Resiliency The Podcast

Jenn Quader (01:16)
Welcome to Resiliency, the podcast. I am so excited today. Our guest today has been performing live in Los Angeles for over 20 years. Now this is a Berkeley trained singer songwriter keyboardist who hails from DC and he has created a style of music that he calls new funk.

And he performs regularly throughout Southern California. You guys, have to see him perform live. It is electric. It is vibrational. is wonderful and happy and just delightful. Now his music has been listened to all over the world. He has more than a million streams. He's also a radio host of Deeper Grooves on 88.5 FM in LA and the host of the Deeper Grooves podcast. And he is the winner of numerous awards. He won the grand prize at the prestigious John Lennon Songwriting contest.

He also has won two World Songwriting Awards, four Global Music Awards, a California Music Video and Film Award. Guys, this guy is incredible. And wait a minute, there's a little more. He's also an author. He is an author of a book series called Side, Hustle, and Flow. And this exemplifies entrepreneurship, wellness, and self-improvement. Guys.

from passionate career to amazing talent to incredible, insightful author, I want you to please welcome with the greatest of resilience, the face of resilience, Mr. Cliff Beach.

Cliff Beach (02:53)
Thank you, Jen. Thank you, Dr. Kelly. So happy to be here. I've never been called the face of resilience, but it's a new thing we can add to the bio.

Dr Kelly Culver (03:05)
Absolutely. we are just like, we are over the moon that you're here with us today, Cliff. Thank you so much. So let's just dive right in because Jen opened the door. What does resiliency mean to you?

Cliff Beach (03:18)
Well, resiliency, feel is just the power to push through no matter whatever the obstacle is. There's this thing that life never gets easier. I've lived over 42 years. I've never had an easy year of life. Everything that I have, everything that I've attained, everything that I've learned required work, sweat, equity went into everything. And so whether it's...

You call it perseverance or grit or resiliency. There's a myth of motivation. So basically, no matter what you wanna do, even if you love to do it, there will be a moment in time where you don't have the feeling to wanna do it anymore for several reasons. And Resiliency is building that muscle that says no matter what I've committed to this, I'm focused on it, I'm going to get this done.

Because we all have that within us. We all have the seeds of resiliency in us. But like any other type of muscle that you build, it's through resistance. It's through going through something that gives you something to talk about. So your hot mess becomes your hot message. But that doesn't happen all at once.

Jenn Quader (04:35)
Wait, did you just say your hot mess becomes your hot message?

Cliff Beach (04:39)
Yes, your hot mess becomes your hot message.

you

Dr Kelly Culver (04:47)
you

Jenn Quader (04:47)
Your hot mess,

please, will you speak more about that? That is brilliant. I've never heard someone speak about facing resistance and it building muscle in that way. Talk to us about that a little more.

Cliff Beach (04:59)
Well, in my books or through music, I always talk about the journey of what I'm going through and that connects us on a human level. But for resiliency, what it does is that the person who you want to find as a mentor or a coach or just talk to them on a human level is someone who's been through it. If you are going through a bout of cancer, then the person who has gone through and survived that

would be able to speak more meaningful than someone who knows the theory or has lived it. They know exactly these are the steps. For instance, when I was taking my journey through Toastmasters, I've been in Toastmasters for over 10 years, and I followed in the footsteps of the person in front of me. They were vice president of PR, so I was vice president of PR. They became an air director, I became an air director. So I was just literally following the clues.

you know, the success that they left in the footprints and they would step out of a role, I would step in. They would move up, I would move under them. And we just kind of tracked that way. And so when you're thinking about being resilient, I think sometimes we feel that we have to become fully self-reliant. But I tell people, there's no fully self-made. You will always need other people. So the resiliency and the muscle is like, who has the information that I need and how can I get to them and get that?

information but obviously people who have gone through it what I call your hot mess. Going through it sucks but the only way out is through when you're finally through it you know I tell people like Harriet Tubman who can lead you to freedom but the person who escaped and went there now you can come back and tell me this is how you get to Canada but before that you can't tell me because you've never been there and that's what the hot mess turning into hot message becomes.

Jenn Quader (06:43)
need our Canadian to speak. mean, Dr. K, what are you taking? Tell me a little bit. This is a hot mess to hot message. And also this is a message about community. This is a message about not seeing resilience as fully self-reliant. And it's a message about mentorship. Dr. Kelly, what do you take out of this?

Dr Kelly Culver (06:50)
you

Well, you know, there's a lot of really cool words that you're using and sentiments that you're expressing and we've heard a few of them like muscle. We're starting to hear people talk about resilience as a muscle like vocal cords are muscle as you know, and you have to as you both know, and you have to exercise your vocal cords. So resilience is a muscle and the thing about a muscle is that you stretch it and contract it and stretch it and contract it depending on the situation in which you find yourself. And that's where your hot mess.

Cliff Beach (07:17)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Kelly Culver (07:32)
constricted becomes your hot message as you break out of it and you turn that challenge into something that is more around growth and transformation. So it's not just about grit. It's about that transformation piece and what do we learn from it? I love it.

