288: John Swanson — How to Develop a Strong Mindset

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Oh, it's all about mindset. How to keep a clear head. We all deal with stress and breakdowns, things like that all the time. How do you not get thrown by it, still be effective through all that? Entrepreneurial mindset is the subject of our conversation today. Hey, hey, hey everyone. My name is Bill Gallagher, Scaling coach, host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. We bring our show to you every week, interviewing authors, gurus, experts, CEOs and others about their secrets, hacks, time, proven methods for scaling up for growing their business and surviving the process. So that's kind of the show, right? We're joined now by John Swanson, CEO of Wendell company. John will tell you more about his background, but he's going to share with us about their work with Entrepreneurial Mindset and some of his experience in the area. Welcome to the show, John.

Thanks for having me, Bill.

Thanks for coming on. So you're in the middle of Minnesota, you said today?

Yeah. Easiest way to think about is if you look at the state we are dead center of, dead center.

You know, what does this even matter? I think there's something about like knowing where we are physically located, what the situation is like, what the weather is. Kind of getting a picture for each other that helps just to like connect and listen on some level.

Yeah, I think it's our, our way of trying to deal with the new virtual world and, and feeling some type of human connection and understanding and maybe a little even empathy, right?

Yeah. If we both stepped in out of a hot day or stepped in from the rain or something like that, we'd have that common kind of frame of reference, I kind of think. But it's a different picture. So I'm in Northern California as always, here in my home, home studio, which is where we are a lot these days. Although Suddenly we're traveling again. Yep, I've got trips this quarter to God. I've got stops in Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Dallas. I feel like I'm forgetting a few up and down the coast. San Diego, Orange County, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara. I just got back from Las Vegas. I've got a trip coming up to Reno and then another Lake Tahoe. Like, here we are again, moving around. And I think it goes to the topic of today. So talk to us a little bit about your background and work in this area. Stress, mindset, that kind of thing. You have a background as a professional athlete. So share with listeners and viewers a little bit about that.

Yeah, so My original background 20, 23 years was being an athlete, growing up, understanding how to continue to progress forward. And when you look at sports, sports really does a great job of preparing you for the world, which is a tremendous amount of failure. And failure where you learn and you get better. And so once I retired from playing hockey, I went in and started actually working with professional athletes, work with them on their nutrition, sports performance mindset, and then started to work with high level professionals. And that company essentially took off and ended up actually creating a consulting company on how we built that coaching business and then built a sporting festival where we partnered with Nike and Reebok and ended up growing it to 40 countries, 15,000 customers, 500 volunteers, and really learned a whole bunch about marketing and big corporate partnerships. So in that entire process, what I've really taken away is that it's our ability to constantly get better every day and how do we really go through this process where we learn most of the time by failure, because most of the time things do not meet our expectations. And so I think sports have done a really good job to prepare me for business and being an entrepreneur.

Yeah, you said something kind of quickly there that's useful to reinforce. A lot of times life doesn't meet your expectations 100%. An awful lot of the time those moments of victory and yeah, there's something there.

Yeah. And when you play sports, you know, the expectation is to win the cup, to win the ring. And so if there's 32 teams, only one of those teams gets to meet their expectation. Everybody else by all accordance was a failure. So you have to get rid good at understanding how to pick the small victories and how to build upon that or you become extremely deflated. And you look at business, there is no winning the cup or the ring. It's a marathon. And it's those that can stay in the game the longest and can continue to adapt and grow and avoid ultimately burnout that ultimately, I think, finds success.

Before you share some of the stories you shared in preparing for our show, tell us a little bit about Wendell company. What do you guys do? Who do you work with? A little bit. Share a little bit about that.

