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[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][divider line_type=”Full Width Line” line_thickness=”1″ divider_color=”default” animate=”yes” delay=”50″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_row_inner column_margin=”default” text_align=”left”][vc_column_inner column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” column_link_target=”_self” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]Nicolas Ronco, CEO of YeloSpa, joins the program to discuss the importance of sleep for overall health and the wisdom of the body. Discover the roles of empathy and integrity in leadership and why “soft” skills are really essential business skills. Nicolas also reveals an experience that he had working in India and how it impacts his work today.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row type=”full_width_background” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” top_padding=”0″ bottom_padding=”7%” class=”custom-p” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none” shape_type=””][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”left-right” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][toggles style=”default”][toggle color=”Default” title=”Episode Transcription”][vc_row_inner column_margin=”default” text_align=”left”][vc_column_inner column_padding=”padding-3-percent” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” column_link_target=”_self” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]Speaker 1: Welcome to Hidden Human, the podcast where we explore the stories behind the business leader. Get ready to hear insights from business leaders speaking candidly about how they became who they are today, and the lessons they learned along the way. And now here’s your host, leadership coach and speaker Kelly Meerbott.
Kelly Meerbott: Welcome to the space where we reveal our personal humanity to reconnect with our shared humanity. It is my true pleasure to introduce the innovative human that is Nicolas Ronco, founder and CEO of YeloSpa. Welcome Nicolas how are you?
Nicolas Ronco: Thank you very much Kelly I’m doing great and I’m very happy to be on your podcast today.
Kelly Meerbott: I’m thrilled to have you, I’ve been waiting for this since June, and I just can’t wait to dive right in. So are you okay with that?
Nicolas Ronco: Very much so, very much looking forward to it.
Kelly Meerbott: Okay. So tell me fist of all, what is YeloSpa?
Nicolas Ronco: So YeloSpa is basically a concept that I created 12 years ago. And the original aim was really to help people recharge in the city that never sleeps, in the city that is constantly agitated, where people like constantly movement, and being part of the city myself at the time for close to 20 years, and having careers in the corporate world and travelings a lot for my job, I was definitely one of the victims of the rhythm of the city. And I felt very strongly that I needed to find a space where I could recharge effectively and thoroughly. And unfortunately I could never find that space. So after I would say a few years of frustration personal frustration, and seeing also frankly my health decline, I decided to create the space that would be appropriate for me and people in my situation, which I know is a majority of New Yorkers and city dwellers from Pennsylvania to London to Asia and all over the world these days.
Kelly Meerbott: Well that’s amazing, and I’ve experienced your spa as well. And I told you the story before we started recording, I was in New York in June, and I had a very early morning, I had to last from 3:00 AM to 8:00 PM. And I thought, well New York has everything I wonder if they have sleep pods. And of course, I googled and you guys came up and I had a great experience with your brand with Jayda Booey, who is the one who helped me, and I can’t say enough about sleep, especially as somebody who has a sleep disorder myself. Before you founded YeloSpa, I know you and I both don’t like this question, but just to give context to the interview, what were you doing?
Nicolas Ronco: So I came from France in ’88, so pretty much a little bit over 30 years ago, and pursued my MBA in New York. And then after that, I worked for Time Warner, and I was in the music group. I was in marketing in the music group. Spent almost 10 years there. Then got a great job offer in France in 2000, which is my home country initially. And got a job in the pre IPO company, and we basically introduced the company on the stock market, french stock market and US stock market six months after I joined, and it was very hectic as you can imagine, it was a lot of travel, a lot of jet lag. And then during my time there, I was in charge of managing business units that were spread all around the world from Australia to Korea, Japan, Eastern Europe, US and Canada, and my base at the time was in Paris France.
and so as you can imagine I was constantly spending my time in the plane. and even if you travel in very decent conditions, ’cause you’re traveling on business, you still feel the heat of traveling jet lag and everything that comes with that. And I was looking for spaces where I could relax quickly and effectively. And except [inaudible], except in Japan and Korea and to a certain degree Hong Kong, I could never find this place in the US or in Europe. This place, the natural space would be spas ’cause you’re not gonna go to a doctors office when you touch down in Tokyo for example after a 14 hour flight, but you could go to a spa. And again in Europe and in the US, the experience was very disappointing to me was either too expensive or too uptight or mediocre or [inaudible]. And I never felt comfortable in this environment, and this is when I decided that someone had to do it, and that was gonna be me creating a space where people could actually show comfortable and properly treated.
