The mere thought of standing up to speak in front of a room packed with strangers would cause most people to be highly nervous and looking for the exit. But Glenn Capelli is not like most people. Glenn is a globetrotting professional speaker with a long career that’s seen him travel to 33 countries to do presentations in more than 170 cities and towns.
Born in Kalgoorlie (and now living in southern WA) Glenn has often described his younger self as “a hobo who backpacked around the world”, as he spent many years working overseas in jobs ranging from being a counsellor in American summer camps to teaching in a Kibbutz.
When I met up with Glenn recently our conversation was long and full of learning and included Glenn’s observation that today’s world places too much emphasis on “big dreams and end goals”.
“You often hear people tell kids they can be anything they want to be. Well, that’s not necessarily true,” says Glenn.
“It’s good to have a Starlight thing – a big goal – but at the same time, you’ve got to have your Sunlight things which are the ‘What are you going to do today?’ things. Your goal might be to be able to run 10kms. Well, the first step is to go for a walk this morning and not just sit around thinking about it.”
Glenn is also a proponent of Kaizen; a Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement and a useful tool for staying motivated.
“It’s important to acknowledge and celebrate each tiny improvement. Notice the steps of progress and notice what’s involved in each step and how each one feels. If you set a goal that’s really specific it can set you up for failure unless you’re a madly driven kind of person. If your focus is just one thing it doesn’t leave any room for what’s happening along the sidelines. What often emerges is not the achievement of the specific goal but instead something that happens along the way.”
Glenn is a good case in point as he says he didn’t leave school thinking he’d become a speaker on stage.
“I’d often found myself in an educator’s role and I loved it. Professional speaking never existed when I left school but I went and did things like travelling and finding work in different ways and found myself drawn to similar situations. When the industry of public speaking started to emerge my potential career emerged at the same time. So it wasn’t being driven towards something, it was an emergence of something as I’d always wanted to teach and I wanted to learn and they’ve got to be hand in hand.”
When Glenn started running courses on mind powers he was quickly recognised as a talented and insightful presenter. He was also awarded a Sir Winston Churchill Study Fellowship which enabled him to gain an entree into America’s billion dollar professional speaking industry.
“Things just took off from there which led to me writing and presenting a five-part series for an American cable TV channel that was aired to an audience of 26 million viewers.”
Glenn was now considered an expert in dynamic thinking, creativity and leadership and after several years in the US he finally returned to Australia opting to base himself on the East Coast rather than his home state of WA. But as a highly sought after speaker he was always on the move and with the constant travelling between countless time zones and the hundreds of hours in the air Glenn reckons he’d been “jet lagged for more than 20 years”.
Having now swapped city life for a calmer life in the country Glenn has scaled back his long-distance travelling. But, as a man who’s seldom idle, he’s continued to add to his collection of 50-plus songs with motivational messages he’s written. He’s also published a book entitled Thinking Caps which is described as “an imaginative, inspiring, nostalgic and humorous look at life”.
And humour is an important part of Glenn’s messages on life as he says there has to be an underlying element of fun when considering goals, motivation and the big picture of your life.
“If you’ve got the fun aspect, you bring in flow wherever you go.”
For copies of Glenn’s book Thinking Caps contact him at info@glenncapelli.com
