Its A Kind Of Magic!

Hello! I’m Ricky and I am delighted to announce I am joining the Confident Club as their new CEO! Woohoo! (Chief Encouraging Officer, that is!)

In light of this awesome announcement, I wanted to share a little bit about myself so you can get to know the man behind the glasses! (Not Steve, the other one!)

“I want to help UNLOCK the best version of ourselves and live an extraordinary life, and this is
exactly what makes me excited to work with the Confident Club.”

If you haven’t met me before, I guess I should start by saying that I am a speaker, award-winning magician of The Magic Circle, and host of the Unlocked podcast. I’ve had an interesting adventure with an extensive background in Retail leadership, colleague development & training and over the last 15 years, I’ve been on the front line in one of the UK’s biggest retailers; performing, serving and studying how to UNLOCK the best version of myself, my team and now through my own business, I’m passionate about helping others achieve extraordinary results!

However, if you would have asked me as a child what I wanted to do when I grew up, I couldn’t actually tell you any of this! In fact, I actually left my sixth form college after 1 year of not knowing what to do with my life as I was more interested in earning money to save up for my 1996 P-reg Ford Fiesta! (Stylish, I know!) but it’s an interesting story for another time…

But my adventure into inspiring others & UNLOCKING the best version of ourselves started here. I left sixth form to continue my Saturday job working in one of the busiest UK high street shops, Argos. Over the years I worked my way up the corporate ladder undertaking roles such as team leader, Customer Service Manager, Stock Manager, Regional Development Coach, Store Manager and eventually a National Trainer for the whole of Argos.

(If you’re in the UK, you may have come across one of those shiny new digital Argos stores inside a Sainsbury’s store, if so, it was probably me or one of my team that led the team-building workshops for those stores!)

When I became a National Trainer, it was here that I really developed my passion to improve the confidence of the store teams to be the best version of themselves, create a high performing team culture & deliver a magical customer experience!

Now, you may be thinking where does all the magic come in? Well, the thing I didn’t tell you was that, during this career, I was secretly performing magic and building my business in the staffrooms, team briefings & at team meetings.

My ethos was If I performed magic for my team, they would like me, we’d get on well and everything would be awesome! (In hindsight, this wasn’t a great idea and when I went back to my original store 10 years later as a store manager, I invited a colleague into my office for a chat. They thought they were going to be introduced to a wonderful magic trick, but I was
actually about to hand them their P45!!!!) Oh hindsight, what a wonderful gift you are!

“One of the saddest things in life is to get to the end and look back in regret, knowing that you could have been, done, and had so much more.” Robin Sharma

Anyway, a long story short, I eventually left ARGOS to pursue my dreams of being a full-time professional magician, speaker & trainer and created a fantastic business performing and presenting at weddings and events all across the UK. Later in my business, to fuel my passion of personal improvement, I created a podcast called UNLOCKED to share my adventures. I’m a huge fan of personal development and the reason I created the podcast was partly inspired by the wonderful quote by Robin Sharma, “One of the saddest things in life is to get to the end and
look back in regret, knowing that you could have been, done, and had so much more.” And so through the podcast, my magic, speaking or training, I want to help others UNLOCK the best version of themselves and live an extraordinary life!

This leads us to the Confident Club…

I’ve been a massive fan and follower of Steve’s work, and in fact, I even use to use his 4-minute rule in all of my sessions to teach colleagues to create great first impressions. So it was only inevitable that I invited Steve to be a guest on the podcast to discuss the 4-minute rule and his book,” How to be complete and utter f**k up, 47 ½ steps to lasting underachievement.” It was a fantastic episode (You can listen to it HERE) and we got on like a house on fire! We kept in touch and I immediately connected with both his & Curly’s values and what they were doing at the Confident Club.

“Professional speakers unlock their secrets on presentation mastery”

In line with my mission to UNLOCK the best version of ourselves, Steve & Curly are also passionate about unlocking the secrets to presentation mastery. And after attending one of the Presentation Mastery workshops in 2021, I could see what all the fuss was about… this is life-changing stuff and I wanted to be a part of this!

The rest as they say is history, but now our beautiful adventure together begins…

The rest is yet to unfold, but I am really excited for you to see what’s in store and I am absolutely honoured to join the Confident Club to help unlock the secrets to presentation mastery, If you are still reading this, I can’t wait to meet you in person at one of the next sessions and UNLOCK the best version of you in your presentations!

Magical wishes, Ricky!

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