Explore the pivotal role of mindset in leadership and the journey to success. Through a blend of personal anecdotes and insightful reflections, we can uncover how our thoughts and emotions serve as the driving force behind our actions and outcomes, much like the unseen bulk of an iceberg. Delve into the four essential keys to mindset leadership and begin to bring mindset to your leadership.
“Leadership starts with self-leadership. And the better that you take care of yourself, the better that you will engage the challenges that you face as a leader.”
- Jason Abell
Hello, everybody, and welcome to our LinkedIn Live slash Insight Interview, where we get to double up there, and this goes out as a podcast episode. But we're also get to do some live stuff, which Jason and I always get excited about. I am Steve Scanlon. I'm the CEO and founder of Rewire and this is my business partner, Jason Abell. And he is the president because we drew straws on that. And I don't know, maybe we'll redraw them one day. But Jason, great to be with you.
I was kind of bebopping to that countdown music there.
I was gonna ask, does everybody get that? I’m gonna ask Destiny that.
It’s pretty good. It's pretty good. It’s my hype music now, if I was a baseball player, that would be my walk-up music.
Somebody thought through that, right? Because to me, it sounded like we're getting ready for something.
I know. No, today is gonna be great.
In fact, to our preparation, and I want to just dive right on this is you're gonna bring something to the table that is clearly of interest to us in the work that we do at Rewire. But it's become super interesting to so many people that we coach, and I think you prepared this work for a live event that you did a month or so ago. And since then, lots of people have asked us to do it. So, we thought, let's just bring it to LinkedIn live. And so, I don't want to talk a lot about it. I know. I mean, again, the title gives a little bit away because we are going to talk about the mindset of a leader. You know, that word mindsets thrown out a lot these days. And so hopefully we get to bring some clarity to that. But mostly, I just want to turn it over to you and go, dude, teach us.
Well, you know that word mindset gets bantered around so much. And I know like when we do our podcast episodes, and the topic of mindset comes up, and we're in an environment like you and I are in right now, there's heads that bob like oh yeah, mindset is, gosh, it's so important. It's everything and you know, everybody's kind of be-bobbing their heads up and down. Like, yeah, I agree with that. But boy, when you wake up in the morning, and you know what you're supposed to do, but you just don't feel like doing it. And you want to just put your mindset in your back pocket and forget about it and go procrastinate or scroll or do anything other than what you're supposed to do that, that's where mindset really comes into play. Like where the rubber meets the road. And our brand of coaching, you know, we've referred since the day we open the doors is mindset coaching. 10 years ago, when we started. And I don't know that it's not more important today than ever, and I know that that's a that's also a kind of a phrase that get gets bantered around, but I think the spin that we can bring to it, and what I've seen not only through audiences, but our one on one clients is when we really get down and dirty with mindset, one, understanding it but then two, what are some tangible things that we can do around the topic of mindset that help us from a day to day basis? So, I'll start off with this, which is a story. There's a quote that goes something like this, “the difficult we do immediately, and the impossible takes a little longer.” So let that sink in. Now the first time I ever heard this, Steve, I was like, young. I mean like pre-kindergarten young. In fact, this quote comes from my father and I'd heard it growing up. The difficult we do immediately, the Impossible takes a little longer. And I never really fully understood what that meant, until I was eight years old. See, when I was eight, I had been given permission to mow our grass, mow the family yard, you know, the house, and that was a really big deal. Because every time I mowed, I got a $5 bill. And back in 1979, that was a lot of dough, like I could go have fun playing arcade games and all kinds of things with a $5 bill. So that was a great.
That was at least 20 Butter Fingers, right?
