How To Live The Ultimate Bucket List Life with Kenyon Salo

The Unbreakable Success Podcast

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Unbreakable Success Podcast, Episode 58 How to Live the Ultimate Bucket List Life with "The James Bond of Public Speaking" - Kenyon Salo.

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Discover how to live the ultimate bucket list lifestyle with the "James Bond" of the motivational public speaking world, our new friend Kenyon Salo.

The Bucket List Life is built off the three core principles that have helped Kenyon design a fulfilling life of travel, adventures, meaningful interactions, and achieving his dreams. Kenyon Salo is one of the top trainers, facilitators and keynote speakers in the fields of adventure, leadership, team building, sales, customer service and inspiration/motivation.

One of only five members on the Denver Broncos Thunderstorm Skydive Team, he is seen each week during game season flying into the Denver Broncos Stadium at 60+mph, ending with a soft tip-toe landing on the ten yard line. He brings to the stage over 20+ years of successful audience engagement through humor, awe-inspiring moments, prolific storytelling, and ‘edge-of-the seat’ content.

With over 6000 skydives under his belt and travels that have taken him all around the world, he’s determined to live life to the fullest and help others do the same. Through his passions for adventure, storytelling, and connecting with people, he found a simple process to guide others on a path to what most of us crave – living a more fulfilled life.

His goal through his engagements is to deliver a powerful and heart-touching message on the possibility of how amazing life can be through providing actionable steps that will help any audience, both personally and professionally, embark on a path to achieve anything they desire.

Fast Facts:

• Kenyon is a Master Trainer and Speaker of more than 100k+ people Trainer for a National Social Media Campaign for Fortune 500 Company
• Featured on NFL Films, ESPN, NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, MTV
• NFL Denver Broncos Thunderstorm Skydive Team
• Performed Stand-Up Comedy at Denver Comedy Works
• Travelled to 49/50 US States and 27+ Countries *Photographer, Adventure Video Creator
• 6000+ Skydives
• 450+ BASE Jumps
• 2 Amazing Kids

Kenyon's truly a motivational force of nature with the elements of a James Bond character; carrying confidence, paying close attention to detail, dominating technology, dressing to kill and always striving to connect deeply. He stays cool under pressure while bringing his listeners through an immersive experience of what it means to live a Bucket List Life. James Bond is one of those heroes that most people can believe in, relate to and truly connect with – He’s an ordinary person who uses his gadgets and creativity to do extraordinary things. Just like 007, Kenyon shares effective tools to empower attendees to walk away from the event feeling ready to take on the world. This is achieved while keeping the organizers in mind so that they can rest assured knowing that Kenyon will do everything in his power to make their lives as easy as possible, from the moment contact is initiated all the way through high-fiving after a successful event and beyond. I'm grateful to share this powerful conversation with Kenyon on this episode of the Unbreakable Success podcast.

Full Transcript:

Aaron: Everybody, welcome back to another episode of unbreakable success. I'm really stoked to have you here. A Kenyan Salo. Every once in a while you'll hear people that actually give themselves sort of a nickname and you are known as the, the James Bond of public speaking, which I love. And sometimes those things can go wrong. Like when you've self and I'm assuming that you, you came up with the theme or at least you and your team came up with the theme because sometimes it doesn't fit where you agree, but, uh, in your case, Kenyon, uh, the James Bond, public speaking, it's authentic. It kind of speaks to the kind of guy that you are, at least from what I've been able to get to know. Have you the adventurous spirit, the confidence, the having a job in wanting to get it done. And uh, you know, and doing it with some style and possess. And I've seen some of your keynotes, I've seen what you're about. And it's definitely been exciting too to get to know you and talk to you a little bit. And that definitely is great to have you on the show today. So for everybody that doesn't know you, tell me a little bit about, tell all of us a little bit about you and what you're up to these days please.

Kenyon Salo: Well Aaron, thank you so much for having me on the show. It's such a pleasure and it's really great to connect and that's the one thing that I love about this industry and the potential to be able to do podcasts is it's not just about the podcast itself, it's about meeting the people that are behind the podcast. You, you're, you're living the podcast. You're, you're leading the podcast. And then of course all of your audience members, all of your listeners, I celebrate them and I thank all of you guys for being on. And you mentioned earlier about being the James Bond of speaking and and for me it was one of those things where I wanted something that would catch somebody's eye, but again, at the same time being very authentic to who I am, which is that balance that you talk about where it's like it's important that you, you list yourself as something that you can actually back up, follow up, that type of thing.

