The podcast spotlights Mike Acker, an executive communications coach on a mission to alleviate child poverty. His unique background, marked by parents involved in drug smuggling and witchcraft, transformed into devout community service, setting the stage for his leadership and communication principles. Mike's journey demonstrates the power of change and resilience. He debunks myths of innate leadership and speaking skills, advocating for self-awareness, purposeful communication, and overcoming adversity.

Mike stresses practical strategies for effective leadership and communication, emphasizing practice over innate talent. He advises individuals to reflect, understand, and articulate clearly, focusing on repairing and building upon one's weaknesses. These insights, born from personal triumphs and challenges, aim to guide individuals toward impactful leadership and communication.

In sum, Mike Acker's narrative of transformation and impactful leadership underscores the importance of adaptability and strategic growth. His continued efforts in coaching and his mission against child poverty highlight the enduring influence of dedicated leadership. His story is a beacon for aspiring leaders and communicators to cultivate change within and around them.

To learn more about Mike's work, check out their website at https://www.stepstoadvance.com/.

Connect with Mike on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeackerdotcom/.

Key Points

Transcript

Craig Andrews 00:11

Today, I want to welcome Mike Acker. He is an executive communications coach and a keynote speaker. He's also the author of ten books, including Speak With Confidence. He coaches business professionals to lead and Speak with Confidence. Mike starting a new mission, and his main mission is with Go on the mission, and he's trying to impact 1 million people by addressing child poverty. Mike's books have been translated in several languages and appeared on numerous book lists, with his first book being designated as the number one book on overcoming fear of speaking on Forbes.com. Mike, welcome.

Mike Acker        00:57

Hey, thank you so much. I'm looking forward to being here with you, Craig, and talking to you and to your audience.

Craig Andrews 01:03

Well, I tell you what, for folks that are listening, we're about to go on a wild journey, and I don't even know where it's going. I know a couple bits and pieces, and I can tell you, I'm fascinated to find out what this journey is about. So, Mike, you had what some might call a non traditional yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Mike Acker        01:30

So when I was a teenager, I found out that one of the reasons why some of my weird stories that didn't really match up as a kid were in my mind was because my dad was a drug smuggler and my mom was a witch. And I didn't know that till much later in life. But my dad, in the 60s, he paid his way through college smuggling drugs. He was dealing drugs at a party where he met my wife, my mom. And my mom was a connoisseur of the good stuff, and she was an active witch participating in seances and astral projection, things like that. So then when I was around four ish years old, my parents had switched out, and they started a new thing on coffee. And they had now had a legal drug dealing business, coffee, in the 1980s. And we were in Kona Hawai. And my parents both had a radical conversion moment where they switched out of their previous thought patterns and became very committed followers of Jesus. And I'm not talking about just, like, show up a church and vote a certain way. I'm talking about how we would go on the streets of Seattle and do soup kitchens, we sold our sailboat, things like that.

Craig Andrews 02:43

All right, well, let me pause you there, because you just covered a lot. I want to hear that part of the story, too.

Mike Acker        02:48

But.

Craig Andrews 02:52

What kind of drugs was he smuggling?

Mike Acker        02:55

Yeah, primarily, and he would say it was just marijuana. My mom said that there were some other ones that were thrown in there. Well, seeing that, she knew every single type of drug that was possible. And when I was 15 years old, we had, like, do this drug class and learn about them. And I just went home and I asked my mom questions, and she told me all about him. So I know there was some cocaine at some point in time that he was part of, and then really I don't know anything else. She's passed away and he refuses to talk about it. Yeah.

Craig Andrews 03:27

Wow. Okay.

Mike Acker        03:28

Now he says it's really about marijuana back in the anyway, and this would be pre cartel days and not heroin, but there definitely was some cocaine at some point in time. Wow.

Craig Andrews 03:41

Now, when you say your mom was a witch, I mean, there's a lot of people that are listening that just they picture Halloween or something like that. What does that mean when somebody's a witch in reality?

Mike Acker        03:58

So there's probably tons of different words for this. So this is her own classification. She said that she was a white witch, and so she participated in seances, astral projection, talking with other spirits and casting spells and such. So for her, in her estimation, it was all going to be things that were kind of on the kind side and nice things. So not a black witch. This is, again, her way of defining it to me when I was 15 years old. And some people would just say it was probably intense new ageism, but for her, that's how she designated it. She had crystals and spell books and things like that.

