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Be ready to transform the way you think and lead! Let’s uncover the hidden power of mindset as the true driver of leadership excellence and breakthrough growth. Explore why mindset matters more than skillset, how self-care fuels performance, and the science-backed ways to reshape your thinking for success. Discover the power of curiosity in challenging assumptions, the impact of the iceberg model on behavior, and why being precedes doing in the journey to personal and professional transformation. Let’s dive into the mindset shifts that lead to lasting results!

 

In this episode, Jason and Steve discuss:

  • Mindset as the hidden driver of leadership excellence and growth
  • Greater importance of mindset over skillset in personal and professional success
  • Iceberg model and the impact of below-the-surface factors on actions and results
  • Role of self-care in improving mindset, performance, and goal achievement
  • Cultivating curiosity to foster a growth mindset and enable breakthroughs

Key Takeaways:

  • Mindset holds greater weight than skillset in determining both personal and professional success, shaping one's ability to navigate challenges and achieve breakthrough growth.
  • Beneath every action and result lies a web of internal drivers—thoughts, emotions, past experiences, and deeply held beliefs—highlighting mindset as the unseen force steering visible outcomes.
  • A closer look at mindset reveals three transformative factors: the iceberg model illustrating the power of the unseen, the interplay between being and doing, and the necessity of addressing below-the-line factors to enhance outward performance.
  • Self-care emerges as a fundamental pillar of a strong mindset, reinforcing resilience, improving overall performance, and increasing the likelihood of long-term success across different professions.
  • The pursuit of curiosity is positioned as a catalyst for growth, with open-ended questions, active listening, and continuous learning serving as essential tools to challenge assumptions and unlock new possibilities.

 

 

“If we're always right about everything in our own minds, curiosity becomes virtually impossible. So, curiosity helps me know I'm not always right about everything, and it allows me to listen.”

 - Steve Scanlon

Connect with Jason and Steve:

 

Listen to the podcast here:


Jason and Steve- The Hidden Driver of Leadership Excellence

Hello, everybody in the podcast and LinkedIn world. This is your host, Steve Scanlon. I'm the CEO of Rewire, and my trustworthy, awesome partner, Jason Abell, the president of our organization Rewire. Jason?

Trustworthy and awesome. Hey everybody.

I was trying to think of some pretty cool adjectives for you.

I like those two.

I don’t’ like saying nice things about you to your face.

Oh my gosh.

Anyways, good to see everybody. This is an episode of The Insight interviews, which is our podcast now. Gosh, what episode Are we on? Do you even know?

Above 200? I don't know. I'm gonna call out some number, and Steph will admonish me afterwards. We've been doing it three years. I think we're on 200 and something. I don't know. A bunch of them.

I referenced one of our episodes today, but this is also LinkedIn live. We are live. You know, the great Saturday Night Live thing was last weekend, and you know, it's a live show, and so we're just really happy that people show up for the live show. Obviously, this gets into evergreen content, and people can watch it afterwards as well, which is part of the whole plan, but it's great to be here. Thank you for coming. Thank you for taking the time to be with us. As Jason and I normally do, we think through these episodes quite a bit, and just so you all know, we don't just sit around and go, I don't know, what do you want to talk about? We really do our best to try to base these around the work that we do, the world that we're living in, the general themes of some of the things that we're hearing. And so just to let y'all know, like Jason, I come together and go, we talk about our coaching process, we talk about how we do live events, what we're hearing out in the world, in the spaces in which we work. And a lot of times we hear these thematic approaches to things, and we'll just go, oh my god, we hear that so much, let's actually turn that into a podcast. Let's make sure that we're bringing something relevant to the table in this season.

Right on.

So, yeah, that's what we're going to do today. And really, in the spirit of this, folks, this is actually a journalism technique. In journalism, they talk about burying the lead. They talk about burying the lead as if to say, if you're going to write a journalistic paper, don't bury the lead, tell people what it's about. And so, in the spirit of that, Jason, I'm not going to bury the lead. Is that cool?

Yeah, I mean, the hidden driver of leadership, excellence and breakthrough, growth. Steve, what the heck does that mean?