Jenn Quader (07:50)
Well, I want to dig a little bit into the resistance you faced, Cliff, because one of the big industry that you've spent your life in and where your heart is, is music. And it is my knowledge, both firsthand and from others, that music is an industry where there's a lot of resilience. So I want to take you first back to the origin story, and I want to know what got you into music. And then from there, tell us about this new funk.

Cliff Beach (08:17)
Well, I grew up in music. I come from a musical family. I tell people like the movie Footloose when they outlawed dancing. For my family, there's a part of it where they outlawed musical instruments. So they're very adept at singing, singing all the parts, the voices that are guitars and bass and drums. They do everything. And so it's great to be able to come from people who learn by ear.

not necessarily by written music, but they really had a love and appreciation and understanding. And I came from kind of the church and gospel. And so having that underpinning of music as it relates to faith, as it relates to all types of music that really helps you get over. So in terms of resiliency, you think of blues music, you think of even before that, where it came from the field hollers and slavery and things like that. It's all about how do we find these

coping mechanisms of getting our emotions cathartically out there and having outlets to express ourselves. So music in terms of resiliency has lasted. We know now that music came before spoken language because it's part of our DNA and process of how do we get over? We get over by singing and playing and getting our emotions out there. Cause I think ultimately

what takes away from being resilient is when you lock the emotions inside. So people who don't have those creative outlets or just any outlet, the thing is that singing and music is not just for musicians, it's for everybody. Whether you appreciate it, people can sing their feelings out even if they don't know the pitches, even if it's just like, here's a bucket of notes, they land where they land, but I'm getting it out there, whether it's karaoke or anything else. I think the most important thing about resiliency

I love the work of Marie Kondo. She was the first person I ever heard that said, pick this up, is this giving you joy? Music is joy and exuberance and getting emotion out there. like, it can be sad, but still happy. We're very complex in that way. But it's like, when you start doing those things that spark joy into your life for me, when I get to perform, when I get to sing, even when I'm singing in the house alone, the feeling that I get from that and the more joy I.

I have that permeates out of me, it affects me, it affects everyone I come in contact with, and it helps you to build a resiliency. Because what happens is that it kind of puts this bubble around you that doesn't mean that you don't see the world how it is, but you can also creatively see the world how you want it to be and start to move in that direction. think resiliency, like anything else, it's about the learning and the takeaways. Some people will naturally be resilient more than others.

but it is a learned process, just like leadership, just like optimism or anything else. So people who are naturally pessimistic, they can learn ways to seize the glass of power, full, and in the same way they can learn to become more resilient. And I love how Dr. Kelly mentioned about people saying muscle, because if you don't use the muscle, it atrophies. But more importantly than that, you can't just.

work on one muscle. I can't just go to the gym and say it's only biceps and that's it. That's not the way the body works. It's a holistic system. know, every day is leg day. Every piece is important. And so you need to be able to work on that. Because even vocally, if someone says I want to stretch my range, you don't just stretch the bottom. You stretch the top and the bottom and the middle. You have to work on the whole system because they are related and interlocked to each other. So once you do that, as I went through the path of

all these little moments of music that make you more resilient. You're swimming with sharks this entire time. Whether it's like in preschool, elementary school, you're constantly being sized up against people and figuring out where do I fit into this world. So eventually I graduated high school, went to Berkeley College of Music, and you're swimming with sharks again. All these musicians who are super critical and you have to figure out how to navigate that system. So for one instance, I was trying to get to this thing called the singer showcase.

It's the top performance that you can do at music school. And it took me literally every semester. No, no, no, no, no, maybe, maybe, no, no, yes. My last semester finally got in and it built a resiliency that you don't get to tell me what I'm going to do. I tell you who I am and what I'm gonna do.

And so then when I came out to LA after that, I did American Idol, I did a couple of rounds and they said no, said, but I said, yes, I'm starting my own band. I don't care what you say. And then after that, that ended, said, I'm doing my own thing again. And I've been doing that, you know, for over 15, 20 years. So it's just like, there's gonna be a lot of no's. No matter what you do, you look at anybody who's successful, they have more no's than people before they get out of bed. That's just the way that it works. Dr. Seuss, tons of no's.

taught the whole world to read. Chicken soup for the soul, 100 millions of copies. Everybody said no. J.K. Rowling, Potter, everybody said no. That's gonna be part of the process. But eventually, the thing that you get from those no's is refining and reaffirming your why and that you are onto something. And it doesn't happen all at once. You have to set before you succeed. But eventually you get there and the resiliency and the muscle that you build. You become so strong.

by all those no's. Sometimes I think a lot of no's in the beginning and pushing through it really gets you past where someone says yes and greenlights it early, then you don't know where you could have gone because you will self limit, I think in that regard.

