Ron Lee

“Our greatest voids determine our greatest values.”

The Corporate Ninja – aka Ron Lee – adopted this line as his way of finding his personal power and life purpose.

Aged five, “I left a supportive home environment and attended school at the height of the White Australia Policy. As soon as I arrived I was bullied, tormented and victimised. Name-calling was a daily event, I was always in fights and I was only a little kid.”

The White Australia Policy was part of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 which gave British migrants preference over all others. Despite being born in Australia to Australian-born parents, the effects of the policy were widespread, particularly for Chinese immigrants.

One of the clauses of this Act stated, “The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman.” That policy was in place until the implementation of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975. Seventy-four years of constitutional racism was entrenched in Australian society.

For Ron, “from the inside looking out I was Australian, but from the outside I look Chinese. Because of my appearance, at school I was looked down upon from all angles, including some of the teachers.

“I had no idea about self-protection or being in my own individuality and personal power, and it was that way for many years. For much of that time I felt entirely powerless.”

Given the quote above that our greatest voids determine our greatest values, Ron knew “my void was personal power and so therefore my value was personal power. All of the philosophers I’ve read stated that our purpose in life is to leverage our talents, abilities, knowledge, experience and passion to serve as many people as possible.”

“One universal law states that for every disadvantage there’s a benefit. For every perception of a negative, there’s an equivalent perception of a positive, and they’re all perceptions and illusions anyway.”

Ron has turned his experiences around and for twenty nine years the benefit has been that he teaches clients how to tap into their personal power. He’s been so successful he’s been inducted into an elite group of Certified Speaking Professionals.

Ron was awarded the CSP designation in 2000 and, “at the time it represented the top seven percent of professional speakers in the world, but so what? It means nothing to my clients, who are only interested in the results I can deliver for them.”

As much as Ron plays it down, the CSP designation is global recognition for his impact in the industry and his unique style of presenting. Ron uses Eastern and Western Philosophies, Metaphysics, Martial Arts, Universal Laws and the Performing Arts.

The basic focus of what Ron does “is about the power of the individual, so if the individual is internally strong the organisation will be strong. The objective of the leader is to provide inspiration as opposed to being a manager. If the leaders are inspired they can lead and inspire teams.”

Ron’s experience as a five year old being bullied and tormented became the beginning of his journey. It led him to study acting and then eight different forms of martial arts. Ron trained at NIDA, the same drama school as Cate Blanchett, Luke Hemsworth and Mel Gibson. He utilises all of his skills in teaching personal power and inner strength. “Internal power is far stronger than physical strength”, he declares..

To highlight just how much stronger inner strength can be, Ron recounts the story about an internal martial arts conference where he matched the smallest woman in the room against the biggest male.

He describes it as “the woman would have been about forty two kilos and the man was at least three-times her weight. I asked the woman to kneel on the ground and asked the man stand in front of her, put his hands on her shoulders and gently push her backwards at forty-five degrees. He did it easily. I then asked her to resist with every cell in her body and the result was the same.”

Ron then said to the woman, “‘Remember the exercises we’ve been doing for the past couple of hours? The focus, the breathing, the energy flow and visualisation’. I talked her through the process and asked the man to push again and to gradually build up to full power. Both followed their instructions perfectly and thirty seconds later his feet were slipping on the carpet, his neck veins were sticking out and his face was turning red.”

Not surprisingly, “those watching couldn’t believe it. Adrian couldn’t push Leanne over. I found out at the end of the demonstration that Adrian used to play in the front row for South African Rugby and he said that he would have shifted a scrum machine with the amount of pressure he was applying.” It was a dramatic example of personal power in action and Ron noted that Leanne’s confidence soared.

In 1986, Ron was sitting on his sofa with his girlfriend watching a television program called Star Search. He was a financial planner at the time and “we were watching comedians and I said, ‘I could do better than that, these guys are hopeless’, and Theresa said, ‘Why don’t you?’ So I did.”

Ron auditioned for the show “to do stand-up comedy for the first time in my life, in front of an audience of two million people. I ended up winning and went onto the next show. I ended up doing four shows, but by the fourth I was pretty bad, in fact really, really bad. After a couple of nights at the Comedy Store in Sydney, I decided to go straight into corporate.”

He was doing just three or four corporate functions a year while still running his financial planning business when he made a decision which changed his life forever.

Ron decided to attend the National Speakers Association Conference in America. As he recalls, “it was in Dallas and there were sixteen hundred full-time speakers there. These people had the shoes, the suits, the teeth and the hair but I thought I’ve got stuff that’s beyond what they’re doing, which was mainly Myers-Briggs, DISC and NLP.