I'm just going to tell people what the hidden driver is right out of the gate. Now, we don't want you to leave, we want you to stay around, because Jason's got some just really great stuff for us today around the hidden driver. I don't know how hidden it is, but it's not executed on a lot. The hidden driver is just simply this: it's mindset. What is our mindset? And really, where you and I coming back, really, since the beginning of the year, we work in some industries in financial services and real estate and different industries around the country, and our coaches do as well, and I'm just going to tell you, for some industries out there, this has been a really challenging season.

Yeah.

I had one of our clients refer to it as an extended winter. And as people get into to this extended winter, certainly that's going to be relevant with inside our coaching, and leaders look for solutions inside extended winters. And so, as you and I began to talk about it, I will tell you that most recently, one of my clients who had asked us to come and do a live event for them, made this passing comment, which is one that I've been hearing more and more, can it be something more than just rah, rah and stuff that you just tell us to do that we already know we should do? Like, we gotta go beyond that. Can you come and do something? And so, as we talked about it more and more, we brought the concept up of, what if we actually helped people explore, observe and tangibly have an impact on their mindset? And that has been met with huge critical acclaim. Now, I will tell you that one of the reasons I think it's the road less traveled is because mindset is an esoteric concept.

That's right

And so no wonder people gravitate more towards dude, just tell me what to do, right? We get into behavior modification; just tell me how to behave differently. Well, you and I, Jason, have created this saying inside Rewire, that we really can't help people act differently until we help them think differently.

That's right.

And about every athlete on the planet has figured this out. At least the elite athletes know that mindset matters. Now, some of them who have all the resources, they then go out of their way not to just acknowledge that, but how do we actually impact it?

Yeah, what do we tangibly do around it?

Right. You and I don't come today and kind of, we don't want to just make an argument for the fact that mindset matters, and we're not going to certainly take 30 minutes to do that, we want to as quickly as we can, hopefully have some consensus and understanding of that, but then you're going to help us move through, are there some tangible ways to legitimately and scientifically impact that? And we just hope that you stay with us today and are willing participants to understand this deeper concept and maybe some tangible ways that we can impact?.

Yeah, so good. So good. You know you and I started this mindset coaching company 11-some-odd years ago, and we've been taking mindset out to the country for that long, and heck, you were coaching around those years and years, even before you found it Rewire. But what we decided to do about a month ago is I put up a poll on LinkedIn, going, okay, that's what we think, but what do you think, LinkedIn? Does mindset matter? You know, and we put up a poll, and we asked this question right here, when it comes to your personal and professional growth, what's made the biggest impact on your success, mindset or skill set? And we just gave four different, you know, potential answers. Is it 80-20, where mindset is, that's it? Is it 60-40, where there's mostly mindset? Or is it the opposite? Does skill matter more? Does skill win? And I think these results are really dramatic. I mean, 97% of the people were like, hey, mindset. And you know what's funny about this, and I'll call this out for those of you that are watching right now on LinkedIn Live, if you add up all these numbers, it actually comes to 101. Now I'm not going to say that LinkedIn isn't really good with their math, I think they're probably doing some rounding here, but for those persnickety people who are like, wait a minute, that's 101, that's not 100, I'm pretty sure there was some rounding here. But the bottom line of this is, you all think that mindset matters as well, and so, one, that makes us feel good, like, we're on to something. Well, we already know that anyways, because we keep on getting asked to coach within organizations; we're asked to do intensives and workshops around this topic. So, what we wanted to do today was make it very tangible. If you all think that mindset matters, well, what is it that we can do to affect that mindset, instead of just shaking our head, yep, mindset matters, sure, that great? Okay, then what do we do about it? So, one of the things that Steve and I wanted to do today was, let's first define mindset, because that can be like you said, Steve, ethereal, esoteric. So, we're going to give you one definition for today for mindset that we just think is simple. One of our values at Rewire is simplicity, and so here's what we're defining mindset as today. Mindset is what lies below the water line that has everything to do with what happens above the water line. So, you may see that and go, that's great, by the way, what the heck does that even
mean?

What water line are you talking about?

