Match The Right Doing To Your Being with Townsend Wardlaw

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I remember some of those conversations.

I just remember being so frustrated afterwards. But at the same time, that's what it took to shift the mindset. And what we're going to dive into is like nothing is the do. He's going to give you a couple quotes today, but like, there's no shortage of books out there on what to do courses out there on what to do. It's about who we need to be in order to succeed. And so I'm going to dive in with Townsend today about this idea of being, but even further on how it applies to. To sale. So buckle in, y'.

All.

This is going to be fun. Townsend, my man. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, brother. Good to see you. Good to be here. Excited about all the stuff we got planned.

I'm just pumped because that just means we get to hang out more and more like I know, which is going to be great. So we're going to get right into this idea of can you break down for the difference between being and doing? Because especially in sales, we want to know what to do all the time. Let's talk about the difference between doing and being and why that's so important.

I think what would be really useful is to give just a little bit of context before I do that. Right. Because even this idea that I'm going to share my awareness to it is newish for me. It's been there all along, but I only had ways to talk about it in the past three years. Like you, I had a fixation with doing. For those who aren't familiar with me or know me, you know, I have been kind of in this sales thought leadership, sales consultant game for a long time. I had my last real job in 2002. I started a company to do sales consulting. Flipped it into sales outsourcing. It kind of morphed into an interesting company where we, we were in the business of making salespeople. So got to remember back in like 2003, 4, there were no SDRs, BDRs. It was sort of a concept. I started training people from scratch to go into entry level sales as these BDR roles. For me, sales was my ticket to, let's just call it a very, very comfortable lifestyle. Right. I went to college. I have reasonable intelligence, reasonable curiosity, no advanced degrees. I was never going to be a doctor or lawyer. So what I want to do, well, I'll get into sales. I can make some real money. And I made a lot of money in corporate sales. I didn't like the corporate world, but sales, for me has always held this really special place in my heart where somebody of average intelligence can produce extraordinary levels of income. That's pretty cool. Like we just don't, we don't give that enough credit, right? Not a lot of people that I went to college with even are making more than 100, $200,000. I don't care what degree you have somebody with archeology or something, right? Even, even really smart scientists and people like heck doctors these days are lucky if they break six figures. Like strap your head on that. We got pretty new salespeople out there asking for a buck 20. So the democratization of sales as a profession has always been really passionate to me. It bothered me deeply that these companies were sort of like, well, we only want to hire people who know how to sell. We're not going to invest in them selling. And salespeople are born, not made. And I was like, that's bullshit for years. So I kind of by accident, you know, we always have great strategy intentions. We look in the rearview mirror. So we'll call it by accident on purpose. You know, I got in the business of bringing into, bringing people into a career in sales by kind of cracking the code of how do you take somebody who knows nothing about it and work with them on all the things that they would need to do to be, you know, led in the club. And the company that I had, I would say on an average year we would, you know, we would train is the way we talk about it. Train two to 300 people, bring two to 300 people through. We'd start with thousands, but two to 300 people would be out the other side. And we place them with these companies as entry level salespeople. So it was really fun and validating world. I shut that down in 2009 and for a variety of reasons. I was done trying to grow a company, but still had a passion for sales and selling. And I applied my craft, if you will, working with smaller companies, sub 10 million dollar companies to help them grow. And it was all about process and tools and methodology and technique. And for a while I really prided myself on this concept of I'm the guy that helps people get to the exactly how, right? What always frustrated me about sales training was it was all arm waving and concepts and mindset, but now nothing like what do you say, what's the script, what's the email, what's the sequence like? Give people a set of tools. You buy something from Ikea and it doesn't say, yeah, put it together, it'll Be fun. It's like step by step by step. Why can't it be that way for selling? And I spent a lot of years and made a lot of money teaching people and organizations and companies all the stuff they needed to do to grow their revenue. And I was really good at it, made a lot of money with it, made a lot of people a lot of money with it. But I'll tell you what always bothered me. There were a certain and a meaningful percentage of people that no matter how much we talked about what you need to do and how you do it and train on it and coach them on it, right? Like role playing stuff, they didn't do it or they couldn't do it, or they would be able to practice doing it and role play, and then they'd get for the customer and they couldn't do it in the moment. And it was like this. This really bothered me because these are good people, right? And it's like, I got to get you out of here. I got to fire you. You can't get this done. I have this belief that we are infinite beings, right? We. We have the capacity to do anything. We're born able to speak any language, have any concept, and pretty soon it's like, I can't do this. I can't do this. I'm not good at that. I'm not good at that. So I never, like, thought I was going to go about solving that problem. I just kind of got increasingly, for lack of a better term, bored with kind of flogging these people and organizations more and more. And what can they do? What can they do? I mean, how many times can you get paid to teach people how to make some cold calls and do it effectively? How many times can you lead a seminar on how to schedule the next interaction and not send a proposal out without a schedule meaning to review it? Simple stuff. And it's like 20% of people got it or already doing it. 20% of the people never got it. The middle folks sort of get it to a certain degree, but as soon as I was gone, they'd go back to doing whatever they're doing. I'm like, this is maddening to me. I made the decision a couple years ago. I was done consulting. I wanted to coach. And it was kind of interesting because it was more like running away from. I was sick of doing that. It's not like I even had a good idea what coaching was, but I knew I really wanted to work with the leaders and the people higher up who were responsible for the Culture and the environment and things that mattered, because that's the other side. Even if people are making a lot of money, if they're miserable, that's so fun for anybody. And trust me, a lot of these smaller founders, smaller business founders and entrepreneurs, they're pretty wound up people, right? They're pretty, like, not very happy people, no matter how much money they have. So I really want to make a dent there. I'll tell one more quick story which will anchor this idea that there's always been in my head like, something's missing, something's missing. And then I'll talk about kind of the real pivot. Then we'll get into being. It was about 20 something years ago, I think 20, 22 years ago, somebody handed me a book by a guy named Mahan Khalsa. Let's get real or let's not play. I read this book and I'd read a lot of sales books, solutions, selling my Michael Bosworth spin, selling back in the day, you name it, I've read the sales book. But I read this thing and I was like, holy shit, this is it. This is what I do. This is why I've been so successful. And I would hand it to everybody and share with everybody. They'd usually come back and say, I don't see what the big deal is. There's nothing really in that book for me. Well, 20 years later, what I can clearly see is that book was so powerful because it didn't prescribe anything people needed to do. It talked about a way of being in sales and sort of a beingness you would bring to the selling, to the world of selling that produced results. And I couldn't even explain it, but I'm like, this stuff is so cool. But it was still like, either God or you don't get it. Like, some people got the book and they did well with it. Some people were like, I don't get it. And there was no way to get them to get it.