Jenn Quader (14:10)
Something that's so beautifully said, and I want to just pick out a couple quick pieces to come back to, which is, first of all, I like that you said you will suck before you succeed, because I think that that is speaking to the opportunity that you have to keep facing that fire and facing that no. But the other thing you said early on when you were talking about music, and honestly, it made me feel quite emotional, because you were talking about how you cannot lock...

the emotions inside, you have to be able to get them out. And because you yourself exercised this muscle since childhood and you learn how to get it out, what that helped you build was the confidence that in the face of no, in the face of no again and again, in the face of no from those who looked like they should know, from those who looked like they might be in authority, it actually gave you a stronger sense of self. And so leading onto that, want to talk about you just released a new album.

called Beach Please, it came out October 24. You you've probably had some no's in the music industry. Can you talk about getting to that, this latest album release, what led up to it, and maybe using what you just talked about, you know, that journey of getting to your own, I say what I do. Talk to us about that journey and what Beach Please means to you now that it's out.

Cliff Beach (15:25)
gosh, well, Beach Please is amazing on many levels for me. I think most importantly, when I started making music in 2010 under my own name, Cliff Beach, after my previous band and a foray into business school, by 2013, I started releasing albums and I said, I want to release 10 albums in 10 years. So by 2022, we were able to get that out and now Beach Please is I think the 12th or 13th album that we've done. And so what that...

did in terms of resiliency for me is it kept me curious and constantly pushing the needle on the envelope forward. So I never rest on my laurels. So you can tell like all these awards that I've won. I'm still constantly pitching and doing new things. Before Beach Please, I had just released my first jazz album that March. And that was a huge process of moving into a whole different genre and a whole different thing. it's

You have to kind of attempt what's impossible to know what's possible. So Beach Please allowed me to work with a new label and I was a whole lot of work to get to doing that and contracts and building relationships and doing those things. But it was about constantly knowing like what's next? What excites me to get up to do something? No one record that I've done is alike. They're all different. They're all nuanced in terms of how they're done.

I didn't work with exactly the same team. There's a lot of people who I worked with that were on all the records, but it wasn't exactly the same team, wasn't exactly the same studio, wasn't exactly the same mixing process, mastering process for Beach Please. After we went into the negotiation with the label, we ended up having to remix and remaster the entire record and that cost more money. And when I was talking to my mom and other people about it, what I discovered is that you don't wanna let

money or time kind of dictate the end result. Because ultimately it became a better record by going through that process. But if I had saw it, well, I've already mixed the master and you take it as is, it would have cut the relationship. And also I don't know if that record would have been as good because what ended up happening is that record went places that the other records didn't go. It ended up being a top 20 funk record and winning other awards.

gold at the Global Music Awards, which I had won previously. And it wasn't about the awards, it's about the effort. But the thing is that I can go to sleep at night happy. Because the thing is people are like, well, that's gonna cost money, that's gonna cost time. You know what? Money's gonna go either way, time's gonna go either way. But I can look back and say, I did that. That's the stamp of what that year was and that project was, and I'm on to the next. So I think the resiliency is understanding that

I think sometimes when resiliency people think you just always push through, but it's not like a linear process. So sometimes there's times where you have to backtrack, you have to retreat. You have to always be looking and saying like, is this ladder on the right wall? And I'm not climbing it at the right time. Am I getting where I'm going or not? So it's not like you always know that. I tell people all the time, you don't know that's the right question and the right answer. You just have to ask the question, run a sequence, look back at the data.

and then make adjustments. So it's never that you can just all that once everything lines up in ducks in a row every time. So resiliency is knowing that that's not gonna happen, knowing that life is like a bowl of frogs and two or three are gonna hop in at one time and that's amazing. But you're not gonna keep them in there. Something's gonna hop out. You just have to let it happen. Because I think the most frustrating part of life is that we're trying to control 99%, which is uncontrollable and life just has to.

Jenn Quader (19:12)
you

Cliff Beach (19:18)
kind of organically do its thing. But you learn so much. If I tried to wave a magic wand 20 years ago over my life, I couldn't tell you half the things that ended up happening. Places that I've gone, people that I've met, opportunities that have come. Because I just said yes to things that were scary, and I didn't know how to do them. So it's like, yeah, when I started in 2013 making 10 albums, I didn't know how to make one, let alone 10.

But I knew that if I had picked a big goal, then if I got half there, I'd still have five albums. What I didn't wanna do is say, I can barely make one, and I'm only gonna make one, and then that would be it. I wasn't a one and done artist, and I didn't feel like I didn't have more to say. So I just wanted to say, go bigger. I think that's the thing, when you go for resiliency, like when I was trying to lose weight, I said, I wanna lose 50 pounds in five months. I could have said I wanna lose 10, but it's like, I feel the further you stretch yourself,

even though the resiliency and building that muscle is gonna take more time and more effort, it's gonna be hard, and it's gonna seem like a daunting task, I think the end result is that you always end up going further. And then if you create a team around you, you'll go even further than you could have gone. Because even though everything is under my name, I cannot take full credit for my career and where I've gotten to, because it's taken a laundry list of people. So if I ever get...

onto a stage where I'm just rattling off names and names and names. I won't even get to say what happened. It'll just be like, here's the shoulders of the giants that I'm standing on. You're just seeing me as the top of the glacier, but the real stuff is underneath. These people actually made that happen. But I think just make the goal much bigger than you think you can do so that you can get close to that because you'll always go further doing it that way than starting and limiting it from the gate.

