Career Coaching Secrets

The Art of Influence: Lessons from Storytelling Coach Robin Bayley

• Davis Nguyen

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Host Rexhen Doda interviews Robin Bayley, a storytelling expert and leadership coach. Robin's journey, rooted in advertising and TV, led him to help leaders connect emotionally through their stories.

His coaching emphasizes emotional truth in communication. Robin's clients, from diverse industries including tech, find him primarily through referrals and LinkedIn's organic reach, not traditional marketing.

Robin's main goal is to achieve a "greater impact on a greater number of people," including through teaching at IE Business School. He advises coaches to align their work with their true passions for authentic and impactful growth.

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Robin Bayley:

You know, I don't really think of it like that. I, and Mel in your audience who are much more business savvy than I am, be kind of pulling the hair out saying, what an absolute idiot. But what I enjoy, I enjoy create with the people I'm working with. So in addition to the people I'm helping to give presentations or give speeches or keynotes, help people develop their leadership skills, That...

Davis Nguyen:

Welcome to Career Coaching Secrets, the podcast where we talk with successful career coaches on how they built their success and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is Davis Nguyen, and I'm the founder of Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, and even $100,000 weeks. Before Purple Circle, I've grown several seven and eight figure career coaching business myself, and I've been a consultant at two career coaching businesses that are doing over a hundred million dollars each. Whether you're an established coach or building your practice for the first time, you'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business. us.

Rexhen Doda:

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Career Coaching Secrets Podcast. I'm your host, Rejan, and today's guest is Robin Bailey. Robin is a storytelling expert, a strategic communications coach, and leadership development facilitator who helps leaders around the world connect with their audiences at a deeper emotional level. Based in Madrid, Robin's mission is to guide leaders in finding the beating heart of their message so it resonates powerfully with the people they need to inspire and influence. Whether it's crafting a pitch, delivering a keynote, or motivating a team, Robin helps leaders move beyond facts and figures to create communications that truly move people to action. I'm excited to explore his approach to storytelling, emotional connection, and leadership impact. So welcome to the show, Robin. It's a great pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure for us. So I wanted to ask you, how did this all start? got started. So what inspired you to become a coach and then start your own coaching business?

Robin Bayley:

Well, I'd love to sit here and say, well, when I was a child, I knew I wanted to be a coach and therefore I became a coach. But of course, things only really make sense when you're looking backwards, as Steve Jobs once famously said. The thread that goes throughout all of my career is really storytelling. So I worked in advertising. obviously storytelling, and then I worked in kids' television, obviously storytelling. And then I, to the upset of my bank manager, decided to give all of that up, a perfectly good career, and I decided to write a book, which is essentially about storytelling. And it was when I was going around the world promoting that book that people started to come to me and they were saying, could you help me with my story? Could you help me with my pitch? And I discovered I really loved it. And so kind of at the same time as that, because I was doing an event to promote my book, and somebody came to me after the presentation and they said, I mean, I did know this guy a little bit. And he said, could you speak at my wedding? I went, yeah, sure. He said, the person who is marrying us doesn't know us, so you know us and you can tell our story. So I turned up, it was Mallorca, and I was there, and the couple said, listen, could you have a word with the best man, because he's gonna be really rubbish. And I thought, how am I gonna start that conversation? But luckily, the guy came to me, he said, could you help me? So I helped him with his speech, and then the groom came to me, he said, could you help with my speech? And then after I gave my speech during the ceremony, somebody came to me after that, and they said, you've got a business here. And I set up this thing called Wedding Speech Guru, which is not something I promoted for years, but people still come to me. So I've written about, written and kind of produced, if you like, 170, 180 wedding speeches. Never been married, but I've been involved in a lot of weddings. And there's this kind of a founding quote, if you like, for that business. Remember the standout comic, Richard Pryor? It's probably a bit before your time, but you probably know him. And he seemed to be the godfather of standup. And people always used to come up to him, you know, up and coming comics, and they say, you know, what is the secret? And he always used to say the same thing. He said, never try to be funny. Be truthful, and funny will come. And that, as I say, became the founding quote for Wedding Speech Guru, and then for all the other stuff which I have done. is help people get to the truth. And as you mentioned in the intro, it's what I'm interested in is the emotional truth. And I'm a leadership coach, but I'm also a storytelling coach and consultant. And I see them very much as the same thing, because if you're leading a team, leading an organization, whatever it might be, you need to be telling a really compelling story. And also, if you are giving a speech, giving a presentation, you are leading the thought process of everybody who is in the room at the time. So I do see them as one and the same thing. And my goal in my business is to help people connect to something that's true, which is going to resonate with the audience that they're talking to.