Can I jump in there with a real quick anecdote that I thought was funny, right? So I'm reading this book right now. I'm really enjoying it. But Townsend, when he first told me about the book, he's like, I probably gave away thousands of this thousand. So I'm like, oh, man. So I jump on Amazon and there's 340 reviews, nothing. And I'm like, what are all these people doing? Like, he's giving. He's giving the do. He's giving it, and people still go, do. And I just remember Looking at going, damn it. See, this is part of our problem, is we don't even do what we know we need to do. Here's someone who's been successful, knows what they're doing, says, this is the greatest sales book you could possibly read. Here it is. And people still don't do. So I just had to jump in on that, because I remember that was my. When I got the book, I'm like, where are all thousand? Gave away thousands on his own.

Where are reviews? Yep. Yeah, keep going. That's awesome. So let's talk about being and what it is, right? So to me, it's pretty simple. In life, we have an idea of the results we want to produce or the outcomes we want to produce. So much money. I want to make the kind of relationship I want. I want to have kids. I want to have a house. I want to go on vacation three times a year. I want to be happy. Right. Even kind of, for us, happiness is a result. Are you happy? Yes, I am. I want to build a company. I want to give back. I want to travel all results. So we live in a world where, you know, we have to produce things we don't have to, but that's what we think about. What is true is that every single outcome or result that has ever been produced was the product of action. Right? Nobody ever built a company taking no action. Nobody ever made a million dollars taking no action. Nobody ever had a baby taking no action. You got to have an action to take a baby. You also have to take an action to not have a baby. Right. I was talking to somebody earlier today. They didn't have kids. I said, well, you're not having kids as a result of actions you took that were not having a baby. You did other things instead of having a baby. Action. Go to any bookstore in the world or Amazon, and, you know, you will never run out of possibilities for books that tell you what you need to do to produce the results that you want. And find one book that says, here's the proven roadmap for doing it, and you'll find another book that's like the exact opposite. This gets you thinking a little bit, right? If. If it was just like, this is the way you do things, there'd be one book on it, everybody would follow it, and everybody get the results as it is, there's lots of books. Those books are in direct conflict with each other. Some people do the things in the book and get the results they want. Some people do all the things in the book. Don't get the results they want. Some people don't do anything in the book and get the results they, this is interesting to me. So now we keep looking upstream. Well, what produces our actions, right? Because I say I need to do this, need to do that, all things I intend to do. But ultimately every action is produced from a thought. There's not a word that comes out of my mouth that there's not a thought that precedes it saying, speak that word. There's not any action. I take that, I don't think about taking it. So you got two people in the exact same circumstances. By circumstances, I mean what's going on out there? Let's use the example of a movie, right? Movie is circumstances. We're watching a movie, you and I are sitting there together. Kevin gets up and walks out. This thing sucks. And I'm sitting there laughing my ass off. Well, why is that different? It's the same movie. Well, Kevin has one set of thinking about the movie and I got another set of thinking. Thinking produces action. And no two human beings have the same thought about the same set of circumstances. The circumstances aren't objective. They are a product of a thinking of it. This is where mindset comes in, right? So mindset is powerful work. And it's all about the degree to which are the thoughts in your head, the right ones to produce the right actions. You see, most of us produce a thought and then we have a thought about that thought, and then we think some more thoughts about the thought. We have some thoughts about what other people are going to think about the thought. Eventually we get around to taking action. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, very successful people, what you'll find are really good at taking what for others might be a debilitating thought. Let's say like, I'm not enough, I'm not working hard enough. Well, they turn that thought into, let's work harder. Somebody else takes that thought, I'm not enough. I don't work hard. And they just sit around doing nothing. But the successful ones are often, often not awful. Those that have a lot of, let's just call them kind of heavy, tough to deal with thoughts, but know what to do with them. So we can teach people about mindset. Nothing wrong with that. It's powerful work. It's been going on for years. The question very few people have asked in the last. I mean, I've searched everywhere for this, and there are people asking the question is, what is it that produces the thoughts? Fundamentally, why is it that in a given set of circumstances. And again, I'm talking about the original thought. Like, we're sitting there with our eyes closed. And, like, scene opens, we're going to have a thought about it, probably have a thought even before our eyes open. But what is it that creates that thought? Now, above our thinking, we get into whole different. Call it reality or plane of existence or whatever. I think about it like, I can't. I can't actually see up there. So I don't. I don't have an answer to the question, what produces the thoughts? But I have an idea. And the idea is what I call being. It is our being that produces the thinking. So we go, well, what's being? Well, depends who you ask. For me, being is a function of a lot of things. Our upbringing, our race, our age, our sex, our trauma as a child. Some people would even say there's things like past life trauma. I would also say there's something even upstream of that in the world of being that some might call the universe or consciousness or God. Right? Most people that I've encountered, if they're being honest, will admit to the fact that some point in their life, a thought appeared in their head which they had no business thinking. Like, there was no prompt for that thought. My beautiful wife Louisa, was at the airport yesterday in Denver waiting to fly home. And she's sitting there waiting for the flight, having her salad, everything's fine. She had a thought. Let me refresh the app right