Interview with Tim Francis about how he eventually developed his confidence, his road to success and how got to where he is now in terms of his amount of confidence.
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Tim Francis Drummer In Rock Band Interview
Antonio: Hey guys! Antonio from Real Men Real Style here, and I've got a guest for you, Tim Francis of Tim Francis Marketing, correct?
Tim: You got it, TimFrancisMarketing.com.
Antonio: How did you come up with that name?
Tim: It's incredibly, incredibly creative. It's my first name and my last name and what I do. Can you believe it?
Antonio: I can believe it. Now, Tim has a great story. He's from Canada, another Canadian, and Alberta, is that correct?
Tim: That's right, capital city, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Antonio: All right, and Tim is a former hockey player, correct?
Tim: Yep, and I also played varsity volleyball. I played college volleyball.
Antonio: And now you're running — oh, the best part, Tim is a drummer. You love the drums, right? You are a drummer?
Tim: I am a drummer. You got it.
Antonio: But now he's into marketing. I met Tim here in Arizona at InfusionCon and had a great conversation. This guy is really smart, so if you have any marketing questions, you reach out to this guy, go check out his website, and I can tell you, I'm definitely going to be following up with this guy.
What I wanted to bring Tim and have him talk to you all about, I wanted him to tell you a little bit about a story, a little bit of information about how as a tall, thinner gentleman he dresses sharp because Tim is one of those guys who, when I saw him, I remembered his hair.
I remembered also this guy is taller than me, he's got a thin profile, but yet he's walking around with a lot of confidence. Every time I see this guy, he's always talking to the ladies. He has no fear. He is not afraid to just go up to beautiful women anywhere and just start talking to them, which many of you guys I know are petrified of that.
Other guys out there are smiling because they want me to give away the secret. That's the secret, guys. You just have to have the confidence to start talking with them even if you don't know what you're saying. Just start talking to them.
So Tim, how did you get this conference? Where did it come from?
Tim: It's an interesting path. I don't know how much I want to reveal. My mom may see this someday.
There's actually a day I remember in high school when I — it's almost one of those moments where you catch a reflection of yourself in a window or a mirror or something and I just kind of noticed that I was slumping.
Immediately, I thought to myself, “Pull those shoulders back,” and it felt a little bit uncomfortable in the beginning because life is habits. We adapt whether that's what time you get up in the morning or how you spend your money, the friends you keep, or even how you keep your posture.
Antonio: Okay, hold on, life is habits. Great say.
Tim: Nice. And furthermore, it's amazing how much from gross to specific, specific to gross, or the outside to the inside, the inside to the outside, and it's amazing how if all you do is — just try this out for fun. You don't have to keep it. You don't have to keep doing it. Give it a shot.
Try just standing with a better posture and walking around with a better posture for like a day. Your muscles might feel a little bit sore a little bit because you're using muscles you're not used to using. Your trapezius, rhomboids, the whole posterior chain isn't used to being engaged like that, and just observe how you feel. And then from there as a secondary benefit, see how others react to you.
Antonio: Yeah. Military guys can relate to this because we are in a sense trained and taught to stand basically with our shoulders back, chest out. Think about that. Look at the animal kingdom. In a pride, the lion that's on top, he walks around. He doesn't sulk around. He basically walks through and you get out of his way.
When you put your chest out, when you put your shoulders back, you're basically making an announcement that yeah, you're the guy on top.
Now, Tim, you also grew up in an area playing hockey. You're wearing a pocket square. You're dressing a bit sharp. You own what you're doing with your hair. Now, as a hockey player, is this how you dressed as a young man?
Tim: Oh my goodness, no. My heart goes out to anybody who's kind of struggling. Maybe if you're in a situation where all the guys dress the same, that could be a corporate environment if a gentleman is into his career years, or if a guy's younger and he's in high school.
I know that when I played hockey in Canada, hockey in Canada is like football in the US. It is the sport.
Antonio: Except you're on ice.
Tim: There are a few differences in the way the game is played. That's right. I can always count on you for jokes like that.
It's like there's this code. In hockey, you're either sulking around in your flip-flops and your big baggy clothes or whatever. You've got short hair and nobody wears earrings. It's like this code, right?
Antonio: So you've got a pocket square, you've got earrings, and you've got long hair. So for most hockey guys, if you started dressing like this, you feel that your friends would come up and say, “What's going on here?” and slap you on the back of the head.
Tim: Yeah. Well, they'd be like, “Oh hey, Francis, nice earrings,” insert slur, do you know what I mean?
Antonio: Yeah.
Tim: It rhymes with rag.
Antonio: Yeah, I understand. It's something in which because you're standing out, but think about it, guys. You've got to have a little bit of courage to stand out. Many of us don't want to start dressing sharp simply because we're afraid of what others are going to think.
I'm sorry, but I'm here to tell you that if you want to be great, if you want to do great things in this life, you've got to be a leader and you've got to stand out. You've got to be yourself.