Kelly Meerbott: You know, it’s amazing. As I was listening to you Nicolas, this roomy quote came into my head and it says, “Yesterday I was clever and I wanted to change the world. Today I’m wise and I wanna change myself.” And that’s really what I’m hearing is that you had a need for yourself, and out of that, the empathize came to create YeloSpa, is that fair?
Nicolas Ronco: Yes. I mean I go by several quotes, but of them is “Be the change you want to see.”
Kelly Meerbott: Oh my gosh, that’s my motto for life. And I also have to tell you, I spent 11 years in the music industry working for Clear Channel. So I know exactly how fast you were moving at Time Warner, because it’s just a crazy business. So you and I have talked about the importance of sleep offline, but tell me from your perspective. From a performance perspective from a human perspective from, let’s say an employment perspective. Why do you think being well rested is important, and how do you think it translates to the bottom line of companies?
Nicolas Ronco: Very good question. So first of all, I’d like to share that I do share something else with you, which is I also suffer from sleep apnea. And I was diagnosed with that twice in sleep studies a few years ago. So to answer your question, we know today that sleep deprivation is an epidemic in America, it’s prevalent in almost every household. And the cause of sleep deprivation both in terms of healthcare costs and lack of productivity is in the billions of dollars, and probably over $50 billion in the economy, and that’s probably a low bowl estimate. These estimates obviously as you can imagine are tough to measure, so they’re kind of all over the place. But we know it’s huge.
And people instinctively feel that it’s huge as well. Lack of sleep will have an impact on heart health. If you sleep deprive someone for just weeks, an individual that’s very healthy for just a week, he or she will start developing type II diabetes. And that person won’t even realize that they’re sleep deprived, it’s the same thing that what you and I go through with sleep apnea, they do the study where they disrupted the sleep of a 20 year old athlete going to college pre sleep deprivation, he was in perfect health a week later, he had a serious problem. So we know there is an impact on that.
There was another Harvard study that came out and showed that people who took a nap for 20 minutes three times a week were able to decrease their incident of cardiovascular issue, heart attack and things like that by 37%. And then when you go into type A mail for example then you would be by 53%. So 37% is really kind of the baseline here. Sleep has obviously an effect on mental health. When the CIA wants to torcher people, they deprive them of sleep, and there is obviously a reason for that. It’s got a huge effect on depression, some people think that they’re going through depression inside they’re just sleep deprived.
Sleep has a huge effect on the immune system, and it’s not just catching a cold or catching the flu, but it’s also catching cancer, because we know now that cancer is very much an immune system related disease not just a genetic disease. And obviously your immunity has a huge importance when it comes to that. It has an importance for weight control. A lot of people, and we see that we used to see that in New York in the 80s and 90s. They were exercising at night, like sleeping four hours a day, exercising like crazy, and not losing weight, or actually putting up more weight. And we know now that if you sleep what is appropriate for you, and that’s a different question that we can discuss later, it could be six hours it could be eight hours could be seven hours, it’s whatever is appropriate for you, and only you can figure out what is appropriate for you.
But if you do sleep what’s appropriate for you, then you will start shedding weight, provided that obviously you don’t have other kind of disease and you don’t eat like crazy. So it effects like a whole slue of issue, which is easily as important as diet and exercise. And it’s starting to be recognized now. It’s starting to be recognized now, it started to be recognized when I started 12 years ago, that’s when a bunch of the studies started coming out. So I was very fortunate in terms of my timing and society timing.
Kelly Meerbott: Well, and you’re exactly right Nicolas to add anecdotal evidence of this, I was diagnosed with it, sleep apnea when I was 27. I’m 42 now and I remember sitting in the doctors office and he said it’s so severe that if you don’t treat it by the time you’re 40 you’re gonna have a heart attack and a stroke. Because your brain and your heart weren’t resting. And then the other thing that was really really fascinating to me, and I’m sure you’ve probably heard this as well, was he was telling me that many doctors misdiagnose AHHD in children when it’s really a sleep disorder. I mean, let’s look at our society just in America. We’re talking about a sleep deprivation epidemic, and we’ve got hand in hand an obesity epidemic and I can’t see that they’re not mutually exclusive, you know what I mean? They have to be tied together. And then we’ve got this generation of children that is being drugged, when really they need sleep.
