Build with Stephen Scoggins: The Best of 2025

How do we rebuild trust as a personal brand? As it. Because you know, a lot of our listeners are aspiring entrepreneurs or early stage entrepreneurs, mid stage, like they haven't quite broken through the seven figure ceiling. I'm just curious, how do we handle the trust?

What we have to tell people is don't think of personal branding as online.

Really.

We define personal branding as the digitization of reputation. All this is, is an old, this isn't a new concept, it's an old concept. It's really reputation. And reputation is about trust. And I would say just like. So, yes, I think there's been a lot of people who've been taken advantage of and burned by people online who just want to get their hands in their pockets. But that happens every day offline too.

That's true.

Happens every day and in every industry. Every industry, every geography. And what, what I would say is you can take advantage of people once, maybe twice, but if you have any type of vision for a sustainable business or brand or money making machine, you can't, you can't continue, you can't, you can't scale garbage. Yeah, right. Like you could take advantage of somebody once, but they're not going to refer their friends, they're not going to come back again and repeat. Business and referrals and recommendations and endorsements is, is all of business. And that hasn't changed, it's just multiplied, it's exponential. Now because we live in such an online world, I think my encouragement would be think longer term. But my encouragement is go. You got to remind yourself that this, that if you're a mission driven messenger, you're not trying to go viral for a moment, you're not trying to be famous for 15 minutes. You're trying to make a lasting impact in the world. And that takes time and if you do it right, it will last a long time. It's not, we're not the people, you can't, we're not the people who look for hacks.

Right.

We're not looking for tricks and gimmicks and oh, how do I like find a trending audio or like a secret hashtag? Like that's not what it's about, it's about reputation. It's about trust. And if you play that game, sooner or later you win. Now the other thing I would say to people that is important about this is in the short term it may feel like you're losing, but, but you always get paid for how hard you work. Sometimes it's now, but usually it's not oftentimes. It's later, but always, eventually.

Can you talk to me a little bit about the difference between what women need specifically as opposed to what men need? Maybe by even just highlighting like what, what really helps a woman optimize.

Lifting heavy. That's like my biggest thing for women 30 and, and up. We really need to focus on lifting heavy because as we age our hormones, that's, that's the number one pushback. But I absolutely love that it's changing. Like the narrative of that is changing, which I freaking love. But you're not going to look like a man because men and women, like you said, are built differently. We have different hormones, we respond differently. If I, I'm. Doesn't matter how heavy I go, I'm not going to look like a man. Unless if I'm taking hormone, you know, enhancement drugs. Unless if I'm on steroids, I'm not going to look like a man.

Yeah.

But. Because when we age, our bones start to deteriorate. Our muscles atrophy like it naturally happens. But if we're lifting heavy, it's going to strengthen our bones. It's going to help with the deterioration. It's going to help us as we get older. Women should. I really. That's my biggest thing. It's like, ease up on the cardio. Like stop doing the hiit workouts. The orange theory. No shade on that either. Like, like I, I have clients that still love to do that. But lessen up on that and focus on lifting because when you're doing those hit and high intensity workouts, your cortisol is going up and we're already dealing with an imbalance of hormones. And the more that our cortisol spikes, our body's in stress mode.

Yes.

There's good and bad stress.

Yeah.

But we want to make sure we're getting a good amount of stress.

Yeah.

So lifting heavy, ease up on the hit workout and ease up on the cordio.

I love that advice. I'm curious to know 1. How did you discover the, the framework of how to approach people?

Yeah.

And to what, what process? I know you already outlined in the book, but I want everybody surprise everybody a little bit.

You are a grown person and you can avoid them. That is your choice. I just don't think it's a growing one. Yeah. And you don't buy books to learn how to avoid people. You're already good at that. So while it's an option, I don't think it's a good one. But nevertheless, some people choose that one. The second option is they could just try to. To change them, which is a lot of people's go to strategy, which then leads us to the belief system that the world would be a better place if everybody was just like me. It's not a very healthy way to see the world. But a lot of times changing people requires twisting somebody's arm. You're grown, you can choose that. But I just don't think on the other side of trying to be changed that someone's going to actually enjoy working with you. The other one is you could cancel them. Some people just go, yeah, I'm just. I'm gonna cut them out of my life. I think sometimes people go to that option a little too soon before they've exhausted all of the other growing options. The last option that we propose in the book is to try and understand them. If you can learn the art of moving towards this person that is complicated, I've learned that they actually get less complicated. People will get more complicated with more distance. But the closer you get to them, you actually go away. You mean they're just overwhelmed?

Yeah.

