From Criminal Solicitor to Performance Psychology Author: Adrian Kelly on Success, Morality, and Transcendence

[00:00:03] Hi, I'm Dr Russell Thackeray and welcome to Resilience Unravelled, a podcast with new ideas, new thoughts, and new thinking about resilience. Guests with remarkable stories, products and services that can really power up your own mindset and resilience. You can also go to our site for more information, to ask questions, or to access some of our resources at www.resilienceunravelled.com. Let's get started!

[00:00:33] Hello and welcome back to Resilience Unravelled and welcome to my guest tonight who has an extraordinarily complicated name. Every now and then I run into these names, I have to rehearse them, I have to practice them, and in front of me, let me just try this, let me see if I can run at this, let me see, Adrian Kelly. How about that? You nailed it man, you nailed it. Great to be here Russell. So nice to meet you first of all. Adrian, when in the world are you? In Northern Ireland. In Northern Ireland? That's right.

[00:01:04] Ooh, very lovely. Which bit in Northern Ireland? That's one of my favourite places actually. The lovely county Fermanagh. Oh great! The lake county as they call it here. Yeah. I used to work doing a lot of projects in Newry. Oh yeah, not too far away. And it was really interesting because everything they say about the Irish is what I've always thought applies to Northern Ireland, not to Southern Ireland. The friendliness, the crack, the straight talking, all that sort of stuff. So Northern Irish are the best. Good to hear. Well, first of all, thanks for joining us. No doubt we're in the same time zone. So that's lovely. Tell me a bit about yourself.

[00:01:34] Oh God, where do we start? I'll give you a brief synopsis. So my journey in life, I suppose my career, I started out as a criminal solicitor. I was a poor enough student at school for a variety of reasons, lost interest early on, and didn't do very well in my final exams at school. But I worked in some chicken factories, turkey factories, wood factories, etc. for the summer, and over various summers, and decided I was not going to do that for a living. I went back and repeated the Leaving Cert, which is the final exams here in Ireland, and did considerably better.

[00:02:04] I was a motivated student. I scraped my way into a bargain basement law degree and went from there. And when I got in, I really found law very interesting and empowering, and it was where I wanted to be. I worked super hard and ended up top of the class and went on and qualified as a solicitor. And then I practiced for six years as a criminal solicitor, which I really enjoyed. I might still be doing that, only for the financial crash, which really started the bite here around 2009, 2010. Yeah.

[00:02:33] And what the government did in their wisdom was cut all the fees for criminal solicitors by a quarter. And coupled with the fact that every conveyancing solicitor, who did property transactions, no longer had property transactions to do. They all came down to district court, which meant that it went from five solicitors down there representing about 300 criminals on average to about 25, which meant that you were losing your clients on the way from the police car to the courtroom.

[00:03:01] And I decided, now's a good time to get out of this profession. It just so happened that a friend of mine had approached me at that time with an invention, which was a renewable energy product. It was a new wind turbine invention. I said, okay, I'll give you some help with that. We went and saw a patent attorney. And I took a lot of solace from how excited the patent attorney was about it all. But I ended up setting up a company with himself and his brothers. And we later had 30 staff and we raised about 20 million euros. And we sold a lot of product out of China into America.

[00:03:29] Not enough product, but a lot of products. And did you find lots of hordes of dying birds at the feet of your windmill and such like that, as I'm told is the case from America at the moment? We're talking micro wind here. Oh, I see. So ours spin a lot faster. We minced the birds. I'm joking. Did not. You didn't just kill micro birds. We've had to pivot dramatically when the government cut subsidies to the wind turbine industry in 2012. So we went into micro wind generation streetlight sized turbines that were 100% renewable with the battery inside the pole.

[00:03:59] Really? Yeah. Which was, yeah, I thought it was a popular product-ish. And unfortunately, I parted a Wasting Company in 2018. It was the usual discussions about investment and the direction of the business. And so I moved on and I had a choice to go back into law, but decided to go into consultancy instead. Which seemed much easier to me, just as a living, you can manage your own time, etc. So I did that. So I worked with the government. I worked with a big law firm. And I did a lot of training and work with businesses. And then COVID hit. Sorry, Brexit hit.