“I got inspired, came home and gave away my finance business to a friend who I knew would look after the clients. I burned my bridges. Two days later work started to come in.”

In the first year Ron earned double his best year’s income. As he tells it, “eighteen months later after I heard ‘Our purpose is to serve others’, I began concentrating on how to maximise my clients’ experience. That really was just a shift in attitude and the following twelve months my revenue doubled again, while my costs were within two-hundred dollars of the previous year.

“I was on the right track. I don’t believe you have to struggle hard because if you’re on track and in focus, things will happen. If you have to slog then I’m not sure the thing you’re doing is right for you.”

Ron admits his original search for personal power was to protect himself because he realised his void was personal power, but the benefit now is his internal power and his ability to teach others how to be powerful.

Ron wryly recalls, “I once told someone that since I started martial arts in 1979 I haven’t been in one street fight and the guy thought that was a shame. I said, ‘What? You mean it’s a shame I haven’t had to beat-up somebody, or even worse, been on the receiving of a beating?’

“The power to pass it on, to stand in front of an audience and present, came from when I was at NIDA studying acting and I couldn’t tell a joke. Others could engage people and had them laughing, so I decided I needed to learn how to do humour.”

For Ron, “three principles form the foundation for helping people to achieve what they want with less effort; Mind Leads the Body, Chi Energy and Belief Systems. On top of this are the Seven Pillars of Success – Certainty, Presence, Purpose, Focus, Vision, Fun and Inner Strength.”

He continues with the example of certainty as an example. “You had a great idea but your friends question it and say it won’t work, then you drop it. Later, someone else comes up with the same concept and it’s successful. Why? Your friends had more certainty that it wouldn’t work than you had that it would.”

Putting this into practice, “I tried it once on a group of global senior managers I was working with. I tried to convince them that all professional sports at the senior level were rigged and the only one that had any semblance of decency and integrity was the noble art of professional wrestling. With absolute certainty I had them believing professional wrestling wasn’t rigged and was entirely above board, but I wasn’t good enough to convince them that every other sport in the world was rigged.”

In this case, “my certainty was greater than their doubt on the subject of pro-wrestling.”

When in the audience of a presentation from The Corporate Ninja the thing you notice from the outset is there are no notes, not a clipboard in sight, no reference tools, just Ron Lee on stage engaging his audience. Ron once “did a seven-hour presentation without notes. Every person in that audience is giving you something in words, looks, attitude and thoughts. In the second you look down at your notes you’ve lost connection with your audience.

“Eyeball everyone and make it seem like you’re talking to them. When you eyeball somebody you can read them, you’re engaging them and they feel you’re talking directly to them. Also, by eyeballing them, they’re compelled to look at you.”

Ron Lee’s mission was to find his personal power and there’s no question he’s done that successfully. He’s known around the world as “The Corporate Ninja”, so does he see himself as successful?

Ron replies, “it depends on your definition of success and my definition is achieving everything you want to achieve, so I don’t consider myself a success at all. Yes it’s a cliché, but it’s a journey. Success is a progressive concept, it’s not an end.”

ADVICE
There’s a story Ron Lee tells which highlights perfectly what it takes to be successful, and it encompasses the key areas.

The first point is realising you have a problem, then not being afraid to ask the right people for help, listening to and applying the advice offered and even covers acknowledging the success you achieve.

Ron was attending an Empowering Women seminar in Canberra in 2015 when “a young, very fit-looking woman strode up to me, held out her hand and said ‘Hello, I’m Caroline Buchanan, and I know why I’m here.’ Looking at her in the eyes, I asked, ‘in an existential and metaphysical context or geographically and chronologically here and now?’ Caroline didn’t miss a beat and said, ‘I’m here so you can train me, will you do it?’

“I don’t know, what do you do?”, Ron asked. She replied, London Olympics, women’s BMX final, fifth place, to which Ron remarked “Oh, you came fifth.” She said ‘That’s why I need you to train me, will you do it?’

Ron told her she would have to come to Sydney and he would train her in internal martial arts and this should help, “and with her being an elite athlete, I thought we could do it in half a day.

“The easy part was to teach her how to double her physical strength, but after watching some YouTube videos of her sport I noticed there was quite a bit of stress at the start of the race. ‘There’s massive tension’ she confirmed with me. She said half the battle is getting a good start, so I also showed her how to meditate and be aware at the same time.”

Ron continues the story, “after the session she paid and left. A week and a half later she rang and said ‘I’m in Auckland, I competed in the world championships yesterday, have a look at the video and then read my email.’

“She was lined up against the Olympic gold medallist, a former World Champion and a former three-time World Champion. It was a stacked field. She won a twenty-five second race by six lengths. In her email she said, ‘I think I did what you said. Thank you.’”