Rexhen Doda:

And you've been doing this for about more than 10 years, right?

Robin Bayley:

Yeah, I mean... I was working in the creative industries for about 15 years, and I've been doing this for probably about 12 now, something like that.

Rexhen Doda:

Cool. So throughout these years, which part of the coaching journey would you say you find the most rewarding since you started doing this?

Robin Bayley:

I think... I think it's when you hear back, and I hear this a lot from different coaches in different ways, when you hear back from people, sometimes it's indirectly, that you've had an impact. I'll give you an instance. There's a company that I do a lot of work with, and the first job I was doing with them was in Vienna about eight, nine years ago. And I was... pacing up and down, waiting for this thing to begin. And then one of the participants came up to, she was a doctor called Marisa, and she came up to me and she's jabbing me in the chest with her finger. And she said, this thing you're doing, it's got no relevance to what I do. I'm a medic. I'm a scientist. I deal with facts. I deal with figures. I deal with data. What you do has got no relevance to what I do. And I said, well, you know, you've traveled a long way to be here. So why don't we just have today as an experiment, a scientific experiment? And if you don't like it, you can go back to communicating the way you always have. Anyway, the day went really well. She's pushing back the whole time, challenging me. But the end of the day, she came back and she said, OK, I'm going to go back to my office and I make sure everybody comes on this training, which is really, really good. A month later, I was running a similar program, One Day Storytelling. And at the beginning of the day, I do what I often do. I was doing what I often do. And I said, okay, so what does good look like? What great speeches have you heard? Who do you really admire as a communicator? And we had people that said the usual thing like Steve Jobs or Martin Luther King or Obama or whoever. And this one woman said, You know, I was at a medical conference recently and everybody was horrendously boring. They were all doing vanilla speeches. Everybody had the same charts and no one was making any movements or making, nobody stood out whatsoever. And then this woman came up and she had one slide and it was a slide of a molecule, completely different to what everybody else had done. And then she told us the story of the molecule. She said there were 2,000 people in that place, and she had them in the palm of her hand. I said, oh, wow, she sounds amazing. Who's that? She said, oh, it's a doctor called Marissa. So in a month, it had come back. She didn't know that woman, but it came back to me. So that kind of thing is, I find that really, really rewarding. And I hear this a lot from other coaches. When people come to your clinic, you hear that you really made a difference. You helped them make a difference to their own life, I should maybe say.

Rexhen Doda:

Absolutely. Seeing that impact is what drives most of the coaches that I've interviewed. I'm not a coach myself, but I can understand that that has to be one of the biggest parts of it. Is there, like, when it comes to the clients that you work with, is there a specific target audience or... demographic or maybe industry that you typically find yourself working with?

Robin Bayley:

Well, in terms of the coaching I do, the one-to-one leadership coaching, it can be I work with people in all kinds of industries, but I tend to work quite a lot with people in the advertising industry and people in the creative industries, music, film, etc. But I also do a lot of work with people in tech. which is hilarious, really, because, you know, I mean, there are mountain goats in the Andes who probably know more about tech than I do. But I use that to my advantage. And I say, well, you know, I honestly, I know nothing about what you're talking about. So you've got to make me care. And that is because if you're going to start trying to machine gum me with facts and data, I'm not going to understand. And there are obviously, I mean, I do this deliberately because there are going to be, even if it's a specialist conference, there are going to be people who have a greater or lesser understanding of what they're talking about. And if you can appeal to people, if you can resonate with people as human beings, as emotional, sentient beings, then you're halfway there or more than halfway there because people will remember people that they felt an emotional connection to.

Rexhen Doda:

Absolutely. And I also wanted to, like we touched upon this a little bit in the beginning of the, you mentioned that most of the people, when it comes to people finding you, most of them find you through your referral network. Is that right? That's where most of the audience comes from?

Robin Bayley:

Yeah, LinkedIn and who have worked with me. I mean, a few years ago, I had a job in Doha, in the Middle East. And I posted a couple of pictures of me coaching some people with these wonderful, elegant dresses on. And somebody wrote to me saying, oh, I didn't realize you did this. This sounds amazing. Can we meet? And so we met for lunch and they said, there's somebody who I think you should work with or should speak to at least. So it was somebody who worked for an advertising agency. So I went to meet with them. And the original idea was to work with a whole bunch of the people who are doing pitches who needed more emotive pitches rather than just data-driven decks. That didn't happen in the end, but because I was there, they said, well, that's not going to happen. But what else do you do? And I said, well, you know, I also do coaching. And so I started working with one of the board directors, one of the members of the board, rather. And then the chief executive heard that I was working with this guy. So then he asked if I worked with him and then two other people in the same company. just beneath the board. They asked if I could work with them. And then the person who is working in that organization then went to another organization. And then her number two went to another organization. All of a sudden that was kind of repeated throughout the industry. And then, you know, people just come randomly. I mean, I got a call the other day to help somebody pitch to Arnold Schwarzenegger. I had somebody a couple of years ago who had to do a pitch to the ex-head of the CIA. trying to get $100 million off him. So I don't know quite how the algorithms work at LinkedIn. To be honest, I don't even do very much on LinkedIn. But whenever I put anything on there, usually some work comes from it.