I mean, it works, it works, right? And so, at the end of the summer, and for those of you that that that mow their grass, you'll know this- the end of summer, it was time to take the gas out of the mower to store the mower because if you leave the gas in the mower, there's some condensation. There are some bad things that can happen. So, my dad said, okay, son, go ahead and take the gas out of the mower. Well, up until that point, I'd always put gas from the gas cans into the mower, but not the opposite way. And so, he's like, yeah, there's a siphon in the garage, go grab the siphon, and go do that. I'm like, I think I've heard of the siphon before. But I find this dirty old hose siphon in the garage, and I go to the mower and the gas can put one end of the into the mower and wanting into the gas can- I think I got this right. And I'm like, I'm like pumping this thing. Nothing’s happened. And I've just keep going and I'm like, I think the gas supposed to go from here to here. But that's not really happening. Like, what? How does this work? Bottom line is I couldn't get it to work. So I go into my dad, I'm like, I do the same thing. Like I'm not really sure. It's like, okay, fine, let's go check it out. Well, he does the same thing. Like he's doing it, it's not working. The next thing that I witnessed is burned into my brain. He took the hose off of the siphon, so, we've got a dirty, clear hose that I'm looking at now, and he put one end into the gas tank in the mower, but the other end to his mouth and started sucking. And I see the gas coming up from the lawnmower into his mouth. When it hit his mouth, he put the other end into the gas tank. And he's got a mouthful of gas right now that he spits out. And I am a wide eyed eight-year-old looking at that and going, okay, what just happened? But really what burned into my brain is what he continued to say, which is the difficult we do immediately, and the impossible takes little longer. See, that day, that particular day, late summer, I got to witness what that quote meant, not just hear it. The reason that I'm bringing it up today is because if you're a leader today, there are difficult things that you come across. And today and especially, right? We’re in an election year. The economy is wack, the global situation, political, global warming, whatever it is, there's just difficulties. And then in your micro-organization, I know there's difficulty, Steve, because we interact with our clients on it all the time.
Absolutely.
Is it a human resource challenge that you're facing? Is it competition? Is it the commodity nature of the industry that you're in?
"There are very difficult challenges, and I don't mean to minimize any of them, but if you take away anything from what we're talking about today, the quote difficult we do immediately the impossible takes a little longer, what I want you to know, from a mindset standpoint, today, you have it inside of you to take action on whatever it is that's difficult that's in front of you, because you have the ability to take care of them immediately. The impossible, that might take a day or two longer, but you can do that as well."
So, with that story, you know, we made a promise when we put this event on LinkedIn, and when we talked about it a few weeks ago, we said hey, we want to give people not just a cute story about Jason's childhood, right? We want to give people 4 tangible and actionable items where they can work on their mindset to actually okay, I watched you guys, now I do something. And so that's the purpose of today.
And hopefully that's the equivalent of the four things are going to be maybe for you, listening, that's you putting your mouth on a dirty hose, so to speak.
Yeah, good. Good. That's right. Nice.
Terrible metaphor, I guess but you're the one that gave it but, right? That seemed impossible to you. And so, you the listener might be walking away going, that feels like a dirty hose, I don't know.
Sure. Sure. And with all the distractions and whatever, to actually listen and take in the information sometimes that's tough. So yeah, great call out. The first thing that we like to do some time, Steve is really just defined mindset, right? And the easiest way that we know how to do it is if you think of an iceberg, mindset is below the waterline. Other things are above the waterline. So, an iceberg, you got the tippy, tippy top, which are the results that you're driving for. So as a leader, you've got profitability, you've got stability, you've got creating an environment, that's a great place to work. You've got clients that you need to serve, whatever those results are at the tippy, tippy top of the iceberg, then right below that tippy tippy is the actions that you need to take to get those results. So, they're the things that are observable. They're the things that we see every day. What actions are you taking to get those results? Well, the big part of the iceberg, most of the iceberg is below the waterline. That's where mindset is. That's where thoughts are. That's where feelings are. That's where the things that's going on in your head. That's where those things are. That is what we're talking about today. Before I get to my four items as Steve, dude, I feel like you're the master of mindset. Anything that you want to add from a mindset standpoint?
You know, I will just tell you really quickly, the thing that jumped out at me, as you were saying, for some reason, and again, this is just, you know, almost like the word association game, I'm just going to tell you what I associated with whether it's particularly relevant or not, but sports. Again, I like to watch golf on television, I actually like to watch a lot of sports on television, tennis, and basketball and all this stuff. And one of the things that when you talk about results and actions, yeah, we all want to win or score the most points. That’s what we’re talking about. When they interview the athletes afterwards, the gal from Iowa State, the basketball player.
