Today we are interviewing an executive and life coach, somebody who has personally helped change my mindset. Although some of his ideas are unconventional in the way they’re articulated, I’ve seen really meaningful results from them. I’m talking about John Mark Shaw. As I mentioned, he’s my personal coach. On the show, we discuss a lot of ideas that I personally use every day and I’ve seen great success with.
If you missed episode 131, check it out here: Data, Set, Match: How to Build a Two-Sided Marketplace to Drive Revenue with Ryan Walsh
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Show Agenda and Timestamps
- Show Introduction [00:04]
- Who is John Mark Shaw? [3:13]
- Coaching lessons learned from 25 years in hospitality [4:57]
- The process of building a coaching business [9:40]
- How to approach the cynics [19:39]
- What to expect from coaching [25:54]
- How to help people change the way they think [29:19]
- John Marks’ biggest influencers [36:42]
- Sam’s Corner [39:54]
Show Introduction [00:04]
Sam Jacobs: Today we are interviewing an executive and life coach, somebody who has personally helped change my mindset. Although some of his ideas are unconventional in the way they’re articulated, I’ve seen really meaningful results from them. I’m talking about John Mark Shaw. As I mentioned, he’s my personal coach. On the show, we discuss a lot of ideas that I personally use every day and I’ve seen great success with.
Now before we get there, we’ve got two sponsors. The first is Loopio. This episode is brought to you by Loopio. If RFPs are slowing down your sales team, you need to check out Loopio. It’s a leading RFP response software trusted by more than 800 high performing organizations across North America. It automates the tedious parts of the response process like filling in the right answers and formatting documents so you can finish RFPs in hours instead of days. See how Loopio can help with your next RFP, go to loopio.com/saleshacker to get a personal walkthrough today.
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Now, without further ado, let’s listen to this interview with John Mark Shaw.
Who is John Mark Shaw? [3:13]
Sam Jacobs: Hey, everybody, it’s Sam Jacobs, and welcome to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Today on the show, we’ve got a very special guest. We’ve got John Mark Shaw. And I’ll tell you a little bit about him and then there’s an interesting personal detail that we will get to. So, John Mark Shaw is an executive and life coach, a business development consultant, a professional speaker, and a successful entrepreneur with over 25 years of executive leadership and management experience. John helps people and businesses grow by working with individuals, entrepreneurs and leaders to develop a vision for where they want to be and a strategic plan to get there.
As a sought after coach, consultant, and speaker, John offers inspiring and transformational programs that help clients achieve new heights of success. John, welcome to the show.
John Mark Shaw: Thank you so much, Sam. Honored to be here. It’s a real privilege for me.
Sam Jacobs: We’d like to start with your baseball card, which is basically an opportunity for you to tell us what you do in your words. I obviously just read your bio, but executive and life coach, what does that mean? Tell us about how you would describe both your title and the company that you’re running.
John Mark Shaw: I help entrepreneurs connect to their higher power and purpose, follow their inner guidance, and create lives and businesses that they love. I do that by helping them develop mastery over their mindset, and also creating strategies for them to identify clearly where they are, develop a crystal clear vision of where they want to be, and then take massive action to get where they want to be. And that can be internal, that can be external, that can be personal life, and that can be in their businesses.
Sam Jacobs: Wow. And how long have you been doing this?
John Mark Shaw: I’ve been doing this for five years. I started my own business just under five years ago. I was a restaurateur for 25 years, and that culminated in my co-founding and building a $30 million business, Hill Country Hospitality. And then I really always had a burning desire to serve people on a deeper level and to help people grow both spiritually and in their lives and businesses. So, as I was approaching 50, I took the leap to start a new chapter with a one-year-old daughter and a new family to support. I am now living my dream and so grateful to have made that leap.
Coaching lessons learned from 25 years in hospitality [4:57]
Sam Jacobs: Let’s dive in there. So first Hill Country Hospitality, is that the legendary Hill Country Barbecue here in New York. That’s my favorite barbecue place.
John Mark Shaw: That’s so nice of you to say. It is. I spent 25 years working for some of the best restaurateurs around, Danny Meyer. I was the Chief Operating Officer for David Bouley, and then I met my partner, Marc Glosserman, and we co-founded and built this company from the ground up. It was an incredible experience for me as a leader and building something from scratch and really learning the core of entrepreneurship. And I’m really grateful for the time that I spent there and for my time in the hospitality industry. And it really taught me many, many things that I’m using today, every single day, in terms of my coaching practice.