here. Because something doesn't seem right, not even an awareness of it, but, like, the thought appeared in her head. Refresh the app. She's at the wrong gate. Got her ass up, got to the right gate, made her plane. She would have missed her plane, right? Things like that happen to us all the time. You're like, where did that come from? I don't really know. Possibly I noticed something subconsciously. Or possibly we'll call it inspiration. We'll call it our inner knowing, we'll call it our gut, or we'll call it God or the universe or consciousness or whatever suits you. But I think being is also part of that. Where did E equals MC squared come from? For Einstein, there was nothing even closely remotely near it until the thought maybe time is relative showed up. Well, that thought came from someplace. Nobody else had had that thought until then. So that's what we call being. So here's what I think gets interesting. We have results in the world. We say we like them, don't like them. They're the right ones, the wrong ones. We want more of this less of that. Immediately we fixate on what am I doing right, what am I doing wrong, what do I need to do more of? What do you do less of? Sometimes we get around to, well, how can I get my thinking better so I can do the right actions? There's a lot of work there, and it's stuff you can work on, right? I've done mindset work with people that helps them with their actions. I've done just action work with people, helps them get better results. The problem is, it's a lot of heavy lifting, and it doesn't always stick. What working at the level of being, as I call it, holds the promise of is that shifting the being changes everything downstream effortlessly. And I'll give you a little example of it. My clients come to me all the time and say, I got a problem. And they begin to describe to me a situation that is a problem, that is tough, that is challenging, that's difficult, that's going to require effort. You have to come up with a strategy for right. What I know to be true is that problem exists from their thinking and their thinking as a function of their being. So from how the world occurs for them, there's a problem, it's going to require a solution, et cetera, et cetera. I wouldn't believe it unless I've worked with folks on it. But when you can shift their being, it's sort of like giving them a different view. One of the analogies, that's simple I always use, I say, imagine you and I are sitting on a park bench, and we see this lady and this guy struggling over purse, right? And Kevin, you say to me, we got to go kick that guy's ass. Help the lady get a purse. And I go, oh, Kevin, you're missing something. I kind of scooch over a little bit. There was a tree in the way. You see, there's a woman knocked down. That was his girlfriend. That lady took the purse. Now we see the world differently. We're not going to go kick his ass, we're going to go help him. That's an example. And all analogies fall apart. But that's the idea of being at its simplest term is how the world occurs for us. And based on how the world occurs for us, we will have the thoughts we have about it. We will take the actions that seem in alignment to produce, and then we'll get the results we get. And I'll give you an example. We'll bring it all together around selling. I think it might have been two years ago. this point, one of the venture capital firms that I'd done a bunch of work for in the past called me up, said, we got this company. They're struggling. Could you help with the sales stuff? I'm the guy you call when you need people to sell more. Now, they didn't know I've been doing different work. I'm not training people. I'm not talking about doing. I'm doing being stuff. But I didn't have that conversation. They just said, will you help these guys? I said, love to. So they made the introduction. Two sales guys. They're gentlemen. They live in India. Bangalore, India. They're Indian guys. They're selling some SaaS product, 60, 80,000 a year, right? Only they're not selling anything. No deals are being closed. Lots of stuff going on. No deals are being closed. Something's not working. Townsend, go teach him something. Well, two months later, the CEO calls me and goes, I don't know what you did here. This is amazing. These guys are closing deals. I said, of course they are. He goes, what'd you teach him? What kind of trading did you do? I said, I didn't train him at all. And now he's really confused. What do you mean you didn't train him? I said, well, here's the way I think about it. What I could train them on is what I would know to do in the situation if I was in it. I call it the Townsend Dance. I know how to do my Townsend Dance. I got my moves right, and I. At least I think I look good doing it. And it works for me because I'm a, you know, little older white dude who lives in the United States. So now let's take these younger, very intelligent, but very different gentlemen from India and teach them to do the Townsend Dance. Well, they look funny doing it. More importantly, it's not natural for them to do it. It doesn't fit with their idea of themselves in the world. Right. I'm really good at being Townsend Wardlaw. These guys might learn a little bit of how to be Townsend Wardlow, but that would sort of be missing the point. So the guy's like, well, what you guys talk about? I said, it was simple. We spent two months talking about how does the world occur for them from who they're being? What do they see? What. When they're calling on a client? What does that sound like to them? What do they hear? What do they think is okay? What do I think is not okay? What do things right. What, do things wrong. What do you Think they're allowed to do what I think they're not allowed to do. We talked about power, authority, money, commitment, reciprocity. We talked about all sorts of stuff. And once we got clear and they got clear on, oh, that's how I see the world. Because most of what they're doing is from an unconscious seeing of the world. Once they're aware to I see the world this way, then I could say, would you like to see what I see? And I kind of walk them over here and I'm like, here's what I see. And they go, oh, well, then I'm going to do something different. And they started doing different things. They started applying different techniques because you can find techniques everywhere. But you would have to see the world differently to think you need a different technique. And so many times we're focused on the technique or the methodology, the process, we don't ever stop to think, well, how does the world occur for them that they would never want to use it. Right. So I'll pause for a second because there's a lot of stuff there you might want to pull apart. And it's.

I hope people, as you're listening this, it's like if you really think about it, and we actually know this in sales, especially to my sales leaders listening, if you think about a lot of the things that you have said to your reps, actually a lot of them come down to being. We just haven't been paying attention. Who does a sales be? They need to be confident, they need to be a consultant, they need to be an expert, they need to be relaxed, they need to be a guide. Like, we actually talk about this a lot, but then we paid no attention to it.

Right.

We still just get back to. But here's what you need to do versus who we need to be and how you're being. And so I'll recap it. How you're being, changes you're doing. Yes, because if you are being a consultant, you're doing with change. If you are being calm, if you are being. And that was the biggest shift for me that's happened today. We were chatting about it a little bit beforehand of like, who am I being right now? Who am I being? Because I'm being committed.

Yeah. Yeah.

I'm going to do changes versus what do I just need to do?

Think, think about. Imagine your customer, right? And you could say, well, who are you going to do business with? Well, I'm going to do business with somebody I trust. So they would need to be honest. Right? That's what they would need to do. They need to do things that were honest. I'm going to do business with people who I believe have my interests at heart. So somebody would have to do things that demonstrated they cared more about me than the commission. Right. Josh. Josh Braun calls it the commission breath. Right. They would need to do things like that. They would need to be or they would need to. I would do business with somebody that was knowledgeable. Right. So the person would have to do things that demonstrated that they were really, you know, dedicated to the craft. All right? So companies say, well, let's, let's put together a training program that'll teach our salespeople to be honest, to put the customer first. Right. And to be self learners. Let's teach them those things. But we're going to teach them these skills. On top of a being that shows up to work, afraid of losing its job, feeling overwhelmed. Right. More concerned with itself than anybody else. Right. Because that's how a lot of us are. That's how we're taught to be. You got to be out for yourself, got to make sure you get yours. So we're going to teach these things things and teach them to a being that goes, okay, well, I'll take the class and I'll mouth the things, but I'm actually not going to do any of that. Right. When we talk about shifting being, we're talking about changing the operating system of who we are. Right. I'll give you a very simple example that to me is incredibly powerful. I can't even add up how much money I've been paid by companies to come in and teach the salespeople, the teams, the organizations. This idea of selling is about creating commitments. I'm going to do this. You're going to do this. Creating the commitment, holding people to commitment, not just sending pricing proposals out and then chasing them. But what are you going to do with it and all this stuff, even scheduling the next meeting. It's core from a methodology standpoint. You don't leave a meeting with another meeting. That's a tactic. I've done this for years and years and years. And the amount of people that have actually adopted it, I'm sad to say, very, very few. Moreover, the ones that still do it a month after I'm gone are even fewer. Well, if I am going to hold others accountable to the degree that I create accountability for myself, Right. I'm going to put together a proposal for you as I'm making a commitment. If I'm going to have the idea, well, I need a commitment in return so that I can have the thought, ask him for a meeting so I can ask him for the meeting and get the meeting. Well, I would have to be somebody who saw themselves, quite simply, as deserving. It comes down to that simple, I am deserving of a commitment here versus I must commit, and then they'll let me know if I'm deserving. Right. And this gets into concepts of worth and value. And we can go all sorts of different ways, but when you look at the highest performers and people that are very successful in selling, what you see is they naturally have a being that says, I know my worth, and I'm going to find people who value it. They don't chase value to prove their worth. A lot of salespeople are out there trying to close a deal so they can feel good about themselves and pay the rent. I show up feeling really good about myself, knowing my value, presenting value, not afraid somebody can take it away or diminish it or rob it or steal it. I show up with value. Sorry, show up with worth. And those that value it stick around. Not only from who I'm being.

This is so. This is so deep, you guys, and I hope you're hearing it for what it can be. Because if you're honest with yourself, everyone listening, if you're honest with yourself and said, am I being my best self? Am I even being my best self right now? How do we answer that? Or are there things you know you should be doing and you're not? If there are things that you know you should be doing but are not, it means there's a gap in the being who we is, the problem we know to do.

Y'. All.

Like, there are things that we all know we need to do to be healthier, to have a better relationship, to be a better parent, to be better with our money, to sell more. We know so much of the do.

Yeah.

Being that is off. And if we can change our being, that's when everything kind of. Let's take that next step a little bit of, like, how can you change your being? Yeah, like you mentioned, all the dominoes start to fall.