Jenn Quader (21:15)
I love that there's a quote I used to write in my journal over and over when I was young, and I'm sure you've heard it, but it's, for the moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the stars. And I think that's what you're saying, which is you gotta pick a big goal. And then it sounds like you're also saying, and you gotta create that team around you and recognize that you're not the only star in the sky and that the constellation is what makes it so beautiful.

I'm sure Dr. Kelly has a burning question, but I do want to dive into one thing that I heard through what you just said, which I think is really an interesting point for our listeners. What I pull out of a lot of what you just said is the word investment. Because you talked about how, for example, when your studio album, when you joined with the record label, it required more money and time, and you had to really think about that. That's an investment of money and time. You talked about losing 50 pounds.

Personally, that's an investment of building muscle and and likely changing diet and all sorts of things So I want to ask you about you know when you are and then you also said something that I'm gonna need a Merch check on on t-shirt number two, which is life is like a bowl of frogs All right, which I couldn't be better. All right. So as you look at this bowl of frogs I guess I want to ask someone like you who's done so much how what would you what advice could you give to our audience on how they might?

better invest in themselves. How do they look at that? How do they approach that? Because that can build toward their resilience.

Cliff Beach (22:40)
I love that, I love that question. I used to really subscribe and listen to a lot of Susie Orman for personal finance and she used to always say, people first, then money, then things. And it's about having a priority to life. So when you talk about investing into yourself, people, always the most important. I will tell you that anyone you ever meet that's dying, they care about the people and their life. They don't care about the accolades. No one says, bring my work, bring my Grammys they don't care.

They don't care at that point. I'm not saying you shouldn't care about their life, but it's like at the very end, you think about who's gonna be around me. Who have I touched in a way that matters, you know, it's people. But when you think about people, you're a person and you matter. And sometimes you have to objectively see how you would be to someone else, but do it to yourself, right? Invest in yourself. That's why when people are entrepreneurial and they're working a lot,

they end up dropping the ball of health in themselves first because they think I have to be out there doing this for other people. But no, what happens is that if you really care about other people, you would put your mask on first because that's why they tell parents on a plane, put your mask on, then help your child. If you become incapacitated, you no longer are an asset to anyone, you're a liability to all of us now. And investing in yourself,

from almost anything that I've seen, cannot have a negative return. There's no way that it doesn't pay the dividends of what you learn. And more importantly, it's not about the doing. Everybody thinks that what I'm saying, it's like, make a bunch of albums, do this, do this, do this. Yes, I'm saying that, but the point is, it's not about what you've done, it's who you become. I became a different person by the project. They're just the output of who I became. I learned processes.

And now you go and you show other people the way and they get to decide what they're going to do and that type of thing. But investing yourself is super important. Just like you would invest in a company, just like you would invest in whatever. And you always invest time. People are always like, how do you spend your time? You spend it or you invest it? There's the only two options. And if you invest it, you get something back. If you spend it, you don't know where it went. That's how a lot of consumption is. I don't know where it

But where you spend your money and your time, that's what you value the most. Or at least that's what you're saying on paper. That's where I put my value. So I think people do need to learn how to invest in themselves. I think that people need to continue their education and become lifelong learners. I think that's the first investment. think the libraries are free and the information is out there. You should be tapping into it if you so choose. Unfortunately, not everybody does. I think also sometimes we push the ownership

of who handles that to other people. So like our system is set up like, education is you go to school. So now we've shifted it to the schools and we shifted it to the teachers and the principals, but no, no, no, it's up to the individual. You need to be a person that says I need to learn because otherwise that's why you have people that they reached the end of high school, they never read a book again. Well, it's like, well, it can't be because they've required you to do it. You just have to be a person who subscribes to wanting to learn. But if you invest, last year I tried to read

at least 52 books, a book a week. I think I ended up doing 90 books this last year, audio books mostly. But when you do that and you're investing yourself or you're listening to audio books as you drive to and from work or whatever, who you become and the ideas that it's sparking you. Every time you get one idea, it's like planting a tree. It's like planting a seed. You plant the seed.

You don't get like a one relationship of like, planted an apple seed, I got one apple. That's not the way it works. Like you plant a seed, you get a tree, lots of apples, that has lots of seeds, more apples, more trees. And so every time I read a book and I get one idea, that idea creates fruit of a bunch of ideas and they create more fruit. So all of these things, you know, I read the Bible and subscribe to Christianity and spirituality. A lot of times there's this term where they say, be fruitful and multiply.