Sam Jacobs: What are some of the things that it taught you?
John Mark Shaw: The idea that it’s an internal game. As Tony Robbins says, success is 80% mindset and 20% strategy. I believe that developing a clear vision of where you want to be is the most important and vital aspect of that. Making a firm decision, being committed, being all in, by any means necessary kind of energy. And then having the courage to take the scary steps to have a strategic plan to take the steps, to do it afraid, to do it imperfectly, to know that you’re going to get it wrong, there’s a level of tremendous requirement of resilience to be and self-love and self-acceptance so that you’re forgiving yourself for your mistakes.
I think there’s a great quote that says “perfectionism is the enemy of success.” We got so many things wrong during that run, and yet created so much success. Fear is really a constant companion on the journey and that it’s not about not having the fear but having the courage to feel the fear and do it anyway and to be willing to do it afraid, do it messy, do it in perfectly and learn as you grow and that you learn as much from your failures as you do from your successes.
So, all of that learning and loving building a team and working toward inspired outcomes and celebrating wins with teams and building a team from scratch. I built a 400-person team one person at a time and that was thrilling with all the trials and tribulations but also the glory and the gratitude and building a culture of people that love what they were doing and were inspired every day. And humans that are happy and succeeding and thriving, which is I think the most important piece.
Sam Jacobs: Did you eat a lifetime’s share of barbecue over the course of those 10 years?
John Mark Shaw: I absolutely did. I also had a, we just packed up and moved as you know. I also have 14 pairs of cowboy boots. I invested heavily in the proper attire to be a Texas barbecue and fried chicken restaurateur. Ate a ton of great barbecue, not only ours but did lots of tasting tours in Texas in lots of other areas. It’s a required part of the job to make sure that the quality is great and that you’re doing the absolute best that you can to keep up with all that’s going on in the food world.
Sam Jacobs: We will spend a great deal of time talking about your coaching, but just last question on barbecue. So, what is the secret to a great barbecue in your opinion given your adventures there?
John Mark Shaw: What’s interesting is it’s the commitment and the love of the process. It’s an art form. And I think mastery in any endeavor — as a sales leader, as an entrepreneur, as an artist, anything that you’re doing as a business person — it’s the willingness to really get in deep into the process and to I think love what you’re doing. Especially the pit masters who are cooking our barbecue, living, breathing, speaking barbecue, tasting passionate, low and slow is the key.
The key to barbecue is low temperature, long hours. Cooking things for eight hours, 10 hours, 12 hours. There’s an element of patience and persistence and faith in the outcome. And just really loving and passionate about what you’re doing and caring about that smile that comes over someone’s face when you watch them taste your food. If the food is cooked with love and served with love and when you see it received with love, that’s the magic right there.
The process of building a coaching business [9:40]
Sam Jacobs: That’s awesome. Well, let’s talk about the transition. It is striking, you built this incredible company. It’s a well-known institution here in New York City as I can attest. And then you decided to radically change your career. So, walk us through that process, that journey of leaping from something that you just spent 10 years building into the coaching business that you started I guess five years ago but is still relatively new.
John Mark Shaw: I think this is important for everyone who, there’s sort of like the key steps to having a transformation. And I think the first step is to really do what I call, and my mentor Mary Morrissey calls, honoring your longing and your discontent. And so, for many years, I had developed a longing to serve people in a deeper way. 22 years ago, I had developed a drinking problem and I got sober, and that led to spiritual awakening and a calling for me to learn about myself, a passion for personal development, for spirituality and for helping myself become better, and also helping other people become better.
I think that longing evolved over time with various commitments. I became an ordained interfaith minister about 14 years ago. On that path, but I was always doing business as my main endeavor and doing those kinds of things on the side. And I was 49 years old, about to turn 50, and I think it’s a time of life that you take stock on where you are, as I had said earlier, had a wife, a recent wife, I’m a bit of a late bloomer in a relationship. I got married when I was 46, and I had a one year old daughter at the time.