Yeah, exactly. Well, I'm glad you asked. We've got another graphic for you, and it's our iceberg model. And those of you that have been connected with Rewire even a little bit, have probably seen this. I used to draw it on a whiteboard, and everybody on staff gave me a real hard time about my drawing, so we came up with this nice image that Steve Longen and Steph Weatherby on our team worked with, and I'm just going to go through this really quickly. Okay, an iceberg. What's at the tip, tip of the iceberg is what everybody sees, and that's the results. Hey, we produce the numbers, we achieve the goal, we did the thing, whatever that thing is at the very, very tippy top of the iceberg, and then still above the water line are the actions that you took to get to those results. And everybody sees you do those. Did you make the phone call? Did you read the book? Did you have the crucial conversation? Those are things that are visible, viewable and observable. But most of the iceberg is below the water line. Those are the things that you're thinking about before you take the action that leads to the result. Those are the emotions that you feel. So, thoughts, emotions, and then there's so many things. I mean, gosh, we could do a whole episode just on this, like the narratives, the past experiences, the belief that you have, the physical sensations that are related to your emotions. But suffice it to say, for now, everything below the waterline, boy, that's mindset that has everything to do with what happens above the waterline. So, Steve, before we go into the three things that we want to talk about that tangibly effects mindset, I mean, anything you want to add so far?

You know, even as you were sharing that, it just strikes me, Jason and people on the call, like, the iceberg model itself, whenever anyone talks about an iceberg, they're just making an implication that what's below the surface, right? Because I think, in the physical world, icebergs have a bigger mass below than they do above, and that's why we use that as a metaphor.

Right on.

But no, gee, even as you were saying that, like there's there is this gravitational pull to above the line, right? We totally get it. I think where you're going to go with us, and even in the work that you did, and I think what people understand, they understand that what's below the line really, really, really matters. And we don't dismiss above the line. We've got programs now that, like, gosh, actions do matter. We don't want to diminish what happens above the line. Only thing that I want to say is, if we minimize, or otherwise don't focus on below the line. Just wanting what's above the line, well, then you and I need to do a whole other LinkedIn Live, right? Let's just do an above the line LinkedIn Live. Because, you know what we do? We'd come and go, make more calls, work out, get better results. Just do it.

That's right.

You know, do these things, do these things, do these things. And we're doing this because, literally, we've had clients come and go, it's such a limiting message. It's not that it's wrong, it might be mis sequenced. Hey, by the way, once we get the entire field of emotional intelligence is derived out of this idea that below the line matters, and we know it, but above the line matters too.

Oh, for sure. Yeah.

And we sit there, you know, and I don't know what percentage of your life as a coach and mine, because we coach people unfocused above the line a lot, but we hopefully are sequencing what's below the line. And so, I just wanted to point that out, because I think that the iceberg model does a great job of that. And how ironic that you're going to help us be tangible below the line, right? There's almost a little irony there.

I see some comments coming in. Ryan McShane is saying, hey, you know, being precedes doing. If we focus on being, we get the doing that we desire, but there is reciprocation there, right? Like, great call out, Ryan, but kind of like what you're saying as well, Steve. I saw a video just this morning that talked about the merits of, hey, do the thing that you don't want to do anyways, because it will affect your mindset to then help you to do it even more, and that can be right as well. So, I don't know that it's only linear. In fact, I think oftentimes, you know, it's circular, cyclical.

And Ryan in his comments, you know, we could do a whole thing. We could get into the being and doing thing, but I like how you said that. It's probably both, right? I mean, faith without action is dead. I'm sure I've read that somewhere, however, action without faith or being without doing, like, we get that it's both, but the one that might not get talked about and tangibleized enough is below the line. So that's where you're going to take this.