[00:04:30] And Brexit was a bonanza for me. Oh. Yeah. I did a lot of work on Brexit because I had a lot of experience with international trade. And I was a solicitor, etc. And yeah, so I formed a company called Brexit Plan. And I was the only company on the website that had Brexit in their name, because everybody saw this as a part-time gig. So we got most of the work. There was 90 providers for 60,000 customers. Wow. So that kept me busy for about 18 months. And then COVID really took grip. And I was looking for a new project and I decided to do a non-fiction writing course with a publisher in the UK.

[00:04:59] And part of the course was to write a book proposal just as an exercise. And I did it. And they liked my proposal and said, we'll publish that book for you if you decide to write it. So that's how I got into the book writing business. And then wrote the book. It became a bestseller on Amazon. Then I said, I better get some qualifications in this area, because the book was primarily about performance psychology. So I'm now finishing the master's degree in performance psychology. I'm just moving into year three of that master's and doing a thesis and enjoying life. So that's a summary of my career.

[00:05:29] So it's often the phrase, isn't it? That people have this great idea that authors are extraordinarily wealthy, but it's one of those things, isn't it? When you have a million pounds is how we turn it into a thousand pounds, isn't it? It's the idea as an author. Is it a career that's lucrative in your experience? How's that working? It's the old joke my uncle had, which was how to make a small fortune in writing. You start with a very large fortune. Yes. Same thing. It's been good to me. I did a partnership publishing deal. I had to put up some money.

[00:05:56] They put up some money, which means that I get a good chunk of the royalties, which is actually... The books sell them well. I've sold about three and a half thousand copies and sell about 200 a month. Mostly in the States, actually, as it happens. Yeah. I do a lot of media work over there. Through my publisher, we have a PR agent in New York. And it's been very successful in terms of writing articles. I co-wrote an article, which was in Forbes magazine last year, which was like millions and millions of people saw that article, which is great.

[00:06:21] And I was on various mainstream TV and radio outlets in the US and do a lot of podcast work, etc. I guess they liked a bit of banter and they liked the Irish accent. So that goes a bit further over there. Yes. And you describe yourself now as an author. That's... Yeah. It allows me... What I love about writing and having written a book is it allows me to have lots of interesting conversations. Now, I do a lot of talks and works with work with teams and so mostly sports teams. And I do talks for businesses as well.

[00:06:50] Big and small, mostly big. Yeah. And on a variety of subjects, evident from effective communication, but mostly around the area of improvement, motivation, resilience and direction, which people are very interested in. Yeah. Interesting. So how many books have you written so far? Just the one, but I've signed a deal for book two. And I feel like I've written another book already with the amount of articles that requests that we do. So, yeah, I've done a lot of work on that as well.

[00:07:18] Well, lots of people create these sort of compendium books, don't they? Of articles and such, which they curate into. You could do that as well. Do that as well. That feels a bit like cheating to me. I want to write another standalone book. Well, it's... There's a lot of competition now with Substack and such people who are doing self-publishing. That must be quite tough to cut through in a way, is it? Thankfully, I have a publisher. So, it's not self-published, which is great because they have an absolutely huge reach. You know, I mean, it's...

[00:07:44] If you type in the success complex, it's the first hit on the first two pages of Google and type in my name and you'll get the book. And it's just, they have absolutely saturated the internet with my book, which is great. Which I don't think you could do if you self-published, which is part of the challenge. Yes. Okay. Interesting. Let's work through some of the things that you talked about there. I was quite amused when you said that you were a criminal solicitor. I couldn't work out if you were a solicitor for criminals or that you were just a criminal, happened to be a solicitor. So, I'm glad you cleared that up. I'm sure many of your listeners have seen Better Call Saul. You don't need a criminal solicitor, you need a criminal solicitor.

[00:08:15] That's the one. I wonder to what extent the training you've had in law shapes the way you think about the world. Yeah, hugely. It really got me interested in the topic of success because by default, you tend to see people who are at their lowest ebb and have failed to manage their lives for whatever reason. And that seems in many cases to be a generational thing. And many of my clients were repeat customers and unfortunately live very sad lives.