I think the reason that, I think understanding a complicated person is the best growing option for all of us is because it's the option we all want. We've all had a moment in our life where we were misunderstood. And what do we want in that moment? Our day in court, we wanted to say, no, no, no, no, you don't, you don't know what I was going through. No, no, no, no, hey, no, you misunderstood my tone. You misread that text message. I didn't say. I said it, but I didn't say it in that tone. And now all of a sudden, they've misunderstood us. I think the best thing that we could do with people that we deem difficult or complicated is to give them the thing that we would want, the benefit of the doubt.

But somebody in the group said, hey, I'm not. I can't put that on my skin. Like, well, why? They're like, well, because you're gonna, you're gonna absorb the toxins that are in the product that's preventing the sun from, from as far as, like the, the UV rays. But it's causing all kinds of other issues.

Absolutely.

There's a, there's a movement out there. It's called low tox living low tox lifestyle. You'll hear people talk about it. And I love this approach because it's basically saying, like, we can't have a no tox lifestyle. We can't cut out all toxins. It's just not possible. I mean, the reality of the world that we live in, there are just tox exposed to.

But she. Reducing toxins has to help.

Exactly. What you're putting on your skin is huge. So I mentioned that I had those fibroid tumors. Mine was coming from fragranced products. So as women, the synthetic fragrances are in everything we use. It's, you know, lotions, hair stuff, perfume, everything has this, like, synthetic fragrance. And now the research is coming out that shows that this is very dangerous for our hormonal health. Our, you know, it's an endocrine disruptor. It affects our reproductive system. Our skin is our largest organ. And so it is going to absorb whatever goes on it to some degree. There are some nuances there, but even some of the natural, clean beauty products, you can still see some ingredients that aren't great.

Yeah.

So I think it really does require a lot of education and research and time to look into this stuff.

And the reason I'm saying this because I want to bring awareness to how to discover prey drive. I mean, I'm sure you recognize it really quick. Oh, boom. Boom.

Yeah. Okay, so now I got prey drive up here, which is the concept. Then I put it into phases. It's got to be activated. There must be a persistence to it. There must be an intensity to it. That's the phases of prey drive. And then I said, what activates this drive? Like what? Right. Which I go into in the book. Yeah, right. And it's like, okay, this activates it. This activates it. So. So that is different than motivation. Motivation means to move. Inspiration means to breathe life into prey. Drive is activation. How do you activate this deep, latent, undeveloped talent? Like I was telling you before the interview, like I figured out I've activated a new tool which is raising capital.

Yeah.

I saw other people do it. I go, I could do it. For years I talked about doing it. I draw it up, and then once I'm gonna give it a shot. Right. And look at how fast. Boom. I've been a part of 25 million bucks just like that. And so it's like that prey drive is your instinct to go get it. Right. And so it's like I started noticing that you were born with certain birthday gifts, but they're latent and undeveloped. They have not been opened or activated. And I could tell you story or story after story, and you've seen it in your life of something happening, and it's like it's activated. Yeah, right. I mean, there was a period where you were homeless. Right. And I see homeless people out here every day across from the Greatness Factory. Right. And I'm like, I know that person could do something. I know that person can flip a switch, but how does it happen? Right. And so my role has been taking that concept and deconstructing it and then I speak on it a lot, the psychology of it. I do it a lot with teams. So that's really what Flip the Switch and Prey Drive is.

This is one of those chances where the unknown entrepreneur can become a well known authority in the marketplace and supersede seed the, the incumbent that's been there for a decade and whatever. Right. This is that disruptive of an environment.

Absolutely.

Where if you will take the time to do your due diligence and to your, to your point, kind of like understand more about how it works and, and put the things into practice, you could do very well.

I always preferred SEO over paid, though.

We did both.

Because to me SEO is more owned versus rent.

Yeah.

But it was all based in quality because Google wants to reward quality. AI is the same thing. Now we're seeing some weird ST stuff in the, in the big startup stages of AI, but they are, it's all going to be based on quality. And I think the power of the way those, these amazing supercomputers, they can bring in so much more information now. So like they just announced that. Yeah. That every podcast ever produced is being indexed. Okay, well now that's fascinating to me because I believe that that's going to give us not only just the SEO value of what was said in the transcription, but now all of a sudden they're also getting the. Of when did somebody stop it? When did they like it? At what second did they comment? And all that's feeding into the quality of that podcast, the quality of that material. And so it does have an interesting opportunity with AI, just because of the vastness of the supercomputing power to. I'm going to use the word democratize. I think the audience understand what I'm saying. But all of a sudden now if you're a smaller player, like maybe you will have some leverage over just people who are just spending money in paid search, so to speak, if you have the quality and you, and you have that, and that can't be necessarily as easily mimicked or gimmicked, I should say.

Yeah.