Yeah. So Wendell is our newest company. I sold three companies in the last year, and Wendell has been launched with the premise of really three major focuses. We have the Trailblazer code. That whole focus is how to elevate the person we work with, elevate their mindset, their skill sets, and really they are the foundation of the business. And so we took everything that we know about health and nutrition and movement and mindset work. We've actually created an entire coaching program and we'll be producing a book on really how to elevate yourself. The second part of it is an actual business coaching program. This is fairly traditional. It's your marketing strategies, paid traffic, organic traffic, how to put a course together, emails, kind of everything you need to put a coaching or consulting business together. The third leg of our company is a done for you SaaS. So we'll come in and actually put all the SaaS together. Software is outrageously technical. Right. And you have landing pages, you have emails, you have tasks, triggers, workflows. And so what we call that is actually our boss business operating system software. And so what we're able to do is really take a coach or consultant and retool them both internally how they run their company and then the software to support and grow and scale it.

So the first part is around performance for anyone. And then the other two parts, coaching for coaches and software for coaches, are specifically for the coaching industry.

Yep. We have the Trailblazer code is definitely something you could use for anybody. But we have written it around essentially the CEO and how to run your team, but also how to live your best life, how to work through a lot of the, we'll call them limiting beliefs that you were born with or acquired by the age of seven. It's also something they can use with their team. So it's a training component that they can help their team kind of unlock those belief patterns as well.

Why don't we start off with you sold your last business. You encountered some stuff with that. Talk to us about that. Tell us that story.

Yeah, so I sold three companies in the last year.

Two of them failed.

Yes, it was. And I learned a lot. I think you actually learn more when you sell a company than you do when you start a company. You learn about what ducks are in a row, what things aren't as clean as they needed to be. So it's been a really good business lesson. Most recently, I sold a company and a year after that company made some really poor decisions. Nothing that we were attached to, but I get to learn a lot about how contract law works, how the IRS works, when somebody files bankruptcy, and just kind of that entire process. And I said to another colleague of mine, I said, this is the best business lesson I could never pay for. And he goes, john, this is costing you almost a million dollars. And I was like, yes, but money can't buy this. There's no school that would have been able to teach this. And I've learned so much. And my response to it was, it's better a million dollar deal than a hundred million dollar deal. And so my attitude, and I think how I've handled this, I mean, to get into it, the company we sold, I think is going to end up filing for bankruptcy. And so then you start to walk down with our legal team. What are the ramifications? We did a finance agreement. How did this agreement need to be set up? How was it set up? And you just learned so much. But really my takeaway from it has been as soon as I got the email that the hand that I was playing changed, we got our team together and we basically said, how do we best play this poker hand? What are our goals? What are the outcomes that we're trying to achieve? And what I've tried to do as much as I can is stay out of an emotional state. And I look at it no different than playing poker, which is funny because I'm not a poker player. But if you get dealt a different hand, your job is to play that hand the best of your ability. And being emotional yelling at the other party is not going to help you reach your goals. And so we put all our goals on the table and we said, here's a new hand. How do we achieve those goals?

I notice in your world there's a lot of setting emotion aside, right in, in the stories that you, you share, where do you see the role for emotion? What's the value for you in. In the emotion?

So emotional emotions are a really great tool to learn. If you can ask yourself during the emotion, which is a really hard thing to do, is, is to actually become aware and say, why is this emotion present and what is it? What is what caused it? What is it trying to teach me? However, when we go to take action out of the emotion, I Find that if you're in a logical state, you think much more clearly. So one of the things I like to do when I'm highly emotional is learn what was the trigger of the emotion and what is it trying to tell me. But I will not act, or I do my best not to act in emotional state. I choose to and analogy or what I use is ABC awareness breath. And I choose and I try to make my choices based off my goals in a logical state. So I think emotions are really, really profound. I don't think we should bury our emotions down as a CEO, as an entrepreneur, but I think if we respond in an emotional state, it can be detrimental.

Have you always been like this?

Always or absolutely not? I would say when I was a child, I was an absolute hothead playing hockey. Growing up, things wouldn't go my way, I'd break my stick, I would get angry, I would snap, I would say things that I regret, and I would. What I think helped me have better perspective was my relationship with my parents and then my relationship with my children. And looking at those connections and saying how, you know, so many parents will say, well, that's how I was raised. The problem is how I was raised, I don't believe was the right way, and I don't want to carry that over. Well, I got spanked as a kid, so I spank my kids. I don't believe that to be true. I yell at my kids because I got yelled at. And so what I'm trying to do with much of who I am today is break a lot of those belief patterns and chains that my parents did with me. Because I don't necessarily think that, you know, I think they did the best they could with the skills they had at the time they had it. But it doesn't mean I can't grow beyond those skills and be a better father or different father to my children.