That's right. So, the hidden driver is mindset. What can we do to affect mindset? Well, there's probably 223 things you can do. We're going to talk about three specific ones today. The one that I can't help but talk about first when it comes to this topic is self-care, and oftentimes I get pushback on that. Oftentimes, people ask, why are you talking about that right now? Let me kind of explain, because I've thought about this a lot, and I've coached around this a lot, and I've had my coach-ees teach me a lot about this. So, here's the thing. All we have is our mind and our body, our physical beings. When that goes away, there aren't any emotions anymore, there aren't any feelings, there certainly aren't any actions that are being taken or results gotten. So, this is the package. This vehicle is all that we have as we go towards whatever it is that we're going towards, or looking for actions or results, or whatever it is. The better we take care of that vehicle, the better we are suited to have good mindset, to take the actions that we want to take to get the results that we're looking for. And so, we just talk about self-care first. And yes, that does mean drinking lots of water. That does mean getting lots of sleep that we've done workshops on. That does mean good nutrition. And there's all kinds of different examples. When we do workshops on this, we go through example after example after example. There was a book that was written by a guy named Jack Grapple over 25 years ago. It's called “The Corporate Athlete”. It's a jawbreaker of a book. I mean, it's a 300-page book, so I'll just give you the bottom line of it, and that is, study after study after study and there's been so much more data behind this in recent years that supports this idea, is basically the bottom line, the better that we take care of ourself, just the more likely it is that you're going to achieve the results that you're looking for. Salespeople that take care of themselves, they tend to make more sales than other people. Recruiters that take really good care of themselves, they tend to recruit better than their cohorts that don't, and so on and so on and so on. I'll leave you with this before we get to the second key of just tangibly helping your mindset. If there's anything inside of you right now that's going, golly, here it is February, and I'm listening to this. I was gonna start some things in January, and there’s that little twinge inside of you that's going, dang it? Yeah, I just encourage you, this is your sign. Take a step towards better nutrition, better well-being, whatever that is for you. It's not for me to say, go run a marathon. Go do a cold plunge. I don't know about any of that, but if there's anything inside of you right now that is just something needling you, something in the back of your mind, boy, I just encourage you to take action on it, because it will help your mindset, which will help you get the results that you're looking for.


No dude, I mean you hit it. I loved what you said about this physical thing is what we're bringing to the table. Just recently, I, like so many people in this country, it seems to me, I've been sick. I caught whatever flu or RSV thing, and one of the things that I noticed amongst others that I was just miserable, is just how much energy I had to dedicate towards being better, right? And so, if you and I are talking about mindset and all this stuff, like, oh my gosh, if we could live well. Now, certainly we're gonna get sick from time to time, but boy, your comment about self-care just resonates with me, because there are people that get sick, and I totally get that to the degree to which we have some agency over helping ourselves be in that level of wellness, it's gonna certainly matter. And your book, I'm sure, pointed out the correlation. It wasn't just, hey, you're gonna sell more. He took 300 pages to describe the fact that there's probably a correlation to the mindset.

Lot of nuances. Lots and lots of nuances. And hear me, right? Because I don't want to get too radical on this idea.

Get radical, dude.

Well, I've made the point before that, and I've heard this. This seems to be a popular thing these days, which is, you know, we have all these goals that we want to achieve, the challenges that we need to get through to achieve the goals, and how do we do that? And if you get sick, especially if you get a diagnosis, like you get really sick, all of your goals, all of your challenges, go away because you have one goal: I gotta get better right now. And I have people in my life, and many of you do too, that that's their one goal. I have people in my life with cancer diagnosis, and guess what? They don't have the same goals that they had pre diagnosis. They don't have the same challenges, because all those things took a back seat to the one thing that's important. Now, when I talk about being radical, I'm not saying, hey, you drink another glass of water a day, or you go take a walk outside, and you're not going to get that diagnosis. No. I’m not saying that, but you might up your odds, and I'm just for doing things that are upping our odds, and so that's why we talk about self-care first, right? Alright. Number two.

Fire away.

Foster curiosity in yourself and those around you. What does that mean? What do I even mean by foster curiosity? So, first of all, just tangibly, read books, go to workshops, go to networking events when you first encounter a challenge, big, small or otherwise, instead of just that knee jerk reaction that we all do, and Steve, I do want you to add color to this in a minute, because you're very wonderful at describing this a little bit better than I am, but instead of that knee jerk reaction, work on fostering curiosity within yourself, as opposed to, I wonder why that happened? What makes you say that? Tell me more about that. Those types of curiosity questions, and I'll talk about the pros and cons of all that in a minute, but Steve, you have a lot to say about the knee jerk reaction, versus, hey, tell me more about that.

Well, you're defining, Jason, a growth mindset. Since we're talking about mindset, curiosity fosters a growth mindset. And all the people on the call and that are going to listen to this, if we asked you, hey, do you have a growth mindset? It's funny, everyone wants to have a growth mindset. I will tell you that there are times in my life where I don't; we get fixed, right? And one of the ways out of that is exