Episode Transcript
Alara Sage (00:02.029)
Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of Wealth Embodied, where we activate and inspire you in your wealth conscious, your creative genius, and your visionary impact. I'm your host, Alara Sage. And today we have a wonderful conversation. If you guys have been listening, you know I love to talk about ancient wisdom. And it's always one of those places, how do we bring these beautiful teachings into modern society? How do we bring them into our businesses and really create higher levels of consciousness and success?
Today we're here to talk with a wonderful guest, Mike Hancock, who has all kinds of accolades and ways to describe him. And I'm going to do just a tiny little bit here and Mike, by all means, add to it if you feel called. He is the recipient of more than a dozen business awards, including the APAC Conscious Leadership Award, the GSF President Award, and four-time Speaker of the Year with multiple awards for business.
person of the year. Welcome, Mike.
Mike Handcock (01:03.773)
Hi Alara, how are you?
Alara Sage (01:06.69)
I'm doing wonderful. I'm really excited to hear your perspective on this topic.
Mike Handcock (01:11.251)
Great. Where do you want to start? I'd love to hear what ancient wisdom means to you.
Alara Sage (01:18.296)
To me, it's really our inner knowing, you know, that really spans lifetimes, generations. It's ultimately consciousness, right? It's ultimately fundamental truth, which is beautifully simplistic and simultaneously deep and profound. How do you define it?
Mike Handcock (01:36.901)
not so different than you. I love your, your take by delving into things like DNA memory, past lifetimes and, that to regress back to the simplest truce. But I think, human beings lived very simple lives in ancient times. And I'm talking about what most college professors would call prehistory. And because of that, I think we, there's a lot we can learn and apply in our current days to help us.
grow, develop and manage the modern world.
Alara Sage (02:09.134)
Beautiful. So I would love to start off with understanding where did you come into ancient wisdom teachings? Where did you really come into conscious leadership?
Mike Handcock (02:20.329)
Probably started with a book I read when I was 18 years old called The Edge of Reality by an Australian author called Dawn Hill. And that led into part of what happens after death and things like that. My first trip to Machu Picchu was in 1995. I've been to Egypt more than 10 times. We owned a company called Soul Journeys, which...
led trips to 26 spiritual destinations around the world as part of our business, luckily sold it in 2019, which was a blessing. And I think it's just always been a deep interest of mine. I've met with everybody from the head of the Hare Krishnas to various shaman in different countries, to spiritual leaders all over the world, really. Sangormas in Africa, American Indian chiefs and medicine men in the US, and the list goes on.
Alara Sage (03:15.0)
Beautiful. You've definitely been around the world several times. I love all of your different connections to different cultures. And I would imagine that, and let me ask you, have you found that there is a thread of that wisdom that goes through all of those cultures?
Mike Handcock (03:31.965)
definitely. And I think the thing is that everybody is seeking love. Everybody is seeking belonging and everybody is seeking seeking a degree of prosperity. In other words, being able to live a comfortable life. And for that, many people are also seeking wisdom as well. So it's it's very much it's almost biblical. Now, the Bible is just one of the books that I've studied, but there's almost like
We're almost at the time of the rapture where there's people who are going to be more enlightened. Let's just call them that. And then there's people who are going to be still stuck in the dark, dim old ages. And I think part of my role is to try and help people seek their own enlightenment.
Alara Sage (04:16.62)
I love that. So was this something that you always brought into business? I'm not quite sure. Were you a entrepreneur? Were you into business before you started becoming conscious and then you started implementing it? How did that all come together?
Mike Handcock (04:29.257)
Um, in my twenties, I was a professional musician, so I was in a, in a touring band. And so that was great. I went into financial services from there and ended up being general manager, sales and marketing of New Zealand's largest financial services company with about four and a half thousand people underneath me that were in sales. And then I became an entrepreneur in 2002. And I'd say ever since I took ownership of my life.
It's been very close to me, not so much in the corporate world because that was difficult. I didn't know how to do it. I would these days, but, but, um, but definitely for the last 23 years as it's been, it's, it's been sitting. walk with one foot in the material world and one foot in the spiritual world. And that's how I keep balance.
Alara Sage (05:14.382)
Thank
Yes, I love that so much. I'm very similar. So let's dive into the topic of how do these ancient wisdoms solve most of our problems and particularly, you know, we'll focus on business issues or wealth issues.
Mike Handcock (05:31.593)
Okay, well, think firstly, if we look at business, know, Pythagoras in two and a half thousand years ago, basically said there is music in the stars and with the humming of the strings. And what he was alluding to at that time is alluding to that the planets have various frequency science since has proved that and what, you know, the earth gives off a frequency of I think it's 7.52 Hertz. We can't heal.
here at an elephant nearly can. And essentially what he was saying was that things happen in a certain cycle. Now in your country in the late 18th century, 19th century, late 19th century, a guy called John Dewey started investigating Pythagoras' works and started applying them to business. Most people think Pythagoras was a mathematician. That's what he was second. He was actually a philosopher and a musician first.
And so what Dewey and John Dewey is there's now a university named after him in the States. But what John Dewey found out is he found the business operates in cycles. the 19 late 1970s, a man from New Zealand called Ray Toomes found took Dewey's models and Pythagoras's model and applied them looking at the financial markets and realized that the financial markets basically follow a musical scale. Fascinating, right?
Alara Sage (06:59.052)
Wow.
Mike Handcock (06:59.547)
So when major scales, minor scales, augmented sevenths, you name it, it's all in there. I can't go into all the technology, but I'll tell you how it applies in business. So there are eight notes in a musical scale, do, re, mi, fa, so, la, do. We all learned that at school. And those eight notes in business, and this comes really from two and a half thousand years ago, is the first thing you need to work on is an idea. The second thing is your brand. The third thing is your team.
The fourth thing is your partnerships. The fifth thing is building equity in what you have. The sixth thing is acquisition of something or someone. The seventh thing is managing cashflow. And the eighth thing is system. They're the eight notes, if you like, in the musical scale of business. And the way I like to teach that, if I'm sharing that with a group of people, and it's easy for people to look at now, is if I picked up your cell phone, firstly,
Providing you haven't got face recognition. Okay, that's not gonna work because I'm not you. So then you go, okay, Mike, guess my pin code to open my phone. And I can punch in all sorts of numbers and I'm never gonna get your pin code, but I can see every number. If you ask me, what's the numbers that are on the screen? I just go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero. So the problem in business is not that we don't know what to do. The problem is the sequence in which we do it.
Alara Sage (08:21.71)
Hmm.
Mike Handcock (08:24.681)
And the difference in my studies over the last probably 17 years, the difference between people who know most of them intuitively, but a lot of them do know this and the people who don't know is often huge success, millions of dollars, a comfortable life and struggling, working for the man, you know, doing a hundred hours a week and you might as well go back and get a job as a business person. So it's that sort of simple stuff.
that once you start researching these things that comes out and that's one for business, is around wealth creation. Here's another one around wealth creation, just simply is that if you look at wealth, all the words in English that come, that are around wealth come from water, the element water. We have cash, flow, we have currency, we go into liquidation, we go to the bank to get money, okay?
Alara Sage (09:13.71)
Hmm.
Mike Handcock (09:22.739)
They're all water words. So quite frankly, if you want to become more wealthy, you need to study water. And if you study the flow of water, you'll realize that most of us make an incredible mistake. And that is that we try and damn and hold onto our wealth and there's nothing we do with it. Whereas, you know, damn stagnate. The idea is to let money flow and to go into the middle of the river, often where it can be a bit bumpy, but that's where you get the best ride.
Alara Sage (09:31.022)
Hmm.
Mike Handcock (09:51.909)
And that's where you go the furthest. And so it's simple stuff like that that we learn from the ancients.
Alara Sage (09:52.026)
You
Alara Sage (10:00.224)
I absolutely love the correlation to the water and because I've thought of currency and energy. I've never thought of it as water and that's definitely profound. And I have definitely thought of holding on to money, not allowing that flow, creating that stagnation and how water does that as well. I really love what you said at the end of like being right in the middle of the river where yes, there might be more turbulence, but also that's where the fun is as well. I want to go back to what you said about the eight points. When you named those off, was that the sequence that you were referring to?
Mike Handcock (10:28.723)
Yes, was. Idea Brand Team Partnerships Equity Acquisition Cash Flow System.
Alara Sage (10:35.766)
And so are people sometimes when you're saying they're not understanding it intuitively or they don't have this information, are they jumping steps or are they miss is really the issue that they're bringing all of those steps into the wrong sequence? Is that what you generally find?
Mike Handcock (10:49.523)
Well, having worked with like literally hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs, I can tell you that there's one mistake that's very obvious a lot of the time. And that is that people move into spending all this money on brand or employing a great team or running out and trying to get strategic partnerships before their ideas even developed. And that doesn't work. So I'm not saying the idea has to be operative.
I mean, WhatsApp's a great example of a phenomenal idea that was well thought through. Then a great brand, WhatsApp, right? And then moving from there to a killer team. And then from there to sensational partners and then sold to, was it Facebook for $18 billion before they'd even made one cent in revenue. So that's actually using the model. So, but I think for many people listening to us today,
Alara Sage (11:37.198)
Mmm.
Mike Handcock (11:45.437)
The fundamental mistake is we move to one of the other eight things before we settle and nail the thing before it. And business happens in a series of spirals to Alara. So, you know, if you're a startup, you go through one level of eight. If you're Apple, you're in the last, the seventh level of eight. So, you know, my business is in the fourth generation of levels here and we're at the partner's level now in that generation. So,
So that's where we are, but no, it's up to everybody to decide where they are.
Alara Sage (12:19.992)
I love the spiral because that's also how consciousness evolves as well. And so when we understand that and that everything evolves in a spiral, we can also understand why we have to come back to things and revisit them, right? With more awareness, more understanding what you're saying is like further on in our business, right? We revisit these aspects of our business to gain more clarity and take ourselves to the next level. Is that what you're saying?
Mike Handcock (12:46.651)
Absolutely. And if you look at even at artists like Madonna or Lady Gaga, how many times have they redone their brand over their years? Right. So they've gone through those spirals and you can where we see it is with their brand. But, you know, even the type of music, the eye, the basis of the idea is different now. And you can look at you can look at that with many artists and see the basis of what they do is different.
but they've strengthened their brand. And look at movie stars, the type of movies that they're in. Brad Pitt, for instance, goes from Thelma and Louise to the sort of more deeper and heavier stuff that he's doing now. So it's that style of thing that we are all going through in our life as we grow and develop.
Alara Sage (13:31.222)
So important because one thing that is always happening is the change, right? Just like the water, if we're allowing the flow, which is where the wealth wants to naturally move, it's going to be constantly flowing and changing and evolving. Like the riverbed shifts over time. It doesn't stay in one place. And when we try to keep ourselves locked into our brand, you know, well, I've already created that and whatever it is, we're really just stifling our own expansion. have to be
Unafraid, know fear is part of it, but we have to be willing to be courageous and that continuous evolution because it is it is continuous, especially as I find as a personal brand or like I loved how you said the musicians, because they are personal brands in that extent. It is really them. We are personally evolving so rapidly and to allow that to continue to be expressed externally. It's really profound, but it's.
really, it's really a journey. mean, I'm speaking to my own journey right now. It's been a journey of my own evolution and my personal jazz. Yes.
Mike Handcock (14:31.817)
Absolutely, it's a journey.
And I think if you look at, like, if we take musicians for a moment, mean, you know, Mick Jagger used to be a rebel. mean, Paul McCartney was a rebel, but these days these are very wise people. And, you know, I listen to, I listen to, I'm a musician. So I listened to a lot of music podcasts and things like that. And I listened to these people that when I was young and I'm a guitar player, so I follow a lot of guitarists and I go like,
Well, Steve Vai would be a good example. Steve Vai, when I was young, was, you know, like the greatest shredding guitarist on the planet. And he was angry and, you know, all of that sort of stuff. And about six or seven years ago, here he is in my friend's spiritual movie, talking about his spiritual life and being a sage. And you go like, hang on, boy, have you changed? And I never knew you were that. Right.
So everybody's going through it and some, it's good that we do go through it because or else we're gonna have to come back and repeat this life all over again because we didn't know what it was about.
Alara Sage (15:39.118)
That's exactly what will happen. So tell me, what is lighting you up right now? Like when you're working with people, who are you working with and what is really lighting you up about supporting them and helping them?
Mike Handcock (15:50.761)
We always work with conscious entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurs coaches consultants and speakers for the main point and their people who for Making a difference is as important as making a profit so, know, we've We've literally helped thousands of them, but I just get I get so buzzed when I see them, you know we've got a client of ours who came to me with a what he said all these friends said was a stupid idea ten years ago and
This year it's listing on the New York Stock Exchange and it's a green technology that's really helping the planet. And so it's that sort of thing that gives me a buzz. But by the same token, in July this year will be in the US, because I don't live in the US, be in the US running a tour called America Before Columbus, which is delving into the people who are in the US, the Phoenicians, the Minoans, the Romans and the Templar Knights.
based out of New England. So I'm really looking forward to the group there. I'm working with an 18 times best-selling author on the subject. So that's going to be a lot of fun as well.
Alara Sage (16:57.944)
Wow, that's very different. You got to keep your life alive with the very variety, right? The variety of the spice of life. I love that. So if there was one more thing you could say on ancient wisdom and really bring it in perhaps to something tangible that somebody can apply to their business right now, what would be that advice?
Mike Handcock (17:00.167)
Yeah, two ends of the spectrum,
Mike Handcock (17:10.213)
Absolutely.
Mike Handcock (17:25.073)
Okay, well, I think the quality of your life comes down to the quality of your questions. All right, so let's have a look at where questions came from. So in 3114 BC in China, the Emperor Fu He commissioned a book. And back then, you know, they didn't have chat GPT, so they actually had to go out and study things. He believes that...
the world as he knew it, which was China at that stage, was a microcosm of the macrocosm. So he sent scholars and scholar literally means observer, whereas academic literally means pursuer of trivia. Interesting. And he sent his scholars out to observe the natural world and they created a book which these days we know as the I Ching. It definitely survived several book burnings. A guy called Richard Wilhelm brought it to the West.
and in the 1920s and Carl Jung was a big fan of the I Ching. Now the I Ching, getting to your question because that's the background so everybody can understand it, talks about the five elements and the five Chinese elements are water, wood, fire, earth and metal. So each of those five elements relates to a question. Water is the why question.
Wood is the what question. Fire is the who question. Think about the warmth of fire in relationships. Earth is the when question and metal is the how question. Now, most of us got taught at school to ask the how question. And I get asked all the time, how do I make more money? How do I get a better quality staff? How do I get a better life? How do I get a better spouse? Whatever the questions are,
It's very interesting that that cycle of water, wood, fire, earth and metal, or why, what, who, when and how also that's called a constructive cycle. There's also a destructive cycle. How is a very destructive question. You notice it's the only question there that doesn't start with W that's cause it was a manufactured question sometime afterwards to sort of dumb us down as a human race, which we can go into at some other stage. But if you look at that, that's the metal question.
Mike Handcock (19:48.955)
Now this is such brilliant ancient wisdom out of water, wood, fire and earth, which one of those can annihilate metal pretty easy? I'll answer it for you. Fire. So fire is the who question. So here's the answer for your entrepreneurs. You never need to know how, if you know who, because who always knows how. So whether that's a mentor, I was just, I was just listening to a podcast on AI.