Oh, yeah. Caitlin Clark. Sure.
I've seen her now interviewed a couple times. She rarely talks about the results and the actions, the things that she talks about are below the waterline in terms of what's made her great. And so just a little side note, like, I don't think that we're bringing out this thing, like it’s news. I think this is foundational stuff even extends beyond our business. I don't know why I thought about that. But like how did you win the game? How'd you get so good? How'd you whatever. Yeah, there were technical things. There were actions that we took. But I just find it fascinating that a lot of the most successful people actually go below that waterline and start talking about what was going on here. Like, you don't need to know nothing about golf. And if I asked you what percentage of golf, you know, happens between your ears, you don't even have to know anything about the sport.
I don’t know, like I don't know. 90%?
Right. So why are we talking about the 10%? I mean, again, yes, you need to know how to do it, I suppose. But I don't know.
So good. Well, there's probably 104 items that we could mention, but as we deciphered through over the last 10 years working with clients, there's just four that rise to the top. And so, I'm going to briefly go over them today. And my gosh, we have we have full day workshops that go over these, but I'm going to decipher them very quickly. And I do want to encourage you as you're listening, like I want you to think about you and your life in your professional day to day activities. Which one of these four are really going to resonate with you and even better, for bonus, which one of the four you're going to take action on today? So here they are. First and foremost, and by the way, no silver bullet here, right? Like no, no, no magic wand is being waived. The first key to mindset leadership is self-care. Yes, yes, we're talking about drinking more water than you currently do. We're talking about your sleep habits. We're talking about eating nutritious food. We're talking about moving your body. And I can just even feel some of the eye rolls as you might be listening that, Jason, wait a minute, we came here for you to tell me that I need to take care of myself? Yeah, leadership, first of all starts with self-leadership and you, and the better that you take care of yourself, the better that you will engage the challenges that you face as a leader. Now, this is the head bobbing moment, right? You can go, yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. No, no, there's data behind this. There's science behind this. In fact, a while ago, more than a decade ago, a guy named Jim Grapple and author wrote a book called “The Corporate Athlete”, and it's a jaw breaker of a book, but boiling it all down, and I'm way oversimplifying it, so Jim, if you hear this, please forgive me. But bottom line of it is, the better shape you're in, the better leader you are, the better shape you're in, the more product you sell, the better shape you’re in, the better career that you have, like there are statistics. This dude studied this. And there's actual statistics around that. So, if you're listening to this, and you're thinking to yourself, man, yeah, I finally got to stop drinking or slowing down my drinking or I finally got to pay more attention to how often I eat out per week, or whatever that is. Golly, I'm happy if you have that epiphany. So, the first one is self-care.
I had a CEO this week, Jason told me that they curbed their drinking. And, you know, again, I know that's not necessarily what this is about, but that's what was important for this individual. And what was so funny is, that statement was followed by you're not going to believe how good I feel, and in 10 minutes of this person telling me how great they felt as a result, and I'm sitting there going, I can't even believe you don't believe that.
Right? Yeah.
Anyway, yeah, love it. So, keep going. We gotta rock.