Rexhen Doda:

And so you're sometimes like, not very frequent, but sometimes you're posting content within LinkedIn, right?

Robin Bayley:

I do a bit. I did a series of videos over the last... I don't know, eight, 10 months, something like that, which people seem to really enjoy. I mean, it was, somebody said, somebody interesting point to me that when they hire me, I am what they're getting. I know that sounds very obvious, but it's, you know, it's not as if I have an off the shelf product that I, here, Edge, and here, this is yours. It's something which we create together. And so if you can see me on video, And some people maybe won't be interested, but some people will. And if you are going to be interested, then this is going to get. So if you like it, then, you know, and that also is quite good at generating some business.

Rexhen Doda:

Where is right now the focus for the future? So do you have any goals with your coaching business for the next one to three years that you're working towards?

Robin Bayley:

You know, I don't really think of it like that. I and Mel in your audience who are much more business savvy than I am. We kind of pulling the hair out saying what an absolute idiot. But what I enjoy, I enjoy create with the people I'm working with. So in addition to the people I'm helping to give presentations or give speeches or keynotes, help people develop their leadership. That's, I forgot the direction I was going in there. What was your question again?

Rexhen Doda:

Mostly about future goals.

Robin Bayley:

Yeah, okay. So I would say my goals have a greater impact on a greater number of people. So in addition to the work that we've already talked about, so the storytelling coaching, the leadership coaching, I also teach in, I'm a professor in IE Business School, which is Spain's biggest business school. And And that is a completely different way of working, but it's also using exactly the same skills. And you have a really bigger reach because you're working with maybe 50 students at a time. I'll give you an example. I said that I see leadership coaching and storytelling coaching very much the same way. And so the guy I was, was an MBA, international MBA group I was working with, and getting them all to work on a story. And So this one guy, he said, okay, this is my story. And he said, my, came from Honduras, actually. He said, my business is about trust. So you've got to trust me. And that was his story. So I said, all right, great. So what kind of journey are you going to take us on so we can come to that conclusion? We talked a little bit more, and he talked a little bit more about trust. And he started talking about his mother. And this is probably the whole class. And I was saying, this is really interesting what you're saying. I wonder, tell me, your mother is very important to you. She said, yeah, she is really important. I said, well, what has she taught you? And then he starts to tell me about the business that she started developing when she moved to the States, Honduras, and da, da, da. And I said, well, that's the story you need to be telling. Tell us the story about how you found what you now have what you can now offer other people and it's that story and i think and something which i find time and time again no matter what work i'm doing it's the work that i'm doing is helping people answer really fundamental questions like who am i and why do i do what i do i don't know if you heard the mark twain quote the two most important days of your life, the day you're born and the day you discover why. And yeah, I mean, kind of what I'm helping people connect to. What's the motivation? Why do what you do? I don't want to come all over Simon Sinek, but, you know, he's onto something. There's a reason why his career took off because this is what he really found. And I find helping people identify to... what kind of leadership leader they want to be and or what they what they communicate to their audience for whatever they're working on it's working to the same place is this is who this is why i offer what i offer and this is how i can help you and and and that's and get to so i mean you were asking what's my future plan I'm aware that what I just said is not a business plan, but that's my answer.

Rexhen Doda:

Cool. Yeah. Well, still good answer. And not all, I would say, are business savvy. A lot of coaches that I've interviewed, some of them are also after a lifestyle where they can do what they want, they can manage their time and they can focus on doing the things that they really love and spend less time on things that they don't like, such as like maybe marketing or sales or things like that. And yeah, so I wanted to ask you throughout these 10 years or 12 years, sorry, what has been a good investment that you've made in your coaching business that you feel like it actually made a positive change either an investment on yourself or maybe a coaching program, mastermind, community, anything that you've invested money on that you feel like that was very valuable?