Huge blessing and also a journey. And I realized, there’s a great quote from one of my favorite poems. “May I have the courage today to live the life that I would love, to waste my heart on fear no more.” And so, what I realized was, “To do at last what I came here for, excuse me, and waste my heart on fear no more.” And that quote really struck me because I recognized that while I had had success and I was doing something that I was good at and had some passion for, that I was not in fact doing the thing I came here for. That there was a level of spiritual service, personal service, helping people grow that I was passionate about and that I had been holding off and avoiding for fear, for wanting to do the practical, safe thing, to make a good living, to support my family.
But that longing and discontent reached a heightened state, and I think for all the listeners, when you are endeavoring for a transformation, it’s important to be willing to stoke the fire and experience your longing and discontent, and turn it into what Napoleon Hill called a burning desire. And so, what was feeling incomplete and longing and discontent, I turned into a burning desire to create some change. The turning of 50 served as sort of a defining moment. And I made a decision that I was going to create change, that I was going to take a scary step. And I found a mentor, Mary Morrissey. I became certified and I’m in sort of a PhD program to this day in transformational studies and coaching. And I took a leap, and it was scary.
One funny story, one of my jobs as a dad is to read bedtime stories to my daughter. At the time, we were reading Old MacDonald, and I was singing, Old MacDonald had a farm E-I-E-I-O. And I was doing the cow sounds and all the different sounds. And during those times when I was first contemplating leaving and then taking the step, I was literally having an anxiety attack internally, like what have I done, this is crazy. So having fear but singing that song while I’m internally freaking out and trying to just be a good dad and sing a fun song.
So, it’s not without fear. Fear is just the energy of the border of the reality we’ve known. And it’s important to be able to befriend and embrace your fear. But I knew that something was being called forth in me, that I didn’t want to wake up at the end of my days and realize that I had not really taken the risk to serve and to be the man that I had always imagined I could be. So, it was a scary leap and it required something called, what I call visionary thinking or Emerson and Thoreau compared to transcendental thinking that they call common hour thinking or common sense.
And at the time, my common sense or common hour thinking was what kind of an irresponsible father of a one year old would leave his safe and secure career to start a new business. And that makes a lot of sense. So, our fear is often very seductive. And my fear was very seductive because I wanted my whole life to be a father and a responsible father and husband and being responsible was always a key core value for me. And so, I kind of set up this opposition that doing the thing that I was called to do would be contrary to that. But that’s the way what I call the paradigm or the operating system of our limiting beliefs keeps us stuck in our tracks. Sometimes it’s just about being willing to take the scary step, believing that you’re, if you’re called, do something that you feel like is really your passion and purpose to be able to lean in and to take that step. And thank God it worked out, and I’m blessed that I’m doing what I love right now, which is the greatest gift I think.
Sam Jacobs: What was your strategy?
John Mark Shaw: A few things, absolutely money, just so on the mindset or the belief element, I believe and I think Maslow spoke about this, that if we do the thing that is most in alignment with what we would love, if we honor our inner guidance, and what he said most people do, trade that in for external approval and do what other people think that we should do, that we will be more successful, we will be happier, and we will actually make more money. That we’ll be living center stream to our being. And I learned this through my studies with my mentor and other people. I have a firm belief and I believe that for my clients is that, when we are doing what we’re most passionate about and called to do, it’s like we’re out in the middle of the current of the river where the force and power are strong, and that’s where there will also be more financial compensation.
So, that is an underlying belief. In terms of scale, I watched my mentor build a coaching business and a teaching business that’s many multiples, many multiple million dollar business. And so I’ve learned strategies. There is group coaching, there’s professional speaking, there’s teaching classes where you have 50, 100. She has classes that are 500 people on the line. She sells programs for $100,000 per year or more for coaching. So, there are ways to scale your revenue in terms of one on one. There are ways to scale your revenue in terms of group and in terms of offering different kinds of programs and structures of support. And then potentially also, developing a roster of coaches that I might potentially work with one day was another potential strategy.
Sam Jacobs: Cool. So far, so good. How are things moving according to your plan?
John Mark Shaw: Yes, thank God. I’ve replaced the income, more than replaced the income that I was making in my restaurant job. Yes, and scaling every year. For example, through this pandemic when I think we all had fears about how that would affect my business, thank God, my business has been up over 25% during these months, which is, again, a testament to that, and one of the things I really want your listeners to hear that we live in a personal economy, and the mind attracts what the mind dwells upon. There is tremendous opportunity right now during this adversity as your incredible success can attest.