The second one. See the people. See the people literally, like even what we're doing right now, Steve. I'm on the East Coast, you're on the West Coast, at least we're in front of one another, at least we're dialoguing with one another, we're seeing each other's you know, body language, things like that. I see still too many leaders and forget COVID, the pandemic, the Zoom nature that we're all, they're just not seeing the people. They're not physically going to travel and seeing the people they're not even turning on their cameras during zoom. But the people that get eyeball to eyeball, even better belly to belly and are in front of people, are leaders that just plain old win. And I'll give you a brief story. When I was a freshman in college, the president of our college at the time this guy named Joseph Salinger, he was a Jesuit priest. He was at the time recently voted one of the most powerful people in Baltimore because he had all these connections, and he was a really good philanthropic types of things. He was real good fundraiser for the school. And I remember there was a fundraiser during our freshman year, it was an auction and one of the auction items was to have dinner with Father Salinger. So, my roommates and I got together, and we bid on this, and we actually won. We donated some money to one of the charities and we got to go to dinner at the Baltimore Country Club with Father Joseph Salinger, one of the most powerful people in Baltimore, right? Like it was a big deal. And we went to this fancy shmancy place, and it was fun. And the point of me telling the story is that Father Salinger, you know, walks in and he greeted us all and had very personable questions that he asked us, and when we sat down at the table, one of the first things that he wanted to know from us freshmen, right? We're still snot nose kids, right? We don't know anything. He said, okay, you guys have been at the school now for a couple of months. What is it that you think we can be doing better? And I just remembered, and then you know what he did for the rest of the dinner? Listened, just listened to what we have to say. And I've got a longer version of the story. But I will tell you, as the years went on, and progressed, junior year, senior year, I started to see things around campus that we had talked about during that dinner, changes that were made. And I'm thinking, he saw us like he sought- see the people.
"So, if there's anything within that story that resonates with you, and the people that you serve, whether that's your internal external stakeholders, and you think, gosh, dang it, yeah, I need to go see the people. Please take this as your as your sign."
And I know we gotta go quick. You got a couple more, give me 30- your best 45 seconds on this objection.
Dude, that sounds great.
I don't have the time.
Yeah, that's my knee jerk reaction to that is, you don't have the time not to. Because with you not doing that, guess what happens? You have higher turnover in your company. With you not doing that. You're struggling to figure out how to sell more of your product. With you not doing that, your number one client gets stolen by a competitor who does see the people, so for me, as you can tell, I get pretty fired up about this one.
All right. What's the third one, Jason?
This one I'm going to need to get up for. So, you mentioned sports and athletics earlier. The third key to mindset leadership is, be intentional about your stance. Be intentional about your stance. So, thank you. You're actually doing it right now. So last month I did this in front of a workshop, in front of a group in person and I'd never done this. I didn't run this exercise by you, or any of our people that kind of know about these things. I was like, I'm just gonna do this and see what happens. I pulled up I asked if anybody was an athlete in the room. Is anybody a former professional or current athlete? It was awesome. I got a male and a female to come up to the front of the room, I had them turn back-to-back. So, they're facing the opposite walls, they're not looking at one another. And I, at the time, I didn't even know what sport they were in. And I asked them here, I don't I don't know how I'm going to do this here, but I asked them, I was like, hey, what I want you to do, is I want you to get into an athletic, ready stance. And right away without any questions, they both got into a stance like this, kind of like you just did. You're an athlete, Steve, right? They got into the stance. And what was interesting is that I asked the people, hey, what do you notice? Well, the things that they noticed were that they were leaning forward slightly. They were on the balls of their feet, both of them and one was a lacrosse player, and one was a former track athlete. And even though they're completely, totally two different sports, and Steve, you're a diver and you're now a golfer, like you kind of did the same stance, you were in the ready stance. And so, from a mindset standpoint, if you can operate and engage the day, from an intentional ready stance, versus, you know, being on the balls, your feet versus being on your heels, yeah, that's a different way to engage the day. And by the way, these other things leading up to it, like I said, self-care, well, when you're taking care of yourself, you're more apt to be in that ready stance, to be intentional facing your day. So, be intentional about your stance. The fourth key, and this one is one that again, you already know it. Be really clear about your personal mission vision, and your why. Why are you even doing what you're doing? And we work with clients all the time, Steve, where, you know, you've got the CEO, who's got an amazing company that's done really well over time, and they lost their mojo. Or this top salesperson who just like, they lost it, and they need to get it back. And we help people figure out their why. Why are you even doing this in the first place? We find our clients that get clear about this, they suddenly find their mojo again.
It's so pervasive that I was telling someone last week, because I was in a coaching call Jason, I was telling someone think about the saying, thank God it's Friday.
Exactly.
I had a client tell me a lot of my people are just working for the weekend. Just make it by. There was no sizzle. There are a lot of people that are just in this kind of blank space. And it made me think of that song in the 80’s by I think Loverboy by the way, called everybody's working for the weekend. If that's you, number one, you're on your heels.