Then you have been. Yeah. Interesting. So you develop this then over time as a personal breakthrough in your own disappointments and upsets around your hockey thing and, and in. As you learn to master that as a kid. What age were you.

Last year? I. I don't. I don't know if. If mastery exists. I think awareness, yeah, I would say. I would say the combination of sport and then business. And I think I would actually say. And I just said this to our team this year, I can truly say that almost everything that's gone wrong, whether I caused it or not, I have taken the attitude of owning it, which is something we talk a lot about inside of our organization, that hasn't always been the case. No matter how strong that mindset gets, you're so quick to. You're trying to justify the emotional state and blame it and create a story around why it wasn't your fault. And even this bankruptcy that we're dealing with, potential bankruptcy of this, this organization. I looked at it initially of how can I better vetted the people buying it? What things did I not put in place? Instead of blaming them and all the poor decisions they made, I tried to use it as a learning experience of saying, okay, I plan to build more companies and I plan to sell more companies. How can I leverage this to grow beyond who I am today so that this does not repeat itself? And so to me, that own it experience, I don't think you ever master it, you just get better at it.

So in getting ready for the show, you shared a story about a client that was angry with one of their clients. Tell us about that one. What kind of business was that? What were they doing and how did that get resolved?

So this individual, one of our students, was in the wellness space. They ultimately work with women who want to lose weight, busy moms, CEOs, things of that nature, specifically females. And we were on a coaching call and she was essentially tearing this client apart, how this is the worst client. And she was essentially in the victim mentality. Look at all these things that my client's doing and she expects this from me. And the story just went on and on and on. And ultimately when that happens, you have to let the person vent. If you try to step in, it doesn't do you any good. They have to feel heard, they have to feel justified. And so I finally waited for them to finish. And I asked him, I said, okay, I understand all that. What did you do wrong though? I did nothing wrong, John. I did nothing wrong. It was her. And again, I was like, okay, I understand that. But if you were to reflect based on all the interactions, there's nothing that you could have done to improve the situation. There's nothing you could have done. And this went around and around for about a half hour. Finally, what we did was we got her back to her sales process. We looked at the questions they were asking there, and she identified core questions that she could have changed. She identified her onboarding process where she could have better set expectations with the client. She identified actual communication processes during her actual coaching program that she can tweak to create better clarity. And it was through this 90 minute call where you could see this, this coach Identify after coming out of the emotional state, areas in gaps in their business where they could be better. And what was astounding about it is that this coach or client of ours was so heated, they wanted to fire it. It started because they wanted to fire the client that John, you know, they basically came out and said, bill, this client is the worst. They're enemy number one. I need to fire them. Help me write the email. I need them out of my business. My coaches don't want to work with them. I don't want them a part of our brand. I said, that's fine. But through the process, we were able to step back and actually identify, well, if they're the worst, why'd you let them in the door in the first place? Where was the weakness there? And we just started to triage every problem that this person essentially was able to, you know, bypass. And so they go through, they. They fix these gaps in their business. We call it ids, Identify, discuss and solve. Which is. Is from Gina Winkman and Traction. And we apply it to their. Their business. And we applied the lens of, okay, you're going to have to essentially understand and reteach this student or you're going to have to let them go. You're going to have to have a hard conversation. And it was funny. About 30 days later, my client comes on to a call and says, john, I have to tell you, that client is our best client. They have referred five people in the last month. And I said, what changed? And they go, everything that we talked about, we implemented with them. And what we realized with them is they were just frustrated because they lacked some specific clarity and we didn't have the proper communication channels. And so it was really neat to see this person go from this massive victim mentality, eventually get out of the emotional state, pull themselves back down and say, look, what are the goals? How do we stop this from happening again? And for them to be able to go and make those changes. And so we ultimately call that reflection, revelation, revolution. And they were able to go and essentially elicit changes in their business to ensure that it doesn't repeat itself. And magically they saved a relationship that turned out to make them tens of thousands of dollars.