As Napoleon Hill said, every adversity has the seed of an equal or greater benefit but we have to find it and plant it and nurture it and harvest it. So this great adversity where experience has an equal and opposite potential benefit. And so while there’s tremendous tragedy right now, there is tremendous opportunity for disruption and for really quantum and exponential business growth. And I’m seeing it with my clients, I know you’re seeing that which is incredible and I’m seeing it in my own business as well.
Sam Jacobs: First of all, I’m glad to hear that your business is up 25%. And yes, I sort of buried the lead, didn’t I? Because I am a client of yours, John. So the listeners should know that, and I can hardly attest to the work that we’ve been doing over the past year because it’s been completely transformational for me.
How to approach the cynics [19:39]
Sam Jacobs: How do you handle that objection when you encounter people that feel like maybe this stuff is not for them, because maybe spirituality isn’t something that comes into their day to day business life?
John Mark Shaw: Absolutely. And thank you, that’s a great question. Often what I’ll use is quantum physics and neuroscience. It’s a very charged topic, spirituality, because most people have ingrained beliefs that were created by their experiences with organized religion, either a good experience or for many people, a not so good experience. And so I believe that they’ve kind of thrown out the baby with the bathwater.
And so, what’s what’s amazing right now is that modern science is just proving that there are universal principles, just like the law of gravity, the law of thermodynamics, the law of mathematics, that there are universal principles about the way it works in this quantum field, in this energy system.
And so, my encouragement to people is to recognize that there are principles, that if you master those principles like mastering the principle of mathematics, you move up the ladder. My daughter thinks adding five piles of five apples is the only way to get to 25. You get a little older, you realize you can get there with two fives by multiplication. You get a little older and you go to more advanced math, you realize you can get there with one five by squaring it.
And so what I try to help people do is recognize that there are principles, laws about the way results occur, that if you master those principles and you master the reality that your thoughts are generating as one of the things that Einstein said was that our thoughts generate a magnetic field that organize the molecular structure of time and space into the form of our results. And if you match the frequency of the reality you want, it must be yours. This is not philosophy, he said it’s physics. I think everyone knows and agrees, who knows anything about science, that the quantum field is where we live in a universe of energy. Einstein said, everything is energy, it can be no other way.
If you match that frequency, so if you think thoughts that are in alignment with the reality you want to create, you actually generate a magnetic field. That’s the law of attraction. You could say that that’s woo-woo stuff that some people say. Napoleon Hill wrote a book about the most successful, at the time, multimillionaires who are equivalent to multi-billionaires today. All of them, the Andrew Carnegie’s of the world, the Henry Ford’s of the world, they knew this understanding and this technology. It’s not new. It’s just there are many people who have belief systems that are contrary and kind of throw out those principles.
So I try to talk to people in terms of science and neuroscience. And usually, if they are not open as much, and then what happens is, they see the results. They start to see that if I develop a crystal clear vision of where I want to be, most people, they don’t live 90 years, they live one year 90 times because we are beings that work according to patterns. And so, we have patterns of thoughts. So there’s a results formula I teach which breaks it down, that we have programmed beliefs, like our programming in the iOS or the Windows operating system, that lead to repetitive sets of thoughts, that lead to feelings, that lead to actions, that lead to results. And that creates a thermostatic setting. There is a pattern. Most of us have a pattern of how much money we make, how much we weigh, how happy we are in relationships. All of those things exist according to patterns just like our computer works according to patterns of programming.
And so, if you want to shift your results from 72 degrees, your current results to 75 degrees, in this case, the metaphor saying warmer is better, then you actually have to reprogram your operating system. Your beliefs, thoughts, feelings and behaviors have to change in order to change your results. And so, I work with leaders and entrepreneurs to not only develop the strategies but to look within themselves to see where their programmed beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and actions can be shifted, and where they have self-limiting beliefs or self-limiting or performance-limiting or company business success limiting beliefs, thoughts, feelings and actions is when we reprogram them, they start to see new results, and then they start to really understand, wow, this stuff works. When I change my thinking, my results change. It’s not common sense, it’s not what we were raised to believe and understand through most of our education, but that’s the truth.