[00:08:43] It wasn't in any way glamorous and it introduces you to the human psyche in terms of just the wonderment of how people keep ending up in these situations habitually. And that's part of something I touch on in the book in terms of morality, which is unusual in a success book, but I write two chapters on morality. And this is more about losing our way, both as individuals and collectively.

[00:09:09] And you probably heard the old phrase, we are who we surround ourselves with. And unfortunately, the people that surrounded a lot of my clients didn't help them out a lot with their life choices. Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? So what do you mean by morality? Yeah, that's a great question. I don't mean it from any sort of lofty perch where I judge other people and their morality. I don't mean that where we set out in a certain direction and lose our way. And it's usually by degrees.

[00:09:38] And the two examples I use in the book are Nick Gleason and Jordan Belfort to use very big, bold examples of things that go massively wrong. Sometimes you have to do that to illustrate the point. But I also focus on organizations losing their way, like Enron, for example, and various other corporate organizations that just focus on all the wrong things and make bad decisions and end up corrupting good people.

[00:10:04] Because they find themselves in a climate or a culture, which by degree, by degrees, just corrodes their moral compass. And that can happen to the very best of people. And it's to recognize when that is happening and know when to get out, is what I argue in the book. Or knowing when to lean in. Because, of course, there are a lot of very corrupt people who are extraordinarily successful. Absolutely. Although I can't have a get that in my book, Russell. No, I'm joking.

[00:10:31] But I always think it's interesting that we always define success as being on the right side of the law. And you would do as a lawyer. But I meet many successful criminals and people who have made loads and loads. I often talk about a client company I consulted with once, which is one of the most successful companies I ever came across. And everything was wrong. The culture was bad. There was corruption. There was crime. There was thievery. There was abuse. There was bullying. And it was one of the most successful companies I ever worked with.

[00:10:57] And it always made me wonder whether we spend a little bit too much time moralizing and saying that we have to have this strong sense of moralistic purpose or ethical purpose. And actually, I think we do that. If you look at some of the most successful people in the States at the moment, they are deeply corrupt. I'm talking about people who are successful financially, potentially as well, not necessarily. And staying with that, I think it's an interesting little subject to on earth here.

[00:11:25] So when you say they are successful, what do you mean, Russell? By what they describe as being successful themselves. Because this is one of the critical things, isn't it? I think there's a sort of a sense that it's somebody else's view of what makes you successful. And I think what was interesting when you talked about morality, I think sometimes having that strong sense of who we are and what we are about. So this is the thing about, sorry, I'm not, but I'm banging on about criminality for another reason, just to have an interesting conversation. Of course.

[00:11:53] But if you get someone who's deeply in that world and is being fulfilled by their nefarious enterprises, they are being successful against their own derivation. Not yours or mine. Listen, there's no doubt you can make a pile of money screwing people over. Nobody will argue that. But I think in terms of true success, I would argue is wellbeing, health and life satisfaction. And there was a great, great experiment done a few years ago with parrots. I thought this was a very telling experiment. And what they did was, these parrots were lonely. It was during COVID or whatever else.

[00:12:23] So they got these iPads and the parrots could ring a bell and their owner would come along and they'd point to the screen and turn the iPad on, et cetera. And they would choose a parrot to talk to. And there was like 30 parrots in the study and they could see pictures of the parrots, et cetera. And what they found was the people that got the most callbacks, the parrots that got the most callbacks, were the ones that made the most calls, which I thought were very interesting. But that links in with a longitudinal study that began in the 1930s. It was called the Harvard study. You've probably come across it. JFK was actually one of the participants.

[00:12:52] And what they were trying to do, it was huge, 700 participants, was detail and catalog all these factors that would contribute to health and wellbeing. And what they expected to find was that exercise and good diet, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, would lead to a long and healthy life.

[00:13:07] But what they found when they correlated all the data over 70 years, they found that at the age of 50, the thing that made the biggest difference to wellbeing, longevity, and also the feel good aspects of life wasn't your diet and your exercise. It was the quality of your social network. So true success is almost how we relate to other people, how we integrate into community.