I guess the thing that I mostly hear is that you're accepting the initial state and then you're examining all aspects of this thing. Well, let's look at this and let's look before and let's look at the other side and how are we doing over here? And from that, you're allowing people to see the situation in some new way.

Yeah. I would say that whenever somebody's looking at a situation, most people, I've found, and my short years on this earth, is that most people, when they're trying to fix a problem, they're actually fixing what I would call a symptom or a pain. They're so reactionary, and they don't think critically long enough. They don't explore enough that they go around putting out these micro fires in their business. And this causes them to feel like they have so many spinning plates when they would be better served stopping, pausing, and thinking. Or what I would say is reflecting, having the revelation of what is the core problem and then going and addressing that, which is what we did with that student. And so instead of trying to put out 10 micro fires, what's causing all the fires to have the oxygen to burn in the first place, go address that. And I think it's one of the easiest ways to help entrepreneurs not get burnt out and stop them from feeling like they have so many plates spinning. And so it's what I would call is their ability to identify, discuss, and solve the core problem and stop solving the pain and symptoms, because pain and symptoms will continue to come up because the core issue is still there.

John, talk to us about your child. Recently had a traumatic event. Talk to us about what happened there and. And how you handled it.

So I was on the 18th green, and typically when I go golfing with my buddies, I'll keep the phone in the pocket. I want to be able to simply enjoy the day. One of the things that we talk about with all of our entrepreneurs that we work with is to have hobbies and have things that you can do away from family and work. And so I kept my phone away, and all of a sudden I looked, and I had 10 missed calls from my wife. And I was like, she knows not to call me if I'm on the golf course because, you know, I'm golfing. And I was like, this can't be good. So I call home, and she does not answer. My daughter answers, and I basically hear screaming in the background. And all she says is, edison just cut his finger off. You need to get home instantly. And so as a father or as a mother, your mind races to the worst place. I visualize, like, blood squirting everywhere. He is about to die, and panic ensues. So I basically. I think I left. I. Well, I left one of the buddies that rode with me to golf that day. I was like, I don't know Figure out how to get home, take an Uber through my clubs in the back of my car, broke a handful of laws driving home. I'm guessing speed limits mostly. And through the process, I was outrageously triggered. I was triggered by the phone call which elicited emotion of, oh, my gosh, my child is injured. And for me, it goes back to my childhood, which is my father died of alcoholism and my father's father died. My sole goal is I want to be a grandfather. I want to be a grandfather, amazing dad, and I want to be a grandfather. I want to raise my children, be healthy, and obviously outlive me. And so anything that is not alignment with that gives me severe panic. So I'm driving home and I'm like hyperventilating. I'm squeezing the wheel. I'm driving my, my Tesla at the time and just outrageously panicking. And I start to breathe. And I go through my stages that I try to teach our students. And I. I become aware of how if I walk into our house, what I believe is I'm one of the two foundational figures, my wife and myself. If I come in and I come in screeching the wheels and I come in freaking out, I do not help the situation. I actually hurt the situation. So I calm down and then I think to myself, if I get home fast, this is during COVID which is a disaster. It doesn't matter unless I have somebody that can retach his finger who can do that. So awareness is my emotional state. Breath is I need to calm down. And then choice is, what are the actions I'm going to take to help solve this right now? And so I roll through my Rolodex, who can I call? Who is that person? And so I call the doctor, somebody that is a family friend of ours. It's seven o' clock at night. I explained to him the severity of the situation. I essentially begged for him to return to his medical clinic. And we essentially got Edison in the car, wrapped his finger, attached his finger the best we could without trying to gross anybody out. But it was not fun. And we got him there. And luckily My son was 4 at the time. We called the right person, we acted correctly, and we were able to, you know, a little bit of luck on the side that I had somebody in my phone I could call, and things ended up working out. They ended up stitching it back together and he has full function of his finger. You know, me being an athlete, you need your fingers to play sports. So anyways, that was the short of the story. But it was definitely one of the opportunities where I used the ABC of what we teach to kind of, I guess, think through and pull myself out of that heightened state so that when I arrived at our house, I was not adding fuel to the flames, but rather somebody that was going to help solve the situation.