Nicolas Ronco: That’s a very good point. Unfortunately America is the country where people feel that everything that’s popping pills is gonna solve every issue. And I really tell people that the best pill is a chill pill, is a sleep pill, because that could take care of so many issues that they’re experiencing. And then to the point that you’re making earlier with obesity for example, it becomes a vicious circle, because if you put on weight, then you have more chance of developing sleep apnea, and then you’re gonna be more tired during the day. If you do start developing and being sleep deprived, you will have a tendency to eat comfort food, eat food high in fat and high especially in sugar, because it’s comforting to you.
And so it becomes like this whole vicious circle where you have even less incentive or less will during the day to move around. And so it’s very important that you break that cycle and one great way to break the cycle, which is really painless is to increase the quality of your sleep.
Kelly Meerbott: Absolutely. So I’m gonna pivot into talking about your childhood. Are you okay with that?
Nicolas Ronco: Sure.
Kelly Meerbott: Okay. So we know that France is your home country. Where in France were you born?
Nicolas Ronco: Actually I was born and raised in Tunisia. Which is in North Africa. And I was born there in Carthage, and my family and I left Tunisia when I was 13, and that’s when we moved to Paris. But really Tunisia is the country that had the most impact on sleep. Tunisia is a place as you can imagine, it’s very hot especially from the month of May to September. And during that time they even in-store what they call the unique séance, which is basically people work from seven in the morning to 1:00 PM and then they go home, ’cause it’s literally too hot.
When I was growing up in 70s in Tunisia, we didn’t have any kind of AC. So people had to leave the office at least once during the afternoon and take a nap. So I used to see my dad coming from the office. He’s also an entrepreneur, he has furniture factories in Tunisia, and he was coming back home to take a nap. So that’s something that was very natural in my cycle. What happened when I started working at Time Warner, I was very fortunate that my apartment was very close to office, I was like 10 blocks away. So on days where I felt really exhausted and I felt that it was going to be very difficult to keep my eyes opened in a boring budget meeting in the afternoon, 3:00 PM being for me at least like the killer time.
I used to go have to sandwich go home, take a 20 minute nap and then come to the office. And then guess who was the only guy alive during the boring budget meeting?
Kelly Meerbott: You of course.
Nicolas Ronco: Exactly, of course. So that made a huge difference. And I felt that my health also, I just felt much better. And this is something that I really want to encourage people to do. I mean use common sense, use yourself as a gage for where your health is. Your body will give you all of the information that you need, just listen to your body, you don’t need to be obsessive about it, but just pay attention to the signal that your body’s sending you, and see how you feel let’s say on the weekend when you’re able to get all the sleep that you need versus a weekday or presentation that you have or your kids crying because they have a fever. See the difference and the response will be very obvious as to what your course of action needs to be.
Kelly Meerbott: Yeah I mean, everything you’re saying I completely agree with, and I’m thinking back to my days in corporate, and I just remembered something. You were talking about, I used to call it 3:00 coffee break, because I would go to Starbucks, and I would order a red eye, do you know what that is?
Nicolas Ronco: I don’t.
Kelly Meerbott: So it’s a large coffee with four shots of espresso. And I would drink it, and I would feel still exhausted, I was that tired. And I was 27 years old. So I knew … the other thing I would go to bed at 10:00 and I couldn’t get up at 6:00 AM when the alarm went off. So those were the telling signs. And I agree with you, and I wasn’t listening to my body, but looking back the signs were all there, everything was pointing in that direction. So we talked about dad being an entrepreneur and owning furniture factories in Tunisia. What does mom do?
Nicolas Ronco: Mom was at the time taking care of my brother at nights, so she was very busy with that.
Kelly Meerbott: So what qualities do you get from your mom, and what do get from your dad that you leverage in the work that you do today at YeloSpa?
Nicolas Ronco: I think from my dad I get courage, I get integrity, and I get a sense of just pushing through when the situation seems negative or maybe sometimes even desperate. As an entrepreneur I’ve seen him going through these kind of phases, and it was very informative to me. So that’s I would say what I get from him. What I get from my mom is more I would say empathy, the ability to really fully listen to people, the ability to put myself in other people’s shoes is also the understanding that being vulnerable is actually okay. A lot of my friends tell me that I’m feminine even though I’m a guy, guys have feminine qualities when he comes to that. And so that’s something that is really important. And again when you’re an entrepreneur and you manage a team and you need to motivate a team, I think that empathy is the number one quality that you can have.