[00:13:31] And it brings me to another thing which I deal with in the book, which I'll tell you about the structure of it in a second before we depart. The final part of the book is on direction, which is the toughest part to write. And the final chapter is on transcendence. And I'm sure you've heard of a chap called Abraham Maslow. So Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, self-actualization is right at the top of the pyramid. He felt that and he published that in the 1940s. But before his death, he never published this, but it was in his private papers. He said that he felt that he'd got that wrong, that it wasn't itself.

[00:14:01] True fulfillment in life is what we do for others, not what we do for ourselves. That's what Maslow concluded after thinking about it all of his life. And I tend to agree with that. I think that screwing people over and making a pile of money will get you so far, certainly get you some short term wins. Might get you a long jail sentence, but that's another conversation. But I think that something really worth aiming for is actually well-being and satisfaction.

[00:14:27] And that comes from, I think, more what we do for others than what we do for ourselves. Yes. It's interesting, isn't it? I always get antsy when people start talking about things like Maslow and such like. And so much credence is given to Maslow. Maslow didn't create a pyramid. Yeah, that's right. He just didn't do it. I know he didn't, yeah. It was one of the publishers later. Yeah, it's based on very flaky research methods. It's a very nice analogy. And it's a bit like Belden and some of these things. And it's great because it's a fantastic metaphor, isn't it?

[00:14:56] And there's no problem with the metaphor. Transcendence is interesting because it's sort of slightly Buddhist vibe about it. Nothing to mind with that at all. But how would you say transcendence? Because one of the ways I've understood transcendence is that you transcend yourself. Yes. Is that you reach a higher plane of spirituality. Are you saying that? I'm saying that we can transcend our own viewpoint to put ourselves in the shoes of others. And one of the other examples that I, and it's a great challenge. I like this conversation. One of the other examples I use is Robert McNamara.

[00:15:25] And if you haven't seen it, your listeners get out there and see it. It's actually free on YouTube. The Fog of War. The 11 lessons of the life of Robert McNamara. And he was an amazingly accomplished man. Very driven, very intelligent, hardworking. But a guy that was riddled with regret and guilt at the end of his life, sadly. And one of the things that he felt that he got wrong was the Vietnam War. And when he met his counterpart, who I forget his name. It's in the book. Who was the Secretary of Defense for North Vietnam, whatever.

[00:15:55] He met him in 1995. And the first thing he discovered after five minutes was that he had entirely misunderstood what the Vietnamese thought the Americans were there to do. So they had misunderstood each other's viewpoint. Which meant that any sort of reconciliation was off the table if you don't understand your opponent. And we hear, listen to that podcast on Trump and politics and blah, blah, blah. It's everywhere at the moment.

[00:16:20] But one of the things Anthony Scaramucci said recently on the rest is politics, he said, you never get into a fight with an enemy you don't understand. But ultimately, I think it's transcendence in that sense. It's our ability to see beyond our own needs and look to the needs of others. And I just don't think we're doing that enough as individuals, society, as organizations. We just don't. And it's interesting, isn't it? I spent a lot of time in my earlier career doing a lot of work in mediation. And it's very interesting being that third party.

[00:16:49] A lot of people come into podcasts and talk about this idea of being a third observer and such. And mediators doing that, the same both sides of the argument. And what basically is happening is people have painted themselves into corners and they've, and then what you do is to defend the positions. They don't have that. They don't have that. They don't have the skill usually to be able to see another person's perspective.

[00:17:10] And it's very hard to do that, especially in a very polarized world as we have today, where, in a sense, we know that what we believe is right because we've got these absolutes that we've learned to believe in. And we've been encouraged to believe in through social media. And I think the way brains are being developed now, we're losing that plasticity, aren't we, of having this sense of absolutes. It's your opinion or somebody else's wrong. And you often see these debating circles on YouTube where people are debating something.

[00:17:35] It's quite staggering to see that people will don't have that neuro flexibility to be able to see somebody else's perspective. It's really interesting. I've spent quite a lot of time looking at what's going on in America, which led to the rise of Trumpism because the same is happening here. And you've got to look at that and you've got to think to yourself, actually, unless we understand it, we can't actually make the best of it or defend ourselves against it.

