00:05 - Simon (Host)

Good day and welcome to the Enabled podcast Great to have your company. Today I'm your host, Simon Order. This month, our guest is Michael Watts, the Managing Director of ToBe Advisory. He's a business consultant, speaker, comedian and with lived experience of disability. Michael, I want to start by asking you about community cohesion as part of your business philosophy.

00:33 - Michael (Guest)

To me, community cohesion is pretty key to achieving any kind of social objective. You know, having the community behind what you're trying to achieve and looking out for the opportunities that are going to benefit an organisation such as Ability Heroes - people working together is always going to have a greater outcome. You've got an army of people trying to find opportunities to improve disability access and remove barriers for people with restriction. It then helps to raise awareness with the businesses and the owners that need to effectively action the changes Effectively. It really just helps to cascade the effect, roping down a lot quicker.

Community cohesion for me is absolutely key to achieving these kind of social objectives. When it's just a small team of people that are looking for opportunities locally, that's fine. But I think if you can start to have an impact across borders in terms of people talking to people and saying, hey, there's this great initiative here in Western Australia, wouldn't it be great to see it rolling out further and further? And you know cross-national and international borders. So I think that the community cohesion piece really just enables that to kind of accelerate the initial rollout and also potentially achieve greater scale than you otherwise could without that cohesion.

01:57 - Simon (Host)

Yes, I think Ability Heroes are very much about developing community cohesion in the way you describe, especially around crowdsourcing accessibility data. The other question we get a lot is about how to think about balancing business and social responsibility.

02:14 - Michael (Guest)

What I seek to do in my business is help business owners to balance people, planet and profit. So how do you make sure that you're being both socially and environmentally responsible as a business owner? And so that's kind of my philosophy in business. If you're going to be in business, then it's important to balance making a profit with having a positive social impact and then doing the right thing by the environment. Basically, businesses that do that have been shown to be more sustainable and more profitable over the long term. It does have that positive impact on social society more generally.

02:47 - Simon (Host)

Yes, I think profit is often the thing that people who are not in business think sometimes is the only priority of business owners. But what about purpose?

02:57 - Michael (Guest)

A business does need to have a purpose because it's now trying to collect and bring people together and it's trying to give meaning to people for why do I work here or why do I buy from this business. So the whole idea of a purpose kind of gives the business or the corporation life, something that people can attach to. From a business owner, I absolutely need to be caught up in defining a purpose for my business and then making sure my business is environmentally and socially responsible so that people can benefit from my business in ways beyond just the financial benefits that might come to myself.

03:28 - Simon (Host)

Now, as a business coach, you tell your clients their business really needs a purpose. But what about your personal purpose? I'm interested to hear about that.

03:39 - Michael (Guest)

You know I very much strongly believe in that a business and a corporation, they need to have a purpose, something that people can align to.

However, on an individual level, I take the view that maybe we don't need to necessarily find our life purpose to have a happier, meaningful life and in fact you can go through life never having discovered your purpose and getting meaning and joy out of the things that you're experiencing and being in the moment and all of those sort of things.

So I think when you can learn to kind of disconnect your happiness from this whole idea of being tied up with a purpose for life, I think opportunities just open, and so having a defined purpose is somewhat limiting in many ways. I don't need to necessarily know or have a named purpose for my life. What I need to be able to do is understand that I'm here now. This moment is where I'm at, take joy in whatever might be happening there and find that peace with what might be happening in reality. That, to me, is sort of fundamentally where I sit from a philosophical point of view in life. There are certainly people out there that do have a purpose in their life and I think if that's you or that's someone who's got that, then absolutely, you know, if that's something that you get meaning out of and it's meaningful for you, then absolutely have that purpose and pursue it.

04:55 - Simon (Host)

Now talking of purpose. Oh, one of the things we try very hard with at Ability Heroes is not to take ourselves too seriously, and we always try to have a laugh. Now I also know that you're a stand-up comedian on the side. How does that work with your coaching business?

05:13 - Michael (Guest)

I do stand-up comedy as a hobby. I like to incorporate laughter into a lot of my professional speaking as well. When people are laughing, it's a sign that they're having a good time. That, to me, is really important. Laughter is enjoyment and laughter is happiness, and I think if we can get to a place of happiness, then the world's going to be a better place. What I really think about when I'm, when I am presenting and I'm using laughter as a bit of a tool, it's really to help get the message across.

One of the things that laughter does it actually makes negative experiences less memorable. So if you're able to laugh about an experience you may have in the past, it takes away the edge and makes it less memorable in terms of a negative event. Heal that wound, if you like, but when it comes to learning and creativity, laughter actually enhances that process. So hence, in a professional speaking environment or a teaching environment or any kind of, you know, learning environment, having laughter there really helps to enhance it and really embed that learning. So people are better able to recall things that they've learned while they're having a good time and they're laughing about it. Is laughter good for you? Absolutely there's. There's a happiness and the hormones and the dopamine and all of that sort of stuff that's going on and it feels good. It is just something that I really believe in and and you know, if I can get people laughing and having a good time, then I feel like I'm achieving an objective of helping to make the world a better place.