So people start saying things like my client today, out of the blue a new investor showed up, out of the blue I got this loan I needed, out of the blue, a new business opportunity. And you start to realize it’s not out of the blue, you’re generating that because we are connected to and one with this universal energy, this quantum field. And as the observer effect proved in quantum physics when they did those experiments at Stanford, that our intention, what happened was, they showed that the experiment result was dictated by the intention of the person doing the experiment. That transformed our understanding about science and about the way results occur. And so that proves that our intentions, our visions dictate our results. Hopefully that’s helpful in answering some different ways of thinking about it that might be more science-based and address some of those concerns.
What to expect from coaching [25:54]
Sam Jacobs: Thank you for that explanation. I think a lot of people come into this concept of coaching and aren’t sure what to expect or what it is. How do you define it and how do you think it’s different from traditional psychotherapy?
John Mark Shaw: We’ve always known that every great athlete had a coach to get them to their peak performance. What we’re starting to see is that every great leader has, we know that they’ve had advisors, but has had coaches. There was a guy who he was coaching the leaders of Microsoft and Facebook and Google. He has a book called the Billion Dollar Coach. It’s not widely known that leaders at that level are having coaches, but we all need support in order to achieve our peak performance. We have blind spots as human beings and it’s important to have somebody who can provide a structure of support and guidance and also help you become aware of your own inner guidance in order to help you create the things that you would love and to be a sounding board.
So I think where it differs from traditional psychotherapy is that there are therapeutic elements because sometimes we go deep into beliefs and where they came from. There may be limiting beliefs. For example, if you have beliefs around money and money doesn’t grow on trees and your family didn’t make a lot of money or they thought that rich people were not such good people, that might affect your financial results. And so, we explore sometimes the roots of some of our programming and our results. But it’s always in service of moving forward in a vision. That’s where it’s different.
I think, oftentimes, and there are amazing therapists, and I’ve been in therapy and I have clients who are having amazing results in therapy. But some therapy winds up being almost like backward looking. And one of the principles in this, one of these universal principles is we generate more of what we pay attention to. What you’re paying attention to is what you will attract more of in your life. And so if you’re paying attention to your problems, or a lot of the times people spend years in therapy and they get clear on what their issues are and what their limiting beliefs are, and where they came from and what happened with their parents and all that. But they’re not doing anything to change it.
The difference with coaching is that we get a really crystal clear vision of where we want to be. We start to take inspired action to move in the direction. And then what will happen is limiting beliefs will pop up. But they’ll pop up, and so we’ll deal with them and clear them or transform them in service of moving forward. So coaching is always about creating something new, moving forward into the future, creating the life, the business, the success that you would love in the future. And so, I think that’s kind of a broad way that it’s different.
But we do sometimes go deep because sometimes in coaching, it’s required in order to replace. Oftentimes our subconscious mind is the source of all of our, is where all of our programming lives. And a lot of it is subconscious. We’re not aware of it. So sometimes it requires becoming aware of the things that are limiting us before we can change it, move beyond it, and then clear that from being an obstacle and move forward.
How to help people change the way they think [29:19]
Sam Jacobs: What’s the process by which you work with people to change how they think basically?
John Mark Shaw: So I think a couple of things. First of all, yes, it can feel daunting, but that’s exactly why we want kind of a structure of support. My job is to provide teaching principles, success principles. So there’s a level of education and insight. There’s a level of what I believe kind of the most important part was evocative coaching, which is helping my clients get really clear on their inner guidance, again, which will be the source of their greatest success. I’m happy to sometimes give advice but the more powerful work is when people source their own guidance to take inspired action to solve their challenges and achieve their goals.
And there’s also emotional support and accountability. So, being there to support someone, being there as a partner and believing, holding a belief in my client, a great therapist named Carl Rogers once called it unconditional positive regard that we hold the people we work with in an unconditional positive regard, meaning I see you as my client as having infinite potential to create anything and everything you would absolutely love. And I hold an energy of that and a structure of support that inspires that. And I have people who are providing coaching for me to provide that for me because we all need that.
And so, to have somebody who’s taking a stand for your infinite power to create your results, that sees you not in your limit but in your full potential and in your full power and reminds you of that continuously, that’s a big element of what the value is. You have somebody reminding you of who you really are and what you’re really capable of even when you’re having challenges and sometimes having pitfalls. It’s a combination of that emotional support.