For years, everyone thought that meant just go have a lot of babies. But that is not exactly what it means because I was like, my ideas are babies. My songs are babies. And anytime someone listens to that and it sparks a change of them, that's a seed growing fruit under a tree I may never see, but it's out there. It's cross-pollinated. So it's like, whatever you do when you invest in yourself, just realize that you're planting that seed in yourself, but when it nurtures and grows and springs up, the fruit that it produces, people will know that's a good tree.

That's a good fruit. And then from there, it's going to exponentially go out into the ecosystem. it's like investing yourself never has a negative dividend, but it's like you go start investing into other people from that. Now you've exponentially, now you've started a movement. Now you spark change and joy into other people.

Dr Kelly Culver (27:46)
pick up on that just for a minute because you've used some really lovely analogies. You've talked about you know the self investment and why that's important and how that that has a multiplier effect that benefits many many many many many many many the little rings in the water. And you talked about seeds and apples and trees and I can think of oaks and acorns and those kinds of things from from a little acorn grows a sturdy oak tree.

I think I heard somewhere, I think a little bird said to me that mentorship is really important to you. And I think that's sort of in some ways also what you're describing to us. So How does mentorship relate to resiliency for you?

Cliff Beach (28:32)
Well mentorship comes in a multiple of facets. I do a lot of work right now working with teen boys Because I subscribe to the theory that it is better to build boys than mend men So I come from a lot of men who were very broken and and what that does is that it creates this ripple in society where you have

people who have walked away from their families and children that don't have parents and things like that. And it's not that you're kind of placing a shade to whatever happens, life happens, but it's more importantly about we have a responsibility to each other and we have choices that can be made if people are presented with the option to learn how to be more responsible. And I say learn because mentorship is teaching them that.

We have choices and we're a product of those choices and what happens because of them. And even if somehow we make a choice that may be not as good as others, we learn from that, move it into the next thing. So when I work with kids and we're playing games, kids will say, we weren't on the leaderboard. We didn't win. I'm like, well, winning is cool. But more importantly, it's like what you learn to carry into the next situation. You need to win at the game of life. This game is like, whatever.

It'll happen, it didn't happen. But what did you learn from that? You look at someone like Michael Jordan, it's like he had a resiliency that he was cut from his basketball team. But that's what made him great. See, the thing is that when they say no, and then you say, I'm gonna work for a year to get better, so you can't deny me next year, that's how you become successful. That's why they go and see 400 baskets a day. And I can tell you, if somehow someone was calculating, they say, you know what, LeBron, that was only 399. He will get back in the car.

back in the shoes, back to the gym, shoot that basket. That's the consistency of doing that. And so the mentorship allows people to see role models because we pair it, we emulate. More importantly though, is that when you ask someone like a Dr. Kelly or a Jen, what do you do? How do you do it well? People will always open up and start telling you, this is what I did, this is what I do. People love to give out that information. They're like compelled to share. Cause they know how difficult it was to do it.

and they know the help they didn't give and they know now what that means to somebody to give them that leg up. I tell people all the time, no matter what you do, you need to go find as many mentors as possible because you don't have the lifespan to make all the mistakes again. You need to do that. If we were all reinventing the wheel from caveman, man, it'd be a rough time. We'd all be somehow figuring it out. Someone would be riding on some triangles right now and that would not be good. That would not be good. So it's like.

You need to take what has already happened and learn from it quickly.

Jenn Quader (31:24)
I'm so glad you said that because I'm envisioning what would happen if I did get planted here and no roads had come before me. I think I might have to just sit and wait because I don't know what I would do. So really that idea of being able to follow out the path that's carved and yet be solid enough in yourself to not be a blind follower. Be solid enough in yourself that when someone says no or when someone says let's go this way and you know that your heart needs to go this way, understand hey life is not linear. I'm going to go in this other direction.

I want to build on this mentorship thing because of course I'm inspired by and I love that you are helping young men. I've actually had many a conversation about that idea of, and I like the way you put it of course, Cliff, you have a wonderful way with words, but the idea of building boys instead of mending men. And I think that's a really beautiful way to give back and it clearly shows your value in community building.

I want to look at that mentorship lens, if I may, just for a moment through the music industry lens, because you're so active in that music industry. And because frankly, I already see you on a Grammy stage thanking all of your long list of giants you've seated on. But I also, as a consumer of things like the Grammys and like the world around music, I can't help but think about the best new artist, Chapel Rowan, who got up on stage and kind of made a big statement that said, hey,

We don't have the support we need here in the music industry. And here she is, you know, taking that top award for this year. I want to ask you, Cliff, as a working musician, as a creator, as someone who's releasing albums, and as someone who's so devoted to mentorship, can you talk about mentorship and finding your way in the music industry from that standpoint of resilience?

Cliff Beach (33:04)
Yeah, I mean, luckily with the Grammys, we do have a mentorship program called Grammy Youth. I'm working with a young girl, fresh out of college to work on that. I think you need good mentors in music because, especially in Los Angeles and bigger metropolitan areas, because it's so multifaceted. I think the first thing with mentorship is letting people know that as musicians, as artists, you are an entrepreneur. You are a solopreneur.