Yeah, for sure.
And like you said, back to mission vision values, when you go get clear about that again, then we don't have to just live for the weekend. I think living for the weekend is indicative of either not having clarity about your mission, vision and values or not having one at all.
Yeah.
And then, you know, I think it was Thoreau that said most men and by that he meant humanity live lives of quiet desperation.
Yeah, yeah. Right.
So, mission, vision, values.
And, you know, I said mission vision values. And you did too. I don't know if it's Simon Sineks finding your why, I don't know if that specifically mission vision values, but what is at the core of the reason you do what you do on a day to day basis? And Steve, gosh, we've had clients who again, find their mojo again, they get refreshed and, and things take off from there. We've had clients that have made certain transitions, right? From a career standpoint because of that, like, oh my gosh, I'm in the wrong industry, or I'm in the wrong role. I need to go do this because now, I can be intentional about my stance. I can go after it with gusto. I can be refreshed in what I do. And so, we just see that over and over again. For me to not mention it in this type of context, I feel, I don't know, I just feel like that would be irresponsible. So, the four keys, starting with yourself and self-care, seeing the people, whoever the people are in your world, see them and be intentional about your stance. Balls of feet not operating from your heels. And then just being clear about your why. Why the heck are you doing what you're doing? So, Steve, we made a promise, I think we've kept the promise by giving those four keys. I don't know. We have a minute or two left.
I do want to dovetail off that, and I think I have a thought it might lead to a question, Jason. I should just frame it as a question. Find that thing that's compelling for you. And I don't know, you didn't even use the word compelling. What if you find your vision or you find that thing, but it's not really compelling? Because I've had that happen, right? Like, and I'm gonna give the most obvious one, right? Like, my mission vision, and I want to just make as much money as I can. You know, like, I tell people, look, the Beatles figured this out, right? You can't buy the most compelling things, right? Like, yeah, that's going on forever. And yet still people that work for the weekend, seem to have a vision around some outcome like that.
Yeah.
And some people learn, hopefully, sooner rather than later that that outcome actually isn't that compelling. Again, it's not that it's bad, I just don’t know that it sustains.
No, I hear that. And that's valid. And gosh, I had points in my career where that was my why, very early on in my career. Now, that wasn't sustainable. And that didn't serve me, and I needed to mature and learn that, but we have exercises to carry people through that particular thing. First of all, I don't think that's good or bad or anything. There's no judgment around that. But I might have some questions there. Why is making the most money important to you? And we can go some layers deep. And we can probably get to a why pretty quickly there. So yeah. Here's what I would say- good segue, and then I'll let you close, Steve. What I've got up on the screen is a QR code that takes people to us. And for those of you that are listening, here's why we do what we do at Rewire. We help the C suite develop independently effective leaders. And we even added something on here that says we did that 90 days, like that's we want people that are heads of companies to have leaders that work for them that are independently effective, that are going doing their thing, and we have plenty of ways to help people with that. So that's what we do. We'd love to chat with you. We've got tools, free tools on our website, we have one on one coaching that we do that helps people through mindset, like the types of things that that we're talking about. But anyways, Steve, I've had a blast doing this today.
Yeah, dude. And well, we got to go. Right at the top of the hour. We end a lot of our podcasts, if not every one of them with a simple question and it goes back to what are you gonna go do with it? It doesn't matter what our thoughts are. I guess it matters that we get them out.
Yeah.
But what matters most is if you're listening, what will you actually go do? Like, by the way, you could sit there and hear all this and go, man, I totally agree and still not go do anything, right? You could not, you know, it isn't about liking what we're saying disliking it, which is kind of funny when people agree or disagree. And we tried to come at it from a scientific perspective, that's kind of like agreeing with math. Right? Like, okay, well, that's weird, but doesn't matter. What will you actually go do? What were your thoughts in this? And how will your thoughts take you to actions and hopefully results? That's the key question. That's what we'll leave you with. So grateful for you, Jason. Thanks for what you brought to the table. We'll see you all next time here on LinkedIn live and on the Insight Interviews. See you later, everybody.
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