In terms of the time, we can talk about how long we’ve been working together. I’ve had clients who have seen massive changes in three months, in six months, in a year. Most of my clients continue working with me for ongoing years because they’re seeing the results. But my introductory programs start at three months, I think it’s important to at least commit to three months. But my clients see palpable differences in at least one area if not more than one area of their life in business. And more important, they’ve learned tools to continue to create change.
Sam Jacobs: When it doesn’t work, why doesn’t it work?
John Mark Shaw: Well, first, I’ll just say, to give an example, I have another client, and your results have been amazing. But I have multiple clients now whose businesses are up 30, 40, 50% since COVID. I have businesses who basically, all of their business went away and completely pivoted to create a new business. Somebody who is doing on-premise events at a large scale and lost all of their business. Never had done a virtual event before, it just got a million dollar contract to do an event for a major company.
And so, this works but I think, and the truth is, it works if you work it if you’re 100% committed. And so, because change can be scary, because it can be challenging, people need to be willing to take the steps that they can take. Most people are not cut out for great success necessarily because they’re not willing to really understand that the ultimate truth is that it’s an inside out game, that we are responsible for all of our results. So many people don’t want to take that kind of responsibility.
But for the people who are willing to see that I have power to transform my results, that it’s not circumstance-based, it’s not because of my lack of education or lack of money or my parents or how I was brought up, but that I have the capacity to create results and new results in my life. It starts with that. The taking of responsibility, that it’s nothing outside of me. So that creates power because now I’m empowered. At first, it may be not so fun to recognize that I am responsible for all my results because it’s easier to blame other people and other situations and the circumstances and the pandemic and the economy. But once you take the power back, now you’re empowered. So you can step in and take and have dominion.
And so, the other piece to understand is just like the law of mathematics and the law of thermodynamics and the law of electricity, we didn’t learn how to harness thermodynamics and electricity until the last 150 years or so or just over 100 years. Or actually not even quite 100 years. And so, what’s interesting is that those laws always existed but we didn’t have mastery over utilizing those laws. And so, what I understand is that these principles are universal and they work all the time. If I’m not having results just like if any of my clients are not, it’s not that the principles are off, it’s just that we’re not using our principles, we are not exercising mastery. Maybe we’re more committed to our problems, our past, our low self-esteem, our insecurities, and we’re having a hard time thinking about our success because we’re stuck in old patterns of belief and thought about ourselves about what’s not possible for us. And so, we’re not able to break out of that. And that does happen but it happens rarely.
Sam Jacobs: John, we’re coming to the end of our time, but you’ve got an offer for folks that are listening. So tell us, if folks are listening and are interested in exploring more, how can I get in touch and what’s the opportunity here?
John Mark Shaw: I’m super honored, Sam, that you allowed me to speak to your listeners, and this has been a great, great honor for me. So I’d like to offer any listeners a complimentary strategy session. It’s an hour phone call with me. We schedule it at your convenience. And we get really clear on that call on where you are, what your present challenges are and circumstances. We help you develop a crystal clear vision of where you want to be. So the clarity of where you are and what might be standing in the way of your success is really powerful. The clarity in an unprecedented way about what you want to create is incredibly powerful.
And then I’ll help provide you with next steps to move in the direction of that vision. And so, I have a website johnmarkshaw.com, or you can email me at john@johnmarkshaw.com. And I would love to schedule a complimentary session with you.
John Marks’ biggest influencers [36:42]
Sam Jacobs: What are two or three or four books that you think we should read so that we can prime our minds to go on this journey of transformation?
John Mark Shaw: For those people who might be a little bit less spiritually oriented who really want to understand the science, Dr. Joe Dispenza is an incredible teacher and I really recommend him. He wrote a book about 10 years ago called Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. And he explains these principles really beautifully from a quantum physics and a scientific and a neuroscience point of view. My mentor, Mary Morrissey, is an extraordinary teacher. Tony Robbins is a wonderful teacher. Think and Grow Rich the book is a seminal work. I really love the book, The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles. It was written in 1910. It is a very powerful book. And as you can tell, it’s very practical in terms of its application. It’s really about teaching people how to build wealth in their lives, but the principles are very much the principles that we’ve been speaking about. So I think that’s very powerful.
And Tim Ferriss is a great teacher. He wrote a book called Tools of Titans, that’s also a lot more modern stories. So I’d encourage people to pick a selection of some of the older classics like Think and Grow Rich and The Science of Getting Rich, and pair that up with some more modern books. Any one of those would be very powerful. And check out Mary Morrissey, my mentor. She’s got channels and YouTube channels and she’s a brilliant teacher as well.