[00:17:58] And I think you have to have that lack of arrogance, haven't you, to be able to put aside your own thoughts and to be able to see somebody else's side of the world. I think that's spot on. I think Reagan said it best. He says, you can achieve whatever you want as long as you give somebody else the credit. It's taken the me out of this situation. And I think, and I experienced this myself recently. It's something that we've been studying through the master's degree in performance psychology, where we look at the top process, particularly under high stress situations.

[00:18:26] Because in situations, we lose access to work and memory. And we tend to default to our training. And if we don't have any training, we default to whatever our personality or whatever else. But I found this recently where I was in a negotiation recently. It was just, I do a lot of volunteer work and it was a minor enough thing. But I brought in one of the board members who I thought would be quite, would oppose my point of view on this, which I needed. I says, I want to set this.

[00:18:50] I want to bring a guy in to this negotiation, who would probably be the counter viewpoint of everything I think maybe at times on board discussions, which you absolutely need on a healthy function on board. But he did challenge me. And my immediate reaction was to push back in that. But then I kind of thought carefully. I was like, that's a thing called metacognition, which is ability to observe our own reactions and thoughts. Yeah. And I tried to exercise that where I said, okay, that's my conditioned response there.

[00:19:17] But rather than going down that road, what if he's absolutely right? And explore an alternative point of view. And I think he was, he absolutely was. And you know, we got to a good deal as Trump would say in the end of it all. But I think metacognition is something that if people don't know a lot about, look it up. It's worth, a quick read is very informative in terms of how our brain works because our brain generates five thoughts at any one time for different parts of the brain. We don't originate the thought consciously, but we have to deal with the thoughts.

[00:19:46] And quite often when we get into thoughts, people think that thoughts are, they feel guilty that they've generated this thought. How could I think that? That's terrible. I'm a terrible person. But our brains actually, if you want to understand the actual mechanics, they operate slightly differently than you might think. And it's not about judging the thought. It's about being able to sometimes separate yourself or stand back, as you point out, from that thought process and try and rationalize it out with objective data and come to a good decision rather than being a positive.

[00:20:16] But this conditioning, this ancient mechanics that we're stuck with at times. So you probably are going to be a fan of two American psychologists. One was called Joseph Luft and the other one was Harrington Ingham. I don't know if you've come across those two characters. No, really, no. You have actually because they developed what was called the Johari Window. Oh yeah. And they talk a lot about this because actually people don't realize that Luft and Harrington were the Joe. Joe and Harrington were Johari. Yes, Johari, yeah. The two names.

[00:20:45] It's interesting because what we're talking about here is the metacognition is about blind spots, isn't it? That's right. It's about not being able to judge yourself. And it's an exercise that as psychologists we learn very early on, which is this idea that when you're sitting in a room, you imagine there's a video camera behind your head or above in the corner and it's videoing you. And you can put your, because the brain is so flexible.

[00:21:09] You can put yourself into a position when you're watching yourself objectively through that video camera. It's a great exercise for people to have a go at. And it is quite bizarre because you can see your own face and you can start to see your own blind spots. And I think, and I know you talked about this, alluded to it earlier. I think it's really important, isn't it? I think you've addressed this in your book as well. I'm just guessing that might be something you've thought about. Yeah, I certainly have.

[00:21:36] But I have some new thoughts on it because after writing the book, writing the book is only a starting point. It's like learning to drive, isn't it? Passing the test. Exactly. But what it does do, and I hope it does this for readers, it gives a framework in which to assess ideas beyond the book. I like to think. The book, I'll just briefly cover this. The book has three parts. Part one is seven chapters on skills we might acquire to overcome challenge.

[00:22:00] Things like sustain and motivation or how to think about various tools that equip us for challenges in life. Part two of the book is how to sustain that, the application of those skills into the longer term. So how do we drive balance? How do we observe direction in terms of morality and other headwinds that might make us veer off course? Stress is another subject I talk about in the book. And how we can microdose ourselves for stress. Stress is not a bad guy. It's a tool to get a better performance out of ourselves.