Craig Andrews 04:37

My goodness. I'm trying to think how I would handle that if my parents told me that. 15, that had to be overwhelming.

Mike Acker        04:46

Yeah, it was one of those. Mike was making some slightly bad decisions and getting punished for showing up three minutes late and thinking it was ridiculous, the discipline. And so I was kind of steering away from my parents. My mom sat me down and said, this is why we're so strict on you. Boom. Wow.

Craig Andrews 05:07

Now you grew up partially in Mexico. What years were those?

Mike Acker        05:11

So that was when I was ten to 18. So 1990 to 1998. And my dad had actually then had a coffee company, then lawyer, and then he quit his job as a lawyer. We went down to be missionaries when I was in Mexico when I was ten years old. And then he was a legal counsel for a hotel down there, actually a big resort. And then we were missionaries part time or full time for my parents. And we did feeding centers and we did educational centers, all kinds of different things that we did down there. Built houses, et cetera. And my parents actually stayed there for years more, but I returned to the United States for college.

Craig Andrews 05:50

So one thing that strikes me as bizarre about that is it would seem like Mexico is the place to move when you're the drug dealer, not after.

Mike Acker        05:58

You were the drug dealer. Yeah. So this is in the 1990s, and Mazatlan was where we were at. So this is where Chapel is from. And this is before Chapel, though he would have been like a teenager or something at this point in time. So this is before his notorious days. And my dad had definitely done some drug dealing from Mexico. And so he was actually very familiar with culture and spoke Spanish fluently because of his drug dealing days. So when we went down there, he already spoke Spanish, he already knew the culture fairly well, and we went down there and now he's doing the opposite. So there's kind of a thought in his life that he was enough of the party, enough of what he would have said was a life of sin. And now he was switching into really turning people away from sin. And so he went there and my dad doesn't drink, doesn't do anything, any drugs or anything, and he just goes in there and we helped hundreds and thousands and thousands of thousands of people. And my dad used his cultural awareness, my mom used her emotional intelligence, and we worked with a lot of people and did some really cool stuff.

Craig Andrews 07:11

So how old were you when they turned around from that old lifestyle?

Mike Acker        07:15

Yes, I was around four years old, and it was less than a year after my parents became Christians that we found ourselves in China in 1985 ish and we were smuggling Bibles into China. Now I remember. This is Communist China, 1985. That was a serious offense in 1985, but my parents had put the Bibles under our clothes and then we went through the scanners and prayed that they would be found. And we got through, carried our big clunky suitcases full of Bibles and offloaded them in China.

Craig Andrews 07:49

Just for some perspective. When was the Tianaman Square incident?

Mike Acker        07:54

I don't know off the top of my head, I think that was 1987.

Craig Andrews 07:57

So you're doing this within a couple of years of the big Tianaman Square incident, right?

Mike Acker        08:05

Yeah, it was definitely a time that you would not be smuggling Bibles in China and just get a pass. But we went in there and we did that and later on I heard my dad say something like for years I never got caught smuggling drugs and now I'm smuggling something good. And God was with know, one time.

Craig Andrews 08:28

I used to go to China a lot and I flew into Beijing and usually a driver would meet me at the airport with my name on the and he meets me at baggage claim, and I'm coming out and there's this Chinese guard just giving me the stink eye. And I was this close to looking at the guy and blowing him a kiss and I kind of paused and I thought, think about where you are. You do want to go home. This may not be the best.

Mike Acker        09:03

That's not you don't want to aggravate it more. But thankfully we were all good. We also went to Philippines and Manila in the dump at that point in time, did some work down there and then we came back to the United States, did a pretty normal childhood, and then we went to Mexico when I was ten. So it was quite the journey in growing up in retrospect at the time. It's just your life.

Craig Andrews 09:27

Curious and we'll move on after this. What was the catalyst? What caused that change in your parents?

Mike Acker        09:33

So, two different stories for my mom, she always meditated, and then she met some Christians and they said, Meditate on the blood of Jesus. I don't know really who Jesus is, but I'll meditate on anything. And when she did, she felt a power course through her that was unlike anything else. And she said, every time I meditated, I would feel power. But when I meditated on the blood of Jesus, I realized that everything else was an imitation to whoever that Jesus is. So whoever Jesus is, is the real deal. Everything else is not the real deal. And she started finding out who Jesus was. My dad, he was a complete agnostic. He thought it was the only intellectual thing to do, and he lobbed a prayer out and just said, god, if you're out there, help me with this situation. And then he's walking across the parking lot and he heard the only time his life, the audible voice of Jesus saying, timothy, I'm Jesus and I'm your friend. And he was in, he was was it was a radical change, too. Like, my parents went from way over here to way over here, and I'm not talking politically or anything like that. Yes, their politics did have some changes in it as well, but we're really just talking about the way they lived, the way they gave, the way they went about.

