949-759-9304 Fax: 949-722-6912 E-mail: trudy@markvictorhansen.com