Sam’s Corner [39:54]
Sam Jacobs: Hey, everybody. It’s Sam Jacobs. This is Sam’s corner. So what do you think of that conversation with John Mark Shaw? Some of it I’m hesitant to share because some of it sounds new agey, sounds perhaps not true or false. Or maybe that’s how it sounds to me because I’m a cynic or a skeptic. But I can tell you, I’ve been working with John for about a year now and this has been the most transformational professional year of my life. And that is late 2019 and throughout 2020, including and perhaps because of everything that’s been going on with the global pandemic, and with COVID.
And so, what do I think you should take from that conversation? Here’s one thing that I think not enough people do. I give this advice to people that I’m coaching for career advice. Really, I give the same advice to everybody. And it’s really the advice that Napoleon Hill initially articulates and documents in the book, Think and Grow Rich, which is visualization. Too many people say they want things but it’s a question more than a statement, and it’s a question pushed out to the universe with uncertainty. You say it aloud — I want to be rich — but you’re not quite sure what it means or how to do it, how to be it.
And I’ve found so much benefit in just simply the act of visualization, which in a way is sort of like backwards reflection. Skip forward to three years, skip forward a year, tell us what you see, you’ve accomplished the things that you want to accomplish. Describe the moment, describe the feeling. Put yourself in the mind state, not of hoping that something great will happen, but actually in the mindset of something great has already happened. Now describe how it happened and why it happened. And put yourself in that state of visualizing the actual destination and describing that destination.
So many people ask for career advice. My career advice generally is “Let’s work backwards from where you want to be in five years.” And many people haven’t written down where they want to be in five years. It’s all the same construct, which is, first of all, visualizing or defining your destination at a minimum helps you orient in that destination, towards that destination. But again, beyond that, it’s creating a mental state that is not skeptical, hesitant, or nervous about success, but actually assumes that success has already been created. Again, new agey stuff, but like that all of time is happening all at once and that really, these are just different places on plots on a graph within the space time continuum. And really, all of the things in your life have already happened.
So let’s describe the state, let’s tune your mind to the state that you want things to be in as opposed to questioning whether they ever might be in that state. Again, part of that is also reorienting around taking agency, taking responsibility, taking control. Saying that the things that happen to you are in your control. By the way, there are obviously certain things that are not in your control. But even just approaching the day as if things are in your control is frankly a much happier, better way to live. How many people do you know that they’re just, oh, my bad luck. Everything that happened to me, it was so unfair. And of course, everybody’s thinking as you hear that, everybody’s life is unfair. Bad things happen to everybody. Terrible things, horrible things happen to people.
Isn’t it better to reframe that and say what were the circumstances at least that are within my control and how can I impact them with a positive mindset? And where am I going and where do I want to go? I’ll stop my lecture, my rant. Again, if you don’t want to embrace any of these ideas, if you want to sort of head into the future with complete uncertainty and a fog, sort of a foggy state where you assume the world is acting upon you and you are powerless to exert any influence, go for it. It didn’t work for me for a very long time, but if you think it’ll work for you, I wish you the best of luck.
I think it’s a better way to wake up and attack every day when you assume that success is not even, not just that it’s possible, that it’s already happened. Possible implies doubt. What if you remove the doubt and you just acted as if you were already successful?
People have built entire businesses around these ideas, about teaching people these ideas. So, for me personally, it’s worked really well and that’s why I wanted to bring John on the show, to share some of those insights, to share some of those ideas. But everybody’s journey is specific to them and I hope whatever you want, you figure out a way to get there.
Don’t miss episode #133
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And finally, finally, Revenue Collective. It’s Awesome October. We are an inclusive community looking for people that want to better themselves. Frankly, a lot of the ideas I just talked about in Sam’s corner are the reason why Revenue Collective exists, to help give people a roadmap and a guidebook for their career so that you can get where you want to go, and to help you visualize that where you want to go is possible, and in fact already been attained.
So if you want some of that love, again, our mission is to help you achieve your potential. Something great is inside you, we want to help you get there. Revenuecollective.com, click apply now, our enrollment team will reach out to you. I don’t have anything else to say right now. I’ll talk to you next time.