Craig Andrews 10:50

Know what's really interesting in that story? Know, I hear an element where they were truly seeking out God, and God found them. And I've heard similar stories. There's actually videos on YouTube called More Than Dreams and it talks about people in Muslim countries who were genuinely seeking out God. And they met Jesus in dreams. One was in Saudi Arabia going on the pilgrimage to Mecca, and Jesus came to him in a dream and said, Turn around. And these are not isolated incidents. There's a lot and seems like your parents had their own version of that.

Mike Acker        11:32

Yeah, absolutely. And it's pretty intense when you go into the whole story. And they got baptized and they just did a 180. We're talking like, hey, I'm going this way, and now I'm going this way. And there's all kinds of funny stories that they had. And I'd heard my parents tell stories as a kid, and I didn't have a way to process that story. So it wasn't until much later in life that I was like, why we were here. That's why this is happening. That's why this happened. And it's fascinating to really look at life and see that.

Craig Andrews 12:10

Yeah. So help us connect the dots. So that's your upbringing, and now you're an executive coach that's getting ready to transition to dress child poverty. But help us connect the dots. Would that teach you about coaching? Would that teach you about leadership?

Mike Acker        12:33

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things I saw from a get go was I watched my dad and mom start things, start a coffee company and sold it for a great amount, started a mission project in Mexico and did that extremely well and grew it. And my mom had started a preschool when I was a kid, too. So I've seen my parents start things, take the initiative. And really, in some ways, leadership is simply the ability to take a group of people and influence them to meet the needs of someone else. So you have a need that's out there whether someone needs a widget or someone needs to be fed, and they have a need, and you take a group of people to do that, and so you're not just doing it on your own, but you're leading people and influencing. That's what I saw my parents do. Now, that's the leadership side. And I got to be a part of leading trips. I was about 13 years old, and I was leading 20 year olds to do construction projects in Mexico. I'm teaching them how to lay concrete. I'm teaching them how to approach this situation and paint in this kind of environment and wash their brushes of oil based paint afterwards. So I'm teaching people and leading people to meet the needs that the mission organizations had when I was 13 years old. So that's kind of the leadership side of things. Now, in terms of communication, let me go back to when I was four. I actually had a speech impediment, realized it with my family, and then went about and worked on it aggressively. My mom said that I was the driving factor in doing that. I was the one who was doing the exercise. Got to spot where I spoke quite well with winning different type of presentation awards as a kid, moved to Mexico, and then I got bullied because I was the only white kid, blonde haired, very fair, blue eyes, huge buff teeth, and I got in front of the class and everybody just laughed. And that happened for years. I got picked on, I got beat up, things like that. And I got to a spot where I overcame that. So in terms of communication, I got to a spot where I was good in a couple of different environments, moved back to the United States, participated in debate, and learned how to be good in America again. So when people come to me and they go, here's where I need to go, and what makes you different? Often I'll say it's because I'm not a natural born speaker. I had to learn how to get there, and I wasn't even a natural born leader, although I had some opportunities that taught me along the way. There's actually no natural born. That's a separate topic, though, in terms of this. I was able to learn and grow and overcome. The things that people are dealing with are things that I've dealt with, the things that people struggle with are things that I've struggled with and learned how to get through it the other side. So that's what I really learned through the whole part was leadership. I had the opportunities speaking, I had all the embarrassment, yet worked through it.

Craig Andrews 15:21

You bring up a good point. There are people that would say, hey, I don't want to speak, I'm not a natural speaker, that's not my thing. What would you say to them?