Alara Sage (20:12.098)
Hmm.
Mike Handcock (20:18.579)
And there's a brilliant woman based in New York, just voted in Forbes 30 under 30s on AI, who keeps it really simple. going like, I'm immediately connecting with her on LinkedIn, because if I ever need to do really technical stuff with AI, I'm going to ask her. Because that's what we need to know these days, is we need to know how to hack the system, how to shortcut things. So we're asking ourselves too many how questions.
Here's the interesting thing is if you look at a child and this is how I can prove this whole thing is the truth. Any of you that are parents that are listening to this, what's the one question your under seven year old child asks you? Why mommy, why, right? Why? It's the water question. That's because they came from water and for the first seven years of their life, they're in water. The next step and they're in what? So, you know, what am I gonna do?
Alara Sage (21:01.707)
you
Mike Handcock (21:13.385)
You know, go and play, but what am I gonna do? Then the next seven years from 14 to 21, it's who? It's all about who am I gonna hang out with, right? Then the next seven years, it's all about when? When am I gonna get the job? When am I gonna get the spouse, et cetera, et cetera? And then the seven years from 28 to 35 is all about how? How am I gonna pay off my mortgage? How am I gonna raise my kids? How am I gonna, you know, hold it all together? And then the cycle starts all over again.
That's why between 35 and 42, you call it a midlife crisis because people go back to the why I did. That's when I left corporate. Why am I doing a stupid job that I don't even really like? Right. You know, why am I living in this town where everybody is, you know, talking down to me or whatever thing that's going on for you as a listener? That's that's your midlife crisis. It's not absolute these things, but that's in the zone of where it's at. So I hope that's helpful. Ask quality questions. You'll get quality answers.
Forget about the how question.
Alara Sage (22:11.382)
I always teach the same thing very differently. teach to connect to higher self and receive that inner guidance, that inner knowing. But I completely agree with you simultaneously in the obsession, quite frankly, with the how. And it can be blinding. You can really be really disconnected to like what you said, these deeper connections of who and what rather than just really focused on the how. And it really can dampen our
Mike Handcock (22:27.347)
Absolutely.
Alara Sage (22:41.354)
expansion. And also, I really find that it really takes away from the quality of the moment because it's very mental. It's very analytical. You want to solve the problem, right? You want to get it right. You want to figure it out rather than being much more in the heart in a place that is available to your own inner wisdom and that consciousness coming through. So I really, really love that.
Mike Handcock (22:52.606)
Yeah.
Mike Handcock (23:03.953)
Your divine being will give you the right question, as you say.
Alara Sage (23:07.978)
Yeah, it's always right there, literally. So wonderful. So how can people find you, Mike?
Mike Handcock (23:11.302)
Absolutely.
Mike Handcock (23:16.755)
All right. The best way if people want to find me is go to our website, which is www.circleofexcellence.biz. Otherwise they can go and find me on LinkedIn and connect there. Mike Hancock, H-A-N-D-C-O-C-K. There's not too many of us, so they'll find me there for sure. And thanks so much for the great work that you're doing and asking really good questions. And I really like the format of your podcast and
the target that you're trying to hit with it. Well done.
Alara Sage (23:49.71)
Thank you. really appreciate that. I'm surprised there's not a lot of Mike Hancock's. I would think that there would be, but I'm glad to hear that there's not. It's mainly just you. So I'll have those links below. you know, I definitely recommend that you reach out to Mike because obviously he's been around the world. He's had a lot of personal experience, both in the ancient wisdom and in business and really has learned quite beautifully.
Mike Handcock (23:58.121)
Not too many with the D, yeah.
Alara Sage (24:19.702)
And musically, might I say, of how those two can be one, how they don't need to be separate. And learn how you can bring your business into greater expansion, greater movement, greater mission, greater purpose with these teachings of ancient wisdom. As always, I love you so much. Thank you for being a part of the show. Until next time.