Kenyon Salo: And so I did some studying on what James Bond is and who he is and, and the, the brand that he personifies. I said, okay, there's a lot of things that I fall into that place where it's like, you know, being onstage, well-dressed, being good with technology, having humor, but at the same time not being infallible, realizing that you can be bumbling, you can make mistakes at the same time and adventurous and succeed in that type of thing. So that was, that was really important to me and I love it and it's far better than a lot of times I see on linkedin where people are like so and so motivational speaker, like you're not going any further in terms of like who is this person? Right? But James Bond speaking, Hey, I'm going to check this out

Aaron: for sure. A brilliant, brilliant from a business aspect. And, and even more importantly, I love it because like you said, it's authentic. Um, if I can share a little bit about, with the audience, about you and I and how we want them connecting. It's funny, a couple months ago, uh, I told you when we talked on the phone the other day, the first time I heard you was, was on another podcast called world speakers, I think, uh, from speaker match.com. And you were doing a training on, on speaking because you, you've been doing this in a relatively short window and you've made some amazing progress. I mean for listening, we're going to hook up the links to his website and things like that. Obviously in the show notes for this episode. But your website is stunning. It's what, it's one of the most stunning sites I've seen visually.

Aaron: You have so much great content, a content, the people that you engage with, your audiences are just obviously like into it, like you have a great persona persona about you. Um, but what, what drew me to you was when you were given a training on speaker match, you were just giving so much great content to help people accomplish what it is they want to accomplish. Like it was so much authentic authenticity and it wasn't like you were trying to just spread a few bread crumbs so you can real somebody into a sales pitch or something like that. You were just really trying to help and it came through very authentically. And that theme kind of carried through when I see you, when I saw you on stage, uh, watching some of your keynote videos, as I told you, I was prepping for one of my keynotes I was doing last week.

Aaron: And I always loved to watch people that I admire along the way. And I think it was watching Mel Robbins and Brendon Burchard or somebody. And then you're, you're a keynote came up and which was cool because I just heard you recently before that. And then funny enough, you and I are connected with, um, Nicole Jansen and I saw that you were all in her pockets and it was, it was sort of a trifecta of, you know, this Guy Kenyan popping up on the radar. And uh, I'm glad that from there we were able to connect and get you on the show today. I definitely would love to have you share with everybody what you call the bucket list life, which is sort of a, one of the overarching themes of what you do. And, and, uh, I'd also love to get to, um, you helping some people out with, with connection.

Aaron: Because what I, what I noticed about you, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, that it's really, it seems to be really important to you that you connect with people authentically when you, when you're doing your speaking and when you're engaging in conversation. And that's something that is essential for not just speakers but entrepreneurs. People in their daily life. If they're on a nine to five people at home with their family. So I'd love to get some of your thoughts on that as we go along today. But, uh, first and foremost, how did this journey start for you? How did you roll into wind up being this public speaker and especially when it has made so much progress from a business standpoint really fast and really authentically? How'd that play out for you?

Kenyon Salo: Well, it's been the one thing that has been throughout my whole life yet I wasn't paying attention to it completely. Yeah. So if I see where I'm at now, definitely we are all in amalgamation of our entire lives. This things that have happened to us, the successes, the failures, the highlights and the lowlights. All those things make us who we are. And for me the common theme that been running through yes, adventure and living that life where I want to experience the word, uh, the world. And that word experience is so very strong because it's deep and core of who I am. You want to experience it. I want to give people experiences. On the other side is the thing that I've been really good at is once I do experiences I want to teach others, I want to help others be able to do that same thing and whether it's back in the day when I was six years old jumping my bike off of a homemade ply wood ramp over a trashcan or then saying, hey, you can do this too, to my neighborhood friends, let me show you how to do it.

Kenyon Salo: And then being able to transfer that so later in life saying, hey, this is what I found about mindset and being able to accomplish goals and when you talk about what I shared on the speaker match call and I appreciate you getting and being able to capture that moment where it's that giving freely because our team, our team decided at the beginning of this year that we would give as much as we could give to speakers, give to event planners, give to podcast, give to anybody we can because we realized when we help others first, everything we desire will come back tenfold. Yeah. So we decided to put that out there. So anything I can do to be able to help others, I just give that information knowing that it will all come back and that's how it is. So that's how I got from the very beginning knowing that I was a speaker trainer, somebody that wants to help and that I was going to tie it in with adventure and stories and things like that and be able to bring that to the stage or bring that to a podcast or a training along the way.

Aaron: Nice. Nice. For those. Don't go know Kenyon has a. What do you over 6,000 skydive jumps now?

Kenyon Salo: Yeah. 6,000 skydives about 400 base jumps. I love to wing suit fly too. So I know a lot of people have seen that on youtube, but it's basically like flying around over houses and trees and it's magical.

Aaron: Yeah, it looks, it looks pretty amazing. It's, it's definitely A. Alright. I'm not going to push and say that's on my bucket list yet, but it is. It is out there. Sort of floating around and we'll see if I grab onto it or not. You're, you're still with the broncos. The Denver Broncos, the jump team, so you may see up. Yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry.