That is something that was never described to me properly in school. And so the ownership is on the artist to market yourself, to put your goods and services out there, to collect that. Sadly, also the artist is like, it depends on the mindset of the artist, but there are some people who are purely creative, which means business, accounting, taxes, they're just not wired for that. And there's a lot of ways that people can get screwed over with contracts.

with record companies, the industry is built to make money. It's not built to cultivate an artist or to care about your wellbeing and your happiness. And you know, sometimes an artist, a true artist, know, a of a van Gogh, right? They never made money in their lifetime, but they're revered all over the world. Because somebody have come in and exploited that, of course they could. Because he just wanted to get the art out there. I have to paint. I have to. There's a part of an artist that's like,

I will do it for free because I love it and I have to get it out of me or I'll go crazy. It just has to get out. And so with that, you need mentorship because you need younger people to understand like these are pitfalls that you can fall into. These are things to avoid. These are things to think about or to set it up. So for instance, as an artist, I had to set up my own record company. I had to set up my own publishing company. I had to be able to figure out licensing, who controls the licensing, what the deals are.

things and the deals to look out for. Like with record companies, you don't want cross-collaboration. I don't want you trying to grab money wherever you can get. There's many artists who end up fighting the labels to get money that they are owed because there's so many footnotes and places to bury it and offshore accounts and certain things. So it doesn't mean that you can always check every box and nothing happens to you. It doesn't work that way, but it's just like there are things to think about. With publishing, for instance, there was a time before I had my publishing company.

Please and funky publishing, by the way. And so with that, it allowed me to, basically there's like a part of the pie that you can't even get to. If I don't create that entity, no one could collect that money. So the money just sits uncollected. And that's something that an artist doesn't really understand. So you're like, okay, I wrote the song, I got my performance royalties, I got my writing royalties. but publishing royalties is a whole other pie and you have to have the right business entities.

Jenn Quader (35:28)
Yes!

Cliff Beach (35:54)
and set up to collect that properly or you'll miss it. And this is something that you don't know until somebody comes along who tells you that who's a little further up the stream. That's why I tell people go find someone who's doing that. I worked with score.org to find a mentor and it's for free. Anyone can go there. But essentially I found someone who had a record company and they helped me start my record company and different genres.

But again, just somebody a little bit further up the road. They could be six months, 12 months, two years, years. It doesn't have to mean like, you know, I'm too the person at the top of the Grammys. It could just be the person in my town who's just doing it well. But the main thing is that yeah, the music side needs different people, because they have to understand the business, where art and commerce come together, but also how you song write. Everyone's process is different.

So when you're interviewing different songwriters, do you write the lyrics first? Do you write the music first? Do you write one and you work with another person? How's collaboration? You know, how do I meet different people? How do I network? There's just so many little aspects and stuff. So having somebody who can kind of walk you up the road helps you do it so much faster. And also because it's a predatory environment, you're swimming with the sharks, it's nice to have someone who could kind of gate and protect you. You know, it's not like everyone that I work with.

Especially when I work with female artists, I don't introduce them to everybody because I don't trust every male to have the best intentions with them, especially family members, people who want me to help. I'll be like, should work with this person. I know them. I will go with you, that kind of thing. Cause you just can't assume that everybody has the best intentions. So music is one of those places that a heavy level of skepticism is necessary. And even before you were saying like, you have to kind of recheck and relearn things through life. Sometimes you'll be doing something.

Jenn Quader (37:22)
you

Cliff Beach (37:44)
and it served you for a while, but it's no longer serving you anymore. So you can't just accept everything as gospel. You really have to vet it, check it, do your due diligence. But ultimately, I think everyone should get a mentor as early as possible. And I don't think it's ever too early. I think at every stage, I think even at five years old, having a person who's eight can mentor you. I don't see a problem with it. think we just follow those baby steps of the person who just.

Jenn Quader (37:57)
you

Cliff Beach (38:13)
A few steps ahead of us.

Jenn Quader (38:16)
I love it. And it's beautiful to know that that is available to artists, let's say at the Grammy level, Grammy, you, but it also can be available to really anyone who can kind of seek it out. Now, Cliff, we are going to get soon into our rapid fire questions, but I want to ask you one last question before I give it to Kelly to whip us into that fun shape. And it's this, you you you just spoke about within that you talked about how as an artist, you have to be your own entrepreneur. The ownership is on the artist.

to do these things. And I think in everything you're talking about, that requires such a stability. And I want to push us in the conversation to your book series of Side Hustle and Flow, where you really achieve, you talk about balance, all things from wellness to money to everything. And I wonder if you could kind of leave us with a little bit of wisdom. You know, we are in this world where people are...

living different lives than they were five years ago, you whether it be the office life or where they've moved or what they've done, everything feels quite different. know, AI has moved in. The way we interact with people is different. So can you just give us a little bit from the perspective of side hustle and flow? How does one really own themselves either as an artist or as a professional, whatever their passion is, how can they own themselves within their career and still stay tied to who they really are?