Yeah. There's a lot, you know, it's. Our kids tell us so much and teach us so much about ourselves being a parent. Right. And then you start to look back at how it was for you as a kid and you think about your dad and your rules for yourself and your life lessons. And I totally get that whole triggering thing. But a useful thing because you don't care about anything nearly as much as you care about your kids and family then in general. But the kids probably more than any other family. That whole world of that coming up. Yeah, I totally, totally get it. And to some other extent, we act that way about our businesses and the people in them and that kind of thing. Not as obviously, though, sometimes, because the caring is not to the degree that. That we have with a child. Yeah. Really useful, I hear. Also a whole. I mean, there's a certain amount that we pick up from where we grew up and that kind of thing, but growing up the son of an alcoholic, I'm sure there's a whole world of that, like keeping it together and not reliving those things and leveling up from that past.

Yeah. As an adult now, I've had to try to make a decision. Do I want to bury those memories or do I need to go back down that path and remember him? And ultimately what I have found is that as painful as it may be, actually going back through and understanding this is what I'll say about my father. I believe that my father played his hand the best he could with the skills that he had. He was a Vietnam veteran. His father was an alcoholic, tried to kill him at the age of, I think, 12. I can't understand my dad's childhood. And so as a child of my father, I only met my dad when I came into this world. And much of it I don't remember until I was probably six. And so I'm missing this massive picture to this movie, yet I'm trying to justify my feelings towards him, that he should have been a certain way. And so without understanding the full journey, because I can't have that conversation, I have to have a little bit of faith that my father, at the end of the day, was a good human. He was doing the best he could with the Skills that he was given to him by his parents and his colleagues. And so for me to walk back down the path, look at my childhood experiences. Ultimately I moved out of my house at the age of 15 and decided to go, you know, no longer live with my parents. I think there was a level of, I think, empowerment to go back down there. I will also say it was hard as hell and it was not fun and it was probably a lot easier to keep that stuff buried. Nobody used to know my dad was an alcoholic. My wife and I didn't talk about any of those conversations in the probably first four years of our relationship because it was easier to guard and protect against it than it was to open up. And I would say a lot of it. I still don't talk about it super freely, but a lot of it is more. I've talked about it internally inside of my house, inside of myself, and made peace with it. And by all means, I'm not going to claim I'm some expert dealing with that type of journey. It's just been my journey.

Well, I'll share with you that my dad was an alcoholic.

Sorry to hear that.

And my dad took his own life.

Yeah, it's not fun.

I loved him very much and I miss him. And I know that he loved me very much and he just was dealing with life in the way he was dealing with it. But there's power in, you know, everybody goes through different kinds of things and I just, I think there's real power. I really appreciate your sharing about it because there are people who will listen to this who have similar painful experiences and that limit them in some way. Right. There was an aspect of play and fun that I didn't allow myself.

When.

My dad was going along and getting worse and worse because I didn't want to be like that. He was very, very playful and fun. Right. That went along with some of that thing and that became a barrier when I incorporated all of it. I had more access to being playful, to being fun, to even having a drink myself, but not having to be an alcoholic or to say that just having a little bit would lead me there. Right. So there's huge value. So thank you for sharing about it for our listeners. I just want to let you know if you want to find out more about John's work and get in touch with John and his company. The Company is Wendell Co. Wendell Co. WendellCo.com. we'll put the link right there below and in the show notes, that kind of thing. But WendellCo.com is how you get in touch with John, find out more about his work and his business. I really appreciate the sincerity and in the depth of the sharing today. Thank you for for going there and bringing that all with us. Big thanks to Lucy Summers producing our show in the background there before and after during like that. To Vern Harnish for creating the scaling up framework that we use to help companies grow every day. If you want to get information about us or any of our work, you'll go find that@scalingcoach.com thanks to the folks at Podfly Productions, Alby Burge, ein Cadena, Tim McGowan for getting our show out the door, produced show notes, written up and all that kind of thing. Thanks everyone for listening for watching. Keep Scaling Up. Talk to you next time.

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