Mike Acker        15:31

Yeah, I'd say no one is no one's a natural born speaker? I say there's people who are born with proclivity and there's people who are born with opportunities that practice. And those two are the different ways that you're born. But no one's born speaking, no one's born leading. Now you might have some proclivities, you might have the type of personality that wants to be in front of people. You might have the type of personality that's a little bit more bossy than someone else. And given the right opportunities to practice leadership, that bossiness can turn into leadership. Given the right types of opportunity to practice that being in front of people can turn into performance and presentations. But really it's proclivity and then there's practice. Now here's the thing, everybody is born with the ability, the opportunity to practice. Now some people are born into environments that are going to force you to practice. Your parents make you practice piano, but no matter how old you are, you can start practicing and practice enough. Practice will beat proclivity. Now some people are born with proclivity and that's great. If a person is born with proclivity, then practices well, that can create the phenomenon. But practice without proclivity beats proclivity without practice any day. Interesting.

Craig Andrews 16:44

Yeah. I can say in terms of podcasting what I've learned just by getting out and doing episodes. And I've heard multiple podcasters say this, they're like, oh please don't listen to my early episodes, they were horrible. I don't think mine were necessarily horrible, but there's a learning process and I don't know any way to get better other than to get out there and do it.

Mike Acker        17:13

Yeah. And then in terms of communication, I 100% agree. And I want to add in a little caveat to it. If you break your leg, don't just walk off your leg, walk it off. First set it and then walk it off. So when it comes to communication, if your communication is there's, many people I work with that they just actually feel like they're getting worse and more insecure in their communication the more they practice it's because they're walking on a broken leg. And first you got to set that leg and then get out there. But when you started podcasting, I haven't listened to your early episodes, but when you started podcasting, you weren't walking on a broken leg. You were just walking on maybe a weaker leg. Now as you've worked more and more towards it, you're stronger and stronger and stronger. And that's for a lot of people. But there are many people who their leadership is broken or their speaking is broken. And as a result of it, the more that they do it, the worse that they get. And they first need to go fix things and set the bone and then walk on it.

Craig Andrews 18:17

Yeah, that's such an incredible analogy. It resonates a little bit with me. Two years ago, I was learning how to walk again, and I had a coach recently tell me the way I was doing my squats were hurting my knees and I was reinforcing a broken process. And what you're saying is you have to identify those broken elements, don't reinforce the brokenness, make adjustments and become stronger in the adjusted way.

Mike Acker        18:50

Yeah, absolutely. So people will come to me say, I joined Toastmasters, and toastmasters can be incredible. And they're like, hey, and I'm volunteering to speak and it's getting worse. I'm like, yeah, that's right, because there's something broken in how you speak. And when you speak, it goes worse and worse and worse because you're just compounding that issue.

Craig Andrews 19:12

So what would be three tips for somebody listening saying, I don't feel like I'm a great speaker or I'm not a speaker at all. What would be three things that you would tell them to do today? To move closer to being the speaker they want to be?

Mike Acker        19:31

So the first one, it would be to pause, to learn how to pause. And there's a whole bunch written about this. I've written many books. I talk about pausing in almost all of them. But then probably most presentation books are going to talk about pausing as well. But pausing, you could look it up online and probably see a ton of different YouTubes about it. The second one I would say is this is Study Yourself, really get to know yourself. So one of my books is called the Identity Workbook. It's just like a $10 little workbook that people can do to study themselves. And I talk about my own process there as well and just really know yourself. The more you know yourself, the more comfortable you get with yourself. I break down a whole paradigm of this and speak with confidence. I talk about how to appreciate yourself, accept yourself, and know what to improve. So study yourself would be the second thing right there. And the third one would be, there's so many different things on here. The third one would be to know why you speak and what you want to say anytime that you go into something. Why am I doing this? How does what I'm saying help someone? Even if you're reporting to your boss or talking to your fellow colleagues, how is what you're saying helping to someone? And another one is what in 10 seconds. If you could say everything you're going to say in your 40 minutes presentation, what would you say in 10 seconds? And that will be hugely helpful.

Craig Andrews 20:53

Those are great tips. Well, so as I understand, you're still going to do coaching. You're starting your new mission with Go on the mission, but you're still going to do some coaching on the side. So what are the ways that people should reach out and find you?

Mike Acker        21:09

Yeah, absolutely. So people can find me@mikeacard.com. People can find me on Amazon. I have ten books and something like eight or nine workbooks as well. People can grab a hold of on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. You can actually go into a Barnes and Noble and speak with confidence there. You can reach out to me and just simply info@mikeacker.com great way to reach out. We'd love to help you. And then the big focus I'm doing here in 2024, lifting kids out of poverty, breaking cycle of poverty. And that's at Goontemission.com.