Cliff Beach (39:41)
Yeah, that's a great question. I think in the books I have from the flow, I talk about work-life balance. And I only use that term because that was the term I knew at the time in 2022. And also that's what most people know it as. But now in 2025, forward, we're using the term work-life integration.

It's how they work together in concert. It's an ecosystem. It's not one or the other. It's where can I find the synergies of all the things that I do? That's why you can be an entrepreneur or you can work for a place and have an entrepreneurial spirit and be an entrepreneur. And we still need all of those. The point is that the options are out there. Not everybody's going to have the stomach to be fully entrepreneurial. Not everybody's going to want to do their passion projects to make money or

be their full-time job. So it's really about figuring out what works for you. Just like you learn how to dress for your body type and eat for your blood type or whatever, you learn to work and integrate for you the way that it works for you. And no two people are alike. We're all snowflakes in that way. that's that. Then when the side hustle and the flow part comes together as hustling, there's this hustle culture. Everybody wants to out hustle everyone, work hard, work hard, work hard.

Working hard is great, but only if you work smart. How you plan and set it up, the execution, that's the most important part. That's why years ago they said, I have three hours to chop down a tree, I'm gonna spend two and a half hours on sharpening the ax. That's the smart part. Then you have less hustle because the work is not as hard because you did the preparation in advance.

Otherwise with a dull act, yeah, keep jumping out and eventually happen, but you're gonna have a lot of sweat equity pouring out of you to make that happen. And so it doesn't mean that every time you're always working at the same level of hard and smart, but the thing is that they do work together. And so you can't just hustle, to hustle alone. That's why I said in the beginning, you have to make sure the ladder that you're on is on the right wall. I could be climbing that ladder for years and then get up there and be like, this was not what I thought I was gonna be. When I was studying to get my MBA,

I went through the whole program and halfway through I was like, this is not what I thought. Because business school for me should be, I started with an idea and at the end it's up and running and it's profitable. They don't do that. It's a lot of theory. Also, they don't teach you personal finance. Nobody ever taught me like, this is how you balance your checkbook. This is how you make sure you have money in your bank. I could look at a profit and loss statement of a corporation and tell you if it's worth investing in, but I couldn't tell you about you Inc. Am I worth investing in?

Dr Kelly Culver (42:20)
you

Jenn Quader (42:23)
Sure.

Cliff Beach (42:36)
And that's why we're back to investing in yourself. the sad thing is that if anybody asks you like, is there only one thing you could do? Like, what is it? It's it's hard to say because there's many things. It's many things working in an ecosystem and like that bowl of frogs, they're all different. That wheel of life is constantly turning and some sectors are booming and some aren't. But I think if I was going to say one thing, I'll take it from Warren Buffett. I will say, you don't want to have just one income stream. You don't want to just have one.

passion project. You want to be diversified because the reason why I made Sidehands on Flow the book is because I diversified in the pandemic when I had no music gig, when I couldn't get out of the house. I was like, can I do by myself to incubate, to use this time? Because again, I said the money and the time, it passes either way. You want to be able to look and say, this is what I did. And so who I became, I became a writer when I didn't even know that I was in

my wheelhouse, but I wasn't surprised because I was always telling stories through music, songs, through other stuff. It's just an extension. It's just a medium. So I would say diversification is one big thing that I focus on. Have many different buckets because again, those frogs are gonna be jumping and you have to just let it happen. It's not gonna be the same three every day. And then from there also just continuing, knowing that your best is yet to come, especially when people get older.

Cause I think so many times they want to put you out the pastor or throw you in the tar pit. Do we still do that? But I think it's just, know, grandma Moses, she didn't start painting till 80 and she painted to a hundred and she wanted to paint at 20, but they said, no, you need to go work on the farm, get married, have a baby, do that. They said, if she started at 20, she would have been the most prolific artist of all time. But again, she still got paint at 80 and did it.

So I say, know what, KFC, after 65, you don't like your social security, get on out there, fry that chicken, 13 spices, you got it. You never get too old. You never get too old. Don't let anybody tell you ageism. No, you're constantly improving your business, you have to come. If you're here, you can do it, get at it.

Dr Kelly Culver (44:42)
I love that. love that. love that. It's, you know, and because like why it's so relevant is we've got in both our countries where we've got people who are aging and aging with grace and dignity and fire and format and all of those kinds of things, which is just so wonderful to see and that the contribution never stops. You talk about can we have a mentor at age five? The answer is yes. I see it with my niece at school.

But we can also we just keep going, you know, until we're 95 or 105, because that's the purpose, the meaning and the value of why we're here.

Cliff Beach (45:15)
And those are the people who should mentor. Those older elders, because they have the time and retired and they have the wealth of experience and knowledge.

Dr Kelly Culver (45:17)
yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. Now are you ready for some rapid fire questions?

Cliff Beach (45:28)
Shoot!