Robin Bayley:

I mean, if I could give you a glib answer, it would be a subscription during COVID. Seriously, I would say the decision to go into coaching and then, you know, coaching training, if you're going to do it seriously, is not cheap. So that, that was... That for me was a very, very good investment. It just felt like, I mean, a motivation. If you turn to the question that I ask other people or get people to investigate about kind of why they do the work they do, I guess one of the reasons why I do what I do is that I want to be good. You know, and as a kid, I wanted to be a cricketer and then I wanted to be a rock star. And those things work out because I did not have the skills required. And coaching of whatever stripe, you know, where it's leadership, storytelling, what have you, I'm good at it. And I don't know why. I mean, it's like I have friends who are musicians and they say, you know, I just... Or, you know, mathematicians, they can look at a spreadsheet and they can understand it. Well, this is, you know, I can look at any presentation, any speech, and I know how I can make it better. Now, I have no idea where that comes from, but I found something I'm good at. So that's what I do. I want to help people in the best way that I can. And that's the way I found that I can have the biggest influence.

Rexhen Doda:

Is there any challenge right now? with your coaching business that you're trying to solve for next?

Robin Bayley:

Well, it'd be nice to make a whole bunch more money, if I'm honest. That would be good. I mean, I'm doing pretty well. And also, I do not want to be a slave to it. I mean, I have turned down enormous opportunities because I just didn't want to work that hard. I want to do work that I really enjoy. And I guess a challenge which... most coaches have is how to get constant business coming through the kind that you want. And, you know, I mean, again, any single coach would tell you that they receive maybe 10 emails a day or messages on LinkedIn saying, hey, have you found my invest three minutes and get 100 whatever clients immediately, you know, and I don't believe that. And usually, I mean, the work that I need comes either by recommendation or just people randomly. And there's a guy at the moment who is working with an Oscar-winning director on a film about his life. And so he's coming out later this year, I think. So he's going to be... required to do a lot of talking about it and he's hired me to help him work out what that narrative is and so you know i i still don't actually how he found me so again you see if i was if i my business coach to me i'd be pulling my hair out going ask that question you idiot but um you know maybe i should ask him

Rexhen Doda:

yeah well we found it linkedin so generally we look for coaches in linkedin seems to be like where Most coaches are, and it's a very important channel for a lot of coaches that are working either in the career industry or executive coaches, leadership coaches. They typically firstly or have their primary channel be LinkedIn, not measuring any of the referral network, but just saying LinkedIn in terms of like manual efforts is one of the channels there. most of the coaches are so yeah that's where we found you see it works yeah it works and i wanted to ask you um in terms of and this is the final question what is uh an advice you'd like to give to other coaches just like yourself who are trying to scale their impact

Robin Bayley:

i'm not sure i've got anything particularly original to say here but i I think it's true nonetheless that if what you're doing is aligned to what you believe in, then it's more likely to develop into something more meaningful. I mean, I've worked with people, I mean, included in the leadership coaching work that I've done. Part of that is obviously helping people navigate their careers, whether they're emerging leaders or whether they're at the top of the tree. And quite often I find people twisting themselves into things which they could do. And when I say, well, is this something you're really excited about? They look at me like I'm a complete idiot, go, no, I don't want to do that at all. don't do it. So that's what I mean. So that's what I would offer to people. Just don't do anything you don't want to do and do what you do want to do. So I'm sure you're not going to find that on the first page of any business book, but it's worked for me. And I think the serious point I'd make here is that, yes, of course, think about this logically. Think about this from a marketing perspective. What is it that your market or your potential market is looking for? What are the pain points? What is it that you can deliver which which would really help them develop whatever it is they're trying to develop so of course do that but also what really excites you i mean when and this is not something that's individual to me i've seen other people other coaches do this as well that you're talking to a client and they're talking and they're just giving a response and all of a sudden they get really animated and then you go have you noticed you just really animated when you're talking about that and again maybe that's something you need to look into so i guess that that's what i would say pay attention to what lights you up.

Rexhen Doda:

Thank you. Thank you so much, Robin. And thank you for coming today. For anyone who wants to find you or connect with you, they can go into LinkedIn and search Robin Bailey and they'll be able to find you. They can also go to your website, robinbailey.com and we'll also put that into the description. So is there any other way people could reach out to you and maybe you get some extra ones coming your way?

Robin Bayley:

Yes, stop me in the street if you see me walking by.

Rexhen Doda:

If you live in Madrid, yeah. So cool. Thank you so much for coming, Robin. It was lovely having you on the show.

Robin Bayley:

My great pleasure. That's it

Davis Nguyen:

for this episode of Career Coaching Secrets. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode to catch future episodes. This podcast was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, or even $100,000 weeks, all without burning out and making sure that you're making the impact and having the life that you want. To learn more about our community and how we can help you, visit joinpurplecircle.com.