Well, first I want. I want to think of a shifting being. I also want to be clear that this idea of being is not something we discover. Everybody's already being. They're being away, and that's producing their life. So it's not like I teach people being. It's not like you and I are going to help people learn it for the first time what they can be aware to is how they're being. And before I get into that, I want to just take one, one quick step up. There are many ways to skin the cat, as they say. I can produce results from being insecure. Like, something's wrong, I'm going to screw it up. Very powerful people, very successful people create a lot of results from an insecure being. And they produce a lot from that. It works for them. The problem is, the more you want to produce in terms of results, the more insecurity you must produce to create those results. That's why it gets more and more miserable, right? A lot of folks, and there was a time in my life when I had this. Had this idea there's a being. I'm not supposed to be here. I kind of snuck in, right? Some people call it imposter syndrome. Well, what does somebody who has the being that doesn't think it's supposed to be here do? Well, they do lots of things to prove it. And if you go, wow, that guy's working really hard, man. We should promote him. They get promoted from the being. I don't want him to find out I don't belong here. And it works. The problem is, at some point they're up here and everything that's been created has been from. I can't let them find out I don't belong here. And now it's even more of that because I'm higher up. I got further to fall. Let's go all the way back. What if instead of waking up in the morning and being I don't belong here, and then let me, you know, do all the things so nobody finds out? What if I was being I belong here. I deserve this. I got this. Just same results, different state of being. Now, over the course of weeks, months, years, decades, what's going to give you more energy, right? Just don't even worry about the results. Let's just imagine the results are the same, right? Would you rather be making a million dollars a year making sure nobody finds out you don't belong here? Or a million dollars a year knowing you belong here and deserve it all from who you're being? And all this goes back to when we were little. We were told, here's how you are. Everything about our being and everything about life was spoken to us. It was created for us. Your name, right? You're Kevin. I'm Kevin. The world's scary. The world's scary. The world's easy, whatever it is. I was told from a very young age you can do anything. A lot of People are told you'll never amount to anything. And we both go out there and create in the world. We both produce results. But it's the qualitative experience of those results from our being that determines how far we can go and how miserable we are, right? What almost killed me when I was around 40 was an entire life that had been built on a being. It's up to me. Nobody's coming, I'm on my own. Man, did I produce a lot of money and power and results and relationships and a company out of that. But it was almost not worth living, right? And for me it had to be kind of dramatic. Everything kind of get broken down before I said, maybe I'll use a different raw material to produce my life. So that's the idea of if I could shift who I'm being. Well, I'll produce at least the same results, but I'll produce them. I like to call with a different fuel in the tank, right? Sort of like I got this really toxic fuel with lots of emissions and gas and it's bad for the environment. I got this nice clean running electricity in the car. They both move the car, different fuels. So how does one shift being? Well, the key is you first must be aware to how you are being. That's producing your life, right? And that's actually not that difficult. It's observing your actions and your thinking to see and ask the question, who must I be being thinking these thoughts and having these conversations, right? If I am fighting with my wife, if I'm arguing with her, I'm not being loving, I'm being right, right? If I'm all lovey dovey with my wife and, and tell her I love her and being sweet with her and have nice thoughts, well, I'm being loving. There's no other way to do it. Like being is the thinking and doing like a seed is to the tree. If I plant an avocado seed, I get an avocado tree. If I plant a peach seed, I