Let's talk about what happened. You had somebody tell you something that really changed the way you dress.
Tim: Yeah. I'll share that story because your last point was such a good one. I'll share something and I'm really speaking to guys that might be on the younger side.
When I was in Grade 9, that was a really tough year for me. I felt I got picked on a lot. There was one guy in particular that he was kind of a little bit of a leader of the clan, one of the cool guys. I was never really on the inside. I was kind of on the periphery of trying to be cool, but so —
Antonio: I think most of us were there.
Tim: Okay. I'm not alone. It felt that way. There's one particular guy I also aspired and he was always talking to girls. The girls are talking about him and I just felt like this guy is the guy that I would love to be if I could pick any person in my junior high, my Grade 9, what you guys call middle school or something.
So recently, I started working out at CrossFit Lazarus. You interviewed Pete here.
Antonio: Yeah.
Tim: He owns the gym. I'm 30, okay? So for 30 years, my family has called me “Slim Tim” and I've always had this persona in my brain of who I am and what category I fit into, and I've always been the skinny guy who's kind of weak and all the rest.
Well, I've spent two years working out at CrossFit Lazarus up in Edmonton, Canada. Here on this trip, we've gone through San Diego, LA, and now we're here, Pete and I. We were traveling together to different marketing conferences, and we happened to go to Muscle Beach on Venice Beach — Muscle Beach, the gym on Venice Beach in California, part of Los Angeles' greater area.
We're kind of joking around, so we took our shirts off and we take this picture of no shirts on. I'm very light, so I knew I'd get ragged on by certain people in my family and friends circle, that kind of thing, but I pulled off my shirt and somebody snaps a pic, they threw it up on Facebook and it's part of our travel pics.
I've gained 15 pounds of muscle. My body fat has been basically the same the last two years, but those extra 15 pounds, and the picture actually looks really nice. You can see definition on my shoulders. My shoulders are way bigger, definition on my arms. You can see the line between the pecs —
Antonio: Guys, I'm not going to be posting half-naked pictures of Tim and Pete on this, but I definitely see your point. It's one of those things that we get stuck and we're limited by our mindset of what we can be and who we can become. And in two years, you're able to transform your body, not a quick fix. It was a lifestyle change and you added some mass, and you're probably a lot more confident.
Tim: And you know who commented on that picture on Facebook? That guy from Grade 9.
Antonio: Really?
Tim: I have not talked to him. The guy that I wanted to be the guy that was the icon of who I'd love to be in Grade 9, and he was the king and all the rest, he comments on Facebook and he says, “Wow, man! You're looking super jacked. Way to go!” and I'm just thinking like, “Are you kidding me?” Crazy!
So the other story that I shared with you earlier that you'd like me to share, and this is a little bit more of a quick fix story, I got this feedback from somebody. So I was in a rock band; we toured. I was a professional drummer for a few years. It was really a cool experience. It gave me an excuse to try on wild clothes and to even be a new person just like in a heartbeat.
Antonio: Yeah, I can imagine.
Tim: Yeah. They don't know what I do by day, but by night, if I'm in some strange city or town or whatever, all of a sudden, I can be anybody I want to be. Now, I'm going to give you a shortcut here that instead of taking 11 years to learn how to play drums, to be good enough, to be able to tour and do all that kind of things, just take my story and stand on my shoulders so you don't have to go through the long process.
I got some feedback that even though I was in this band and everything that I look like a college kid. It's like, “Are you really going to take it serious?” If you think of Tommy Lee, the drummer from Motley Crue, one of the most iconic drummers not just because of his playing, but his lifestyle and LA and Pamela Anderson, the whole thing, right? I might be dating myself to some of those years, but he is not a college kid. You make no mistake. This is Tommy Lee, right?
Imagine if he's sitting behind the drums and he's wearing a Hollister T-shirt and Old Navy shorts and he's got a lame — it's just like that is not at all rock and roll. That's a college kid look. Somebody told me that that's how I came off and it really hit me.
And so, I kind of took a step back and I started thinking, “Okay. What are the drummers who I am aspiring to have the same effect?”
Antonio: So what were the things that you did exactly to, in a sense, peacock? There was the guy, “The Game”, Neil Strauss, who talks about something like that, but there were certain things that you did and you went out and bought, and they changed your style and the way people perceived you.
Tim: Absolutely. And the further I went, the more reaction I got. The first thing I did was instead of wearing always a polo, a Lacoste polo on its own or stuff with no collar, I threw a collar on, like getting a button-up shirt with a collar and that immediately took things up at the next level, or —
Antonio: Have you guys ever heard me talk about this, a button-up shirt with a collar? Go back. I have probably 200 videos on them.
Tim: I didn't even know you had that many videos on the collar.
Antonio: I probably do.
Tim: Okay. Well, then —
Antonio: Or at least I'm wearing one. So you've got the collared shirt, pretty simple.