Dr Kelly Culver (45:29)
Okay, what's your favorite TV show or movie that makes you feel resilient?

Cliff Beach (45:35)
Oh my gosh, the big you feel resilient. love the oldies from the 80s and 90s. So I would say I toggle between law and order, OG law and order and murder she wrote. I think it shows you that, you know, the deductive reasoning and process allows you how you think as a man think if he becomes so the logic and reason.

Dr Kelly Culver (45:59)
All right, now, okay, this could be a real, this could be a real challenge or could be super fast. What's your favorite song that makes you feel resilient?

Cliff Beach (46:10)
my gosh, there's so many songs that made me feel that way. But I will say James Brown is a man's world. I think it, I love that he says it's nothing without a woman or a girl. We're all included in that process.

Dr Kelly Culver (46:31)
What's the last thing that made you laugh?

Cliff Beach (46:36)
Kids make me laugh. Every time I see like giggling babies and smiling stuff, they say that psychologically if you watch that, I have a friend who sends me little video clips of his baby and it's just they change so rapidly. It makes me smile, makes me laugh. And it makes me remember like when they're learning to walk, they never think they can't do it. And the way they learn to talk, they learn from just surrounding themselves by mentors. Everybody's talking and they learn. So that's the way you keep a childlike mind in terms of curiosity, you'll be.

Right with the world.

Dr Kelly Culver (47:09)
curiosity, imagination and that sense of wonder. And sometimes we lose it. I don't think you have. And we just have to have the confidence and courage to find it if we've misplaced it ourselves. What's a question you would like to ask or that you'd like to leave for future guests?

Cliff Beach (47:30)
What do you think your legacy will be? How do you want to be best remembered?

Jenn Quader (47:37)
Great question. Great question. All right, I have one. Our last rapid fire. This is a question that was left from a prior guest. And the question is meant to help people visualize what resiliency means to them. So are you ready, Cliff Beach? Okay. What to you does resilience look like? What does it smell like? And what does it taste like?

Cliff Beach (47:54)
I'm ready.

Okay, what does it look like, smell like, taste like?

Resiliency to me.

Looks like nothing. It's invisible. I think of it like Harry Potter and invisibly close. It's something that's shrouded around you, but people may not see it, but its presence will be felt. In terms of the smell, it smells sweaty because there's a lot of work behind building that shroud around you. And so it's not gonna smell the prettiest, but it's gonna keep you protected.

And then what does it taste like? It tastes like triumph. It tastes like victory. Because ultimately, you cannot be a victim and a victor at the same time. You have to choose what you will be and what you will become.

Jenn Quader (49:09)
Cliff Beach, this episode tastes like triumph to me, I'll be honest. I just wanna say thank you. What a gem you are. I agree with Dr. Kelly. You have managed to work through an industry that is historically and known to be quite difficult. are a self-made person and yet, as you mentioned, on the shoulders of giants. And you've brought us so many beautiful nuggets of wisdom, exciting things.

Dr Kelly Culver (49:13)
Hmm, absolutely, absolutely.

Jenn Quader (49:39)
Please, will you share with our audience how can they keep following you? How can they catch one of your amazing live shows? Where can they find you, Cliff Beach?

Cliff Beach (49:47)
Awesome, well you can find me on all social media at Cliff Beach Music and for the book and just other musings on life, you can go to sidehussleandflow.net, I have a blog where we do five articles every week there just to help people as well as the book. All the music is under Cliff Beach as well as the book, but you'll find them in all the streaming platforms and places that you can purchase things. And if people want to email me, they can always email me, Cliff, at scyhouseluffflow.net as well, or DM me on the socials.

We'll get back to you. It's all about building a tribe. It's all about building a network. And you know, the beauty is that I reached a place in life where I don't really want much from anybody. You know, I just want to be felt and heard and understood and hopefully just help them get a leg up and seeing them do better is the greatest gift.

Jenn Quader (50:38)
Cliff, are honored to be part of your tribe and honored to have you as part of ours and all together we are honored to build this resilience community. And with that, I just want to say thank you to all of our listeners out there. Guys, if resiliency is something you're interested in, please like this episode wherever you're listening to us, go find us on YouTube, watch us, support us. really does help us. Now, Resiliency the Podcast is out on all social medias. It's at resiliencythepodcast.com.

and this is the place to find stories and strategies and inspiration on how to embrace change, how to overcome challenges, and how to redefine resilience in today's ever-evolving world. I am Jen Quader. You can find me on all the socials at Jen, J-E-N-N-Q-U-A-D-E-R. You can also find me at my company, thesmartagency.com. Our incredible, wonderful, brilliant, illustrious Dr. Kelly Culver. You can find her at...

Culverdgroup.ca, that's .ca from Canada, and she is also on LinkedIn and Instagram, at Dr. Kelly Culver. Guys, we thank you. We wish you a musical, resilient, fantastic, beautiful week ahead, and we look forward to you joining us on the next episode of Resiliency the Podcast.