get a peach tree. If I'm being loving, I produce loving thoughts, loving actions. If I'm being scarcity, I have scarce thoughts and I'm very stingy in my life. So the first key is always to get really real about how am I being like, don't get all attached to you doing the right things or the wrong things or the right results. The wrong results. Just ask how am I being producing them? And what I find fascinating about this work is we're all pretty good at self correcting, right? The challenge to stopping fighting with your wife, the only challenge is realizing you're fighting with her. Once you realize I'm not being loving, I'm being argumentative, well, I know how I want to be, which is loving. So it's usually pretty easy to shift back to that. But the temptation is try to say the right things, or modulate my words or hold back my words, or not say it wrong. And we get stuck out here. Like, I call it holding the wrong end of the tool. Right? We're holding the wrong end of the tool, trying to get the job done. Whereas in order to work at the level being, you have to use the thinking and the actions to get a sense of the being. And for lack of a better term, kind of ignore them. Like, don't try to do anything with them. Because the temptation is, as soon as you see us doing something wrong, well, let's fix what we're doing. And what you're doing is you're. You're hiding and you're obscuring the being that's creating it. It doesn't. It does work to a point, right? I can coach people. Don't say that, say this, don't do that, do this. And we'll make some tweaks. But if I can let them do what they're doing and kind of work upstream and say, well, who are they being that's doing it that way? And we shift their being. The example I was sharing about this idea of next scheduled meetings and commitments. I worked with a group last week, a sales team, and we had spent a number of weeks on the fundamentals of working at the level of being. And seeing the base, they're really aware to it. So now we got to have the fun parts. Like, we got the operating system all dialed in. Now we just put the apps in there, right? So one of the apps is how do you do proposals? And they talked about what they did, and they're thinking about why they did that. And then we did what I call a being shift. And it was the coolest thing. Kevin, you got six people sitting around the camera, and they're just like, oh, shit, I can't believe I was doing it that way. Like, it's literally as if I took their glasses off and they saw a different world. Well, now they're going to do, like, what I promise you is they will never send out a blind pricing sheet with no commitment, no nothing ever again because it looks ridiculous to them. Before last Friday, it looked like what you're supposed to do. Telling them to get a scheduled meeting well, that looked crazy. So that's the power of this working at the level of being stuff is once you get to kind of the operating system and the framework for it, literally, you can transform deals, you can transform sales processes. You can transform any aspect of the sales process by shifting your being. Because you stop trying to get people to do different things. You work at the level of how does the world occur for them that they're doing the things they're doing.

And all this too, one I can speak to personally. Just if I look at how much my life has changed since working with you and going through the program and going through it, I'm like, I actually feel like I'm doing less. I feel like I'm doing like that. The fuel analogy I love because the results are better in every aspect of my life. I'm making significantly more money. I have a better relationship with my kids and my wife. I am healthier now. But the do the doing. I feel like I'm doing less and it's cleaner burn, you know, it feels like cheating.

Sometimes it feels like cheating.

I'll catch myself of like, oh, I'm not doing enough. I'm getting lucky. And then I change my state of being of like, wait, no, hold on. Because something you said that I wanted to call out and I, you know, you probably said this when we were working together, but I hadn't heard it in that moment of like, the doing put on the wrong being never works. And I think, like, that really stuck with me because as a sales leader myself, teaching the dude. Teaching the dude. If it's not going, doesn't matter. As we wrap on this, because I was like, man, we could go for hours.