[00:22:29] Of course, it can be a bad guy if we don't get adequate recovery. The secret is to push hard and get serious about recovery as well. But we can build our battery to deal with success over time. Over time, once we, which is fascinating, once we understand what we're doing and why we're doing it and how to challenge ourselves with stress appropriately. But the third part of the book, as I mentioned, was direction. So if we have our skill set and we know how to apply it in the longer term, what are we trying to achieve anyway?

[00:22:54] And the three chapters that I picked there, it's a permanent structure, seven chapters, five chapters, three chapters, was control. So we tend to be more and more controlled by outside influences these days, whether it's scrolling on our phone or prompts on our computer. I just see a prompt coming up on my computer here. So just maybe think of it. And we have to, that's very bad for our general wellbeing.

[00:23:15] So because if we're starting to lose our perceived sense of control of our world, our personal world, it can be very debilitating from a cognitive point of view. The second thing was purpose. Purpose is key to everything. And it's striking to me how many people do not have purpose or don't seem to have any particular purpose. If somebody pushed me and said, what's your purpose? My purpose can ebb and flow.

[00:23:40] But generally speaking, certainly now, it's to try and get really useful information out there into the world and help people who need that help with that information. You can't be all things to all people. But in the chosen field, performance psychology, I think there's a lot of really good value there. And it's a very young area of psychology. The first sports psychologist in the UK was in the mid 1980s. So there's a lot of good research being done, which is not out there. It hasn't seeped into the wider consciousness yet. And I want to help do that.

[00:24:08] And the final chapter, of course, which is what we've already spoke about, which is this transcendence element, as in we all live in a small planet. And we know we can't leave this planet very easily. So we have to learn to work a bit better with each other on this planet. And I think, yeah, two things, two things about that. Well, first thing is interesting how you're talking about motivation being a choice there because it's a skill, therefore must be a choice. So people that aren't motivated have chosen not to be motivated, which I think is really important to say. So this is brilliant.

[00:24:36] And I've just looked at the time and I'm eating into your tea time, I'm sure. How do people get hold of the book? How do people find out more about you, Adrian? Yeah. So the book is called The Success Complex and it's widely available online. Amazon is probably the easiest, but it's in many traditional bookstores. My own website is askmore.ie. The name comes from Ask More of Yourself, Ask More of Life. And you'll see how to contact me there and you'll see other interviews and work I've done.

[00:25:03] And hopefully shortly a summary of what's coming in book two also. I was going to say, when's book two coming out? And will you come back and tell us about it? Yeah, it probably won't be for about another two years because I'm not going to- Oh, come on. I'm doing a research, I have a final year of research to do for my thesis in the master. So I want to give that a good crack and then I'll spend another year writing that book too. Then you've got to get your doctorate after that. Yeah, probably. Yeah. Let's see. You're on the treadmill now. It's a way of life, isn't it? You just, I don't know what I'd do if I wasn't doing this, by the way.

[00:25:32] I just think it's such an interesting path to be on. You have two doctorates. That's how you get end up. Which you have, I assume? Yeah. Right then, it's been a joy, Adrian, and I look forward to seeing you in a couple of years time. And we're going to go through this and I promise no more dolphin jokes. It's been a pleasure. So thank you for spending time with us today. We've been talking to Adrian Kelly from askmore.ie and it's been a joy. And for those of you who thought taught law was something different to thought law, then

[00:26:00] that's the Irish accent, isn't it? It's absolutely lovely to listen to you with an Irish accent. I know it's Irish people don't seem to do the TH today, but it's absolutely brilliant. No, we struggle. Yeah, that's great. It's been an absolute joy. Thanks for spending time with us today, Adrian. Thank you. You take care. Thank you. I hope you found that episode useful and entertaining. If you want to support our work, please go to resilienceunravel.com. And you can become a member there as well.

[00:26:30] You can also send us a question there and even apply to do a podcast. You can also leave a review on Apple podcasts or any of the other podcast hosts of your choice, as well as getting hold of some useful resources about resilience and a whole lot more. Join us next time on the next edition of Resilience Unravelled.