Written by Hale Yildiz.
Metathesiophobia (noun)
- The persistent, abnormal, and unwarranted fear of change.
- That feeling advisers get when exposed to a speech by Baz.
In the 45 or so public speaking engagements Baz has delivered from May to September 2012, he cites ‘the fear of change’ radiating out of the eyes of advisers as the most persistent resistance to his content and the ideas he introduces. This fear of change, he adds, enters the scene every time he confronts his audience with a menacing new vision of how the business of advice can be done differently.
Indeed, Baz spent his last four months in and out of public speaking events, keynotes and workshop sessions; country-hopping from all over Australia to Beijing, Bangkok and Singapore, all the while working to create a momentum that hasn’t existed before in the advice community. Assuming we can all agree on the amount of work and outside-the-box thinking that goes into breaking old habits, Baz has been quite busy lately (note the slight tinge of understatement).
So, what has he achieved so far?
Baz defines his success on qualitative terms. Namely, success is a scale of reaction in a room full of advisers ranging from a hint of recognition to total mind-blown. Any such response and Baz is delightfully inspired to take another around-the-world trip.
But for him, public speaking is not just about feeding content to the inspiration-hungry adviser and presenting mind-boggling digital media strategies to the tech-savvy. Baz’s real achievement (and ultimate challenge) is in communicating a fundamental message to advisers: It’s not technological, it’s “social”.
Through the looking glass, the ethos of Baz’s innumerable public speeches is about relationship-building, social linkage and the value of personal connection. The paradigm-shifting change that Baz is working to convey is not Social Media proliferation but the profound impact of human relations in increasing business leverage.
Baz is spreading the word.
The word is Social Advice and it’s travelling the world.