We could go for hours.

And we will. Let's talk about then what sales being is, like, what the vision we have for this and what that program can look like.

Well, for me, it's really simple. And that is. It is a dramatically different way to accomplish the goal that I've had for a long time, which is to empower people to produce the results they want in their life. In and around this career called sales. That's all it is, right? What I want for people is the ability to have a tool set and a way of thinking and a way of approaching their career, such that anything that's going on, they can almost instantaneously change. And I've made that down to the deal level. I worked with sales folks that are losing a deal. We shift being the strategy and everything shifts. Now they're winning it. They didn't have to do anything different. I've had sales folks I've worked with that have lost a deal. We shifted the being. They went back and won it. Right? So anything about that, I don't want to say more importantly, but I will say more importantly, at the end of the day, this is about people, right? We're having a human experience here. And it's great to make money and it's great to have success. But what we really care about is the connectedness we have, the level of peace in our life, the level of freedom we feel. Everybody says they want freedom. I know lots of guys with lots of zeros in the bank account. They're still talking about freedom someday. So for me, this is about. I don't want to call it a Trojan horse, but we got something here that is incredibly tangible that people should be willing to pay for, invest their time and their money, and companies should be willing to do that because it has a material benefit on the revenue, something we all can measure the roi and this is ridiculous. I talked to a guy today, a week ago. We met for half an hour in the week that we met. He's a consultant, a coach. He does his own thing. He basically went out and made 5,400 bucks. Half an hour, he turned into a shift in being one little shift, he turned into $5,400. I'm like, that's pretty good ROI, right? And that's everywhere but the degree to which we can help up level the human experience, right? Because let's face it, there's going to be people who are always going to be successful, but do they go home and truly enjoy that success? Are they connected with their wives and their families or are they playing the someday game? So the idea of bringing this to the world as a tool that has a very material benefit but fundamentally changes people's lives is what I'm most passionate about. That's why we're working together. Right. We both care about the outer world game. We love playing the game called make money. But we're also far enough along in life. We're like, you know, it's not all about that. There's more to that, right? Yeah.

And it's that aligned mission, right. That like triggered the phone call.

Right.

As I went through this program with you, I saw the results and then it was conversation after conversation going that this is what's missing from salespeople. They need this. Like the do is out there. This is what's missing. And then it was. It was like, hey, I have an Idea. Can we talk? I talk about, like, ideas, right? Things being downloaded.

Yeah.

Brain of, like, how could we do this specific for sales? And, like, I have taught a lot of courses. You have taught a lot of courses. I've trained a lot of reps. You've trained a lot of reps. Like, we have that part. I would have been so excited about a course because this is about changing the being, changing the mindset.

And it's fun. It's not like a heavy lift or beating people up or bludgeoning them or having. I used to have to work a whole room and, you know, this deal. Like, you, like, you're fighting with the whole room to kind of see what you're trying to get them to see. And this is like, people. People receive it, right? Because. Because it's their being, seeing it differently. It's their power. It's their choice. It's not do this because I said so. It's the right way. It's a proven methodology. Right. If you're sitting there, you know, screwing screws with a screwdriver and I go, hey, try this. And it's a. I don't have to convince you about this. Right? I don't have to have a long conversation about, this is better. You're a smart, powerful human being. Like, give me that. I'm done with this nonsense. I'll use that one. That's what this is.

So where can people go find more? Like, if they're interested in learning about their being, if they're interested in this idea of shifting their being to get the results that they want, where can they go to learn more about this and get involved?

That's a great question. The short answer is, in the near term, you and I are running a couple of cohorts for this being for sales experience. So that will be happening. I'm a big believer of we do it. We show people the power of it, and then we can create websites and PDFs and all that kind of stuff. I'm not really into trying to convince people there's enough people lining up for this. So if this is interesting to anybody watching this, send me an email. Send Kevin an email. This is a very different approach, and as such, we're taking a very different approach to, like, enrolling people in this. It's not like a, you need this. Let's pitch you on it. It's. Let's make sure you're in the right spot for it. So there's a couple steps that we're walking people through that will both Help them learn a little more about being and bring them to the point where we can see if this is a good fit now or maybe, maybe down the road. It's not. There's no rush on this. So the short answer is, if you want to learn more about being and this piqued your curiosity, send Kevin an email. Send me an email. We'll send you some stuff to start looking at, reading, watching. We'll kind of start to build the relationship in service of you. And we got some things going on that if you want to actually jump in the deep end of the pool and start creating some results, we got that too. Yeah.

And actually I have to ask this question. I just have to ask this question. Like we'll wrap on this is like working with a coach, right? Like why working with a coach is so important. Because I, you know, I was reading a lot of this stuff. I was reading the books, I was doing things. Yeah, get a coach, you have a coach, one of the best coach, ultimate coach, right? Like let's wrap on this idea of like why having a coach matter?

So it's a great question, but the first thing I'll say is nobody needs a coach, right? We're powerful beings. We can, we can self learn our way to anything. There's a fundamental challenge in doing anything yourself is we always see what we see from where we're seeing it, right? People are always like, so I work with a coach in Phoenix, Arizona. He only meets in person. I spend two days every two weeks in transit to go spend two hours with him. And there's a big check to write as well. But it's a big commitment. One of the most sought after coaches in the world. I'm very privileged and grateful to be working with him, but people always ask, so what'd you learn? What did he tell you? Like, he's like, you know, got some book of wisdom and he's doling it out. And what I say is, that's not how it works, right. I'm an incredibly intense, thoughtful, intelligent human being. I can solve anything that I see. And I always see what I see, but only where I'm looking from. So when you talk about having a coach, right, this idea of coaching, real coaching, real coaches don't tell you what to do. They don't even tell you how to be. They help you calibrate where you're looking at the world and guide you to look at it differently. Because when you see it differently, you start thinking differently, you start acting differently, you produce different results. So it's a very different methodology than training or even what a lot of people call people think coaching is like, let me give you advice in this deal. In the most pure coaching, I don't give advice, I don't tell people anything. I work to help make sure I grasp what do they see from where they're looking and then give another view. And to be honest, after having done this for a lot of years with a coach, I'm pretty good at it. I'm pretty good at saying, okay, what do I see from where I see and let me see it differently and taking different views. But I still go work with this guy and he shows me something like, man, I would have never looked there. But now that I'm looking from there, what I see changes everything. So that's my spiel on coaching. And it's also an accelerant. I met with a very powerful guy a couple weeks ago. I say powerful, what he's created in the world just sold his company. He's a retired military officer, flew very expensive jets. The guy's accomplished everything any person could conceive of accomplishing in their life. But he's got another 34 years left. So all we talked about is what would you want to create in the next 30, 40 years? And we did a lot of look in there and he came up with some very powerful intentions. I want to do this, I want to do this. And they weren't like things to get done. They were ways of being that would produce other stuff. Long story short, when he had written these down, I said, listen, I'm going to promise you something. Everything on that piece of paper that you wrote down, you will get to. And you don't need me for it. You will get there simply by the virtue of you have the idea in your mind of where you want to be. That's how we work now. If you'd like to get there faster, we could talk about me helping you. That's it. I don't get anybody any place they're not going to get on their own. I can help them come up. Any coach can help you come up with a better vision for you want to be, but you don't need them to get there. But shit, if I can do something that's going to take 10 years in a year, I'll pay money for that.

Now that's something I've always encouraged my team and reps right about what to do. It's like, why take 10 years to get good at something? If you can learn from someone good at it for 10 years, learn from people. Just the accelerant is the key. It really can.

Because time is the commodity we run out of. A lot of people are like, well, I'm fine where I'm at. I said, yeah, me too. But what I know to be true is this carnival ride is going to stop. And if I can do something in a year that would Otherwise take me 10, I. I don't want to do it in a year because I need to, but. Because then I'll do more stuff. I don't need to do any of it. I don't need more money. I don't need more impact. I don't need more love. I don't need more sex. I don't need more anything. And yet every day I wake up going, what more can I create? Because it's fun, the sheer joy of it. How much more can I give? How much more can I contribute to the world? How much more love can I produce?

And that's the core of it, man. I think that's what's driven me in this too, actually. I was interviewed. This was, gosh, three years ago now, right before the Pandemic. I was supposed to present at Sales Loss, you know, Rainmaker and gonna get to meet Spike Lee. I was super excited about all of it. And they flew up and they did these interviews, and one of the things that I asked is, like, what would allow you to die happy? Was one of these deep questions they asked.

Yeah.

Like. And actually have this quoted. So it's actually in my office. Like, if I could just find a way to help people accomplish their goals in life, I would die happy. Because it's such an amazing. When you set a goal and you hit it, that feeling is just matched. And it's like I've been searching for so long of, like, how could I do it? And actually think I know what that is now.

I think I do, too. Yeah.

So, Townsend, my man. This was everything I was hoping it would be and then some. As always, you know, I love you. I appreciate you. Thank you so much for this today, man.

Thank you, brother. Love you. Oh, yeah, Sam.