Kenyon Salo: Schedule comes out every April and I've already got it. It's all on my calendar for the fall season and our preseason game started August and yeah, we get to skydive into every single home game that the Broncos have and that is so. Oh Man. 70,000 people scream landing on the field. Uh, it's, it's, it's, it's a pinnacle of my life. It's amazing.

Aaron: Yeah. That's got to be a lot of fun. How long have you been, have you been with the team now?

Kenyon Salo: Seven years. So really a 2011 is when it started for me and they started in 2009 and I, we're the only team that's associated with an NFL team that skydives always into every single game.

Aaron: That's pretty amazing, man. That's got to be so much fun. Now, again, this is one of those things that, one of the reasons I was really hoping to get you on the shows because you have this discrete mixture of living life to the fullest and you certainly by most people standards, you take it to the extreme. You're jumping out of airplanes, flying wing suit, doing base jumps and real and it's authentically you. You're not trying to show off. You just, it's obvious that you love doing this. It to the point where you even, you even bring them on guests, do some keynotes. Sometimes you bring a, you do that every keynote where you have somebody with a thing under the receipt to have them join you on a jump.

Kenyon Salo: Only if it naturally comes up in that moment. That's what it's supposed to be. So sometimes it's just, I say it, sometimes I do it, it just depends. So I've had about a half a dozen people from events decide to come to Colorado or do a skype with me, which it's magical to be able to help them check that off.

Aaron: Yeah, that's pretty cool. So will tell us this because uh, like I touched on earlier, one of the themes of your, of what you do when you're speaking is this thing that you call the bucket list life. Tell us what that's about and how it sort of evolved and became a thing for you.

Kenyon Salo: Yeah. The bucket list life is really what I've been living, but I didn't know it. And then once I started to dig into it and unpack it, it's what I realized that most people are doing anyways. Or the other side of it is if someone feels stuck and they're not doing one of these three things or they're not doing the three things in a continuum and there's no particular order that you have to do them in. But the way that I, I put them out there is irst create more experiences. Second, share more stories and third, live more fulfilled by helping others. When we do those three things, again, not in any particular order, but when we're consistently doing those three things, we feel the most APP happy. We feel the most alive. We feel like we're doing or being what we're supposed to be on the planet and that's, that's the brilliance in and around it. So yeah, I would love to share those three concepts with you. Oh

Aaron: yeah, yeah. Let's, let's talk to him as far as I love to make this relevant for, for you all that are listening right now. I'd love to make this relevant if we start with create more experiences because look, it's 2018. Everybody's hyper. Uh, I want to say hyper busy, but really most people are hyper distracted whether they're building a business or they're, they're running the kids to and from school when they got to get to work and then they got to get to or they got to get to work and work on the side business on top of that. So there's all these things that get us caught up. So, you know, you bring up this point of creating more experiences and a lot of people will immediately push back and say, well, you know, I don't have time to create more experiences. How can I build that into my everyday life? What is your answer the damn, because I think we can. We can sort of try to simplify what it means to create more experiences, but what does that mean to you when you share it with, because obviously you're sharing these speech, the speech with ceos and executives and salespeople. I'm corporate functions so you're not speaking to other adventurous all the time when you're sharing this, so how do you connect it and make it relevant to the people that you're speaking to, including our audience today?

Kenyon Salo: Well, absolutely. I believe that every one of us has a desire to create more experiences. Now creating more experiences is about self. It's about what I want to do, what do I want to see, what do I want to experience? Which is totally cool because we have to fill up our own cup, know in order to give to others, so when we want to create experiences, if we think back to times at any time we created a new experience, whether it's a new movie that we saw, we tried a new restaurant or we said, hey, let's try river rafting or jumping out of a plane. It doesn't matter what the experience is, it is, it doesn't have to be, uh, an extreme experience. It just has to be something new and that something new like say, Hey, I want to learn a new language before I traveled to Spain.

Kenyon Salo: And so you, you're, you, you learned Spanish and you say, okay, that's great. The thing is, new experiences challenged us. New experiences help us grow. They make us feel alive. Why? Well, there are a little scary. And that's when you say, Hey, we're hyper busy. Well that's really a hyper excuse. It's like, oh, I don't have time to do that open. I'm going to binge watch this on Netflix. Like you could have said yes to that experience and gone and done it. You are looking for irs at you that just people that are saying no to stuff because their fears come up for them.

Aaron: Sure, sure. Yeah. That's a, that's a, that is so true. And it's one of the things that, you know, and I brought that point up about being so busy because it's one of the common excuses I get when I'm coaching or if I'm speaking with people and you know, we're bringing up the concept of, of just living more and living authentically and immediately the excuses come up about time. But, uh, I think it was, I'm sure more than one person said this, but we all have, we all make time. We all have time for what were the things we must...