Kelly Meerbott: This is Kelly. Thanks so much for listening to Hidden Human. We love having you as part of our audience. As a thank you gift from us to you, click to kellymeerbott.com/downloadables to download our free white paper seven insights on leadership from 20 years of coaching executives. That’s k-e-l-l-y-m-e-e-r-b-o-t-t.com/downloadables. Thank you so much for being part of the hidden human family, and make it a great day.
It’s so funny that you were talking about empathy Nicolas ’cause I was with a client this morning before our interview, and that was the theme, it was be more empathetic, be more empathetic, she’s a high powered high performing executive who’s very great tactically, but emotional intelligence needs to be worked on, and I kept saying you gotta put yourself in the other person’s shoes. And as an entrepreneur you have to have empathy, and those active listening skills. So tell me about the most important person in your life, and tell me about him or her and how they’ve influenced you in a positive way.
Nicolas Ronco: Well that’s a very good question. I think there were a bunch of important people that’s in my life because they came a different, and so you have key moments in your life and then these people influence you at different moments. And some of these important people can actually be people that you actually never physically met, and that really inspire you tremendously. So the first ones, and we were touching on that earlier were my parents. Obviously their influence was incredible on me, and for the two sets of qualities that I was able to observe and inherit to a certain extent. Then when I start actually working for Time Warner, I had a mentor named Fred Wistol, he was the executive council of Time Warner, and Fred is an incredibly wise person, and his degree of empathy is just off the charts to point where he retired from Time Warner, and he became a coach, and he became basically an advise giver, and he’s helping and he’s helped so many people around the world, not just in New York.
Other people that have really inspired me, I would say President Obama. I’ve never met President Obama, but just his story and the way he managed the country for eight years was incredibly inspirational to me, and he’s not flawless by any means, but I understood where he was coming from, and he and his family to me, and his wife is even more inspiring I have to say like she’s to me an incredible woman. So all of this and coming to this country and living in New York where you’re surrounded by so many exceptional people, and I don’t mean successful I really mean exceptional people humanly in terms of talent and in terms of life path. I’ve been inspired by a lot of these people.
Kelly Meerbott: Wow, I mean this is incredible. So what are the most important lessons that you’ve learned in life?
Nicolas Ronco: The most important lesson to me is really related to two things, it’s integrity and empathy. Integrity is having [inaudible] yourself, and it really starts with that, and that in my opinion needs to be the driver. Being able to wake up every morning, look at yourself in the mirror, and feel that you’re okay, you haven’t done anything or at least voluntarily that hurt other people or hurt the environment or hurt the planet, and if possible if you done the opposite, if you help people, if you help the environment, then you’re on a good path. And constantly questioning your choices, make sure I’m going int he right direction.
And then the second one is really empathy. And empathy I think a lot of people confuse it with being soft, or I can get abused by people because I have empathy and I have such an ability to put myself in people’s shoes, that they can walk all over me. This is not at all what empathy is at least to me. Empathy can be an incredible weapon actually in a negotiation. I did the best thing with [inaudible] that I’ve seen are people who are able to read to people who are in front of them. So if you do approach a negotiation with, “I want it to be a win-win” because from just above and beyond my own moral compass, I know that a deal is gonna be long lasting and is gonna be a good deal for every party if it is a win-win. If one party takes more than they should, then something at some point is gonna happen and screw the whole thing up. So just being very practical from a business stand point.
And then secondly, really understanding the motivation of the person in front of you. If you do understand that, then you can get a lot. And if you show the other party that you understand that, then you can get a lot from the other party as well.
Kelly Meerbott: It’s so interesting that you talked about empathy being soft, because the discussions I have with a lot of leaders especially incorporate is, do you do training around soft skills? And my response is usually no, I do training on crucial skills, because these are crucial skills that unfortunately are disappearing in our society, and if we don’t preserve them, we’re gonna be in my opinion, which doesn’t really mean anything, I think it’s gonna be disastrous. And then you were talking about negotiation. A long time ago I adopted in my business, and I’m sure you probably have the same version, what I call compassion and business practices, meaning, how do we create a win-win for the greater good of all concerned? Because to your point businesses, or relationships can’t be one way, it has to be symbiotic for it to work.
Nicolas Ronco: No absolutely. And it’s really again, so important in the way you approach every kind of situation in business or in life. One thing that I learned, I’ve been married for only three years, and one thing that I’ve learned also in my relationship with my wife is that it’s okay to negotiate. That’s something that a coach actually talked to me because usually people are reluctant to negotiate within romantic relationships because it’s not very romantic. And in fact when you get into the important part of the relationship after a number of years where you have to get to the real work, then negotiation is the only way to unlock certain situations, so it’s valued in every aspect of life in my opinion.
Kelly Meerbott: Yeah I agree, I agree. And congratulations on being married for three years. My husband and I just hit our 10 year anniversary in May, and it’s so much fun to be married to your best friend. Yeah okay, so you touched on coaching, I’m gonna put my coaching hat on for a second, are you alright with that?
Nicolas Ronco: Sure.
Kelly Meerbott: Okay. Where do you feel in your life and business that you’re not reaching your highest potential?
Nicolas Ronco: Right now, I would say in infusing the same passion within myself to everybody and especially with the people that I work with. I’m able to do that with a number of core people, and I’m able to do this strangely with people outside of my immediate circle, but sometimes they’re people within my own organization that I miss. And when that happens, I always question myself. Is it my style, is it what we do, or did I hire the wrong people, or was I not clear enough in terms of the expectation? Because that’s something that I was not used to when I was working in corporate when I was in big companies where people are very driven, well educated, that’s not really an issue you have other issues in this kind of organization like politics and people backstabbing you and all this kind of stuff.
But usually there’s not an issue with drive. In organizations where you’re in retail or where you’re in wellness where you have a lot of questioning you have people from completely different backgrounds. Sometimes you find yourself confronted to situation where you really question the person’s drive that’s in front of you, and when I’m not able to insulate the same drive in them, I question myself.
Kelly Meerbott: Got ya. That’s interesting, we should talk about that offline. You shared a lot of powerful stories and experiences with us today Nicolas, and thank you so much for being so open and vulnerable. How do you leverage that collective experience in the work that you do today?
Nicolas Ronco: The collective experience in terms of what?
Kelly Meerbott: Everything you’ve experienced in life, how do you leverage that to help your staff and to help your customers?
Nicolas Ronco: Well it’s with me all the time in the sense that, what I do outside of my work is so important because it does inform now what I do within my work. And I have to tell you, when I changed paths completely 12 years ago, and I went from the corporate world where you make very decent living, you get a paycheck, it’s very thrilling as well, you’re surrounded by a bunch of very stimulated and smart people. But then when you create your own opportunity, and you create basically your own world, that’s really an amazing, it’s scary but that’s really an amazing experience. And when you get into this experience then you have to pull everything that you are in order to do.
And so for example, the fact that I was born in Tunisia and I went through certain things in Tunisia, was not always easy growing up in these kinds of countries. Then moving to France and having to adapt to a completely different environment gave me that skill that I can pretty much feel home anywhere in the world, and I adapted very quickly compared to people who are born in one place and stayed in one place all of their lives.
Secondly, when I was 29 I went to an [inaudible], I performed volunteer work. It was actually the [inaudible] but I was there 10 years before. But that was an amazing experience because that the first time that I could apply kind of my management skills to do service, and we were feeding 5000 meals per day, and I was working the kitchen with the cook, and I had a team of people and our role was just to clean the food. And for anyone who’s every been to India listens to the podcasts, they understand how important it is to clean the food so that people don’t get seriously sick.
So I have to say actually cleaning the food in India was actually the most stressful job I’ve ever had, because nothing compares to having a real direct responsibility on kids health, on elderly health, people with weak immune system, etc and you’re like, if I screw up someone can be very sick or even die. So this is very stressful, and it’s something very remote to standing in front of the computer with spreadsheet or PowerPoint or whatever it’s a very different experience.
Kelly Meerbott: I loved how you talked about service Nicolas. It reminds me of that Martin Luther King Jr quote, “Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You only need to have a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love.” And that’s to me really kind of sums up who you are as human, which is thank God we need more of you like that.
Nicolas Ronco: Yeah thank you. And I will tell you I also learned my most important management experience that really informed me today during that time in India. I had a team of 10 people in the kitchen, and one of them didn’t wanna work, and he was a Spaniard and his job in Spain was he was a prison guard. And for whatever reason he had a huge issue with authority. And he would not follow and kind of instruction. And again because I was trust by the degree of real responsibility real life real world responsibility that we had as a team, I started becoming very inpatient, and at some point we got to clash, and I fired the guy. The way you do it in New York, it’s not working out, don’t need to show up tomorrow have a nice life. And the guys from management came back to me and say, “I don’t think you’ve understood the point of what we’re doing here, you actually do not fire people. And the whole point is that you have to learn to work with that person, and this is exactly why you’re here. And this person is gonna be your biggest teacher, and you will be his biggest teacher as well.”
And they set up an entire coaching meeting with the two of us. We had translators we had four hour conversation. And after a few weeks and a few months we both realize that there are absolutely right. You can’t get rid of a problem, they told me you get rid of him, okay you get rid of a problem, a bigger problem is gonna come to you because you also have something to resolve in this experience.
Kelly Meerbott: That’s such a beautiful lesson that everybody can teach you something. I always think that every time I meet somebody that’s a challenge to me, it’s the next level of graduate school for me. So I love to end the interviews with four rapid fire questions. Are you ready?
Nicolas Ronco: I am.
Kelly Meerbott: Okay. So what is your favorite comfort food?
Nicolas Ronco: My favorite comfort food is chocolate, very dark chocolate, actually 70%.
Kelly Meerbott: Yeah very bitter, I love that. Wow we have a lot in common Nicolas. Okay, what kind of music is on your playlist?
Nicolas Ronco: So it goes from classical jazz and electronic music. And I love electronic music because it really gets me moving. I also love African music. So I love music that’s gonna move me from an emotional stand point, that I also love music that’s gonna move my body.
Kelly Meerbott: Okay so since you’re such passionate about music, I’m gonna divert from a rapid fire questions for one moment. What was the first song that you ever heard that made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up?
Nicolas Ronco: [inaudible] from [inaudible]. I was in Tunisia, and my dad put headphones on my head, and had me listen to that, and I was moved to my core.
Kelly Meerbott: Will you email me a link so I can hear the song?
Nicolas Ronco: Sure it’s a classical song, I’ll email you that.
Kelly Meerbott: That would be great, okay. So back to the last two questions. What books are on your night stand?
Nicolas Ronco: These days there are a lot of I have to say [inaudible] book, and the Arianna Huffington for example [inaudible], we also do sell there, the one about sleep is there. I have books from [inaudible] about how the universe actually works. I’m also very interested in experiences of people curing cancer through natural ways, and what seems like miraculous cure, which we all know there are not miraculous, they’re something that happens, but we just don’t fully understand the mechanism. But the book that really moved me to my core is a french book, it’s called [inaudible], which means the beauty of God, and it’s not a book about God, but it’s a book about relationships, and how if you are searching for perfection in your relationship, you’re gonna go straight into a wall and it’s gonna be a disaster. So it’s a very interesting book written by Albert Kahn I think in the 50s.
Kelly Meerbott: Oh wow that sounds fascinating. Okay final question. What are you most grateful for in this moment right now?
Nicolas Ronco: Right now I’m extremely grateful for having found my wife. It’s been a very long time coming, and when you find your life partner. It took me 44 years to get there, and when I finally found her it was like wow okay I understand what other people were saying about it.
Kelly Meerbott: Let’s give her some on air love. What is her name?
Nicolas Ronco: Her name is Sanna. S-a-n-n-a Sanna.
Kelly Meerbott: Well hello Sanna, and thank you so much for letting us borrow your amazing husband for just a moment. So Nicolas will you let us know how people can find out information about YeloSpa?
Nicolas Ronco: Yes. The first thing is, go to our website, which is yellowspa.com y-e-l-o-s-p-a.com. You will have a lot of information if you just google YeloSpa, you will find a lot of link with videos, we were very fortunate to be covered by pretty much everybody since we opened from CNN to the New York Times. So it’s a great trove of information. And lastly just coming up and experience us.
Kelly Meerbott: Yeah it only takes 40 minutes. I’ve taken a nap there. It’s amazing. See Jayda, see Nicolas, take care of yourself. And Nicolas, merci beaucoup for being vulnerable for being real, and to our listeners, it’s our intention that this podcast inspires you to go out into the world, and have authentic conversations to deepen the connections in your life. Thanks so much, and make it a great day!
Speaker 1: You’ve been listening to Hidden Human, the stories behind the business leader. If you’ve enjoyed the episode, please subscribe to the podcast on Itunes. To learn more about Kelly and the services she provides, youloudandclear.com. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a new episode.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/toggle][/toggles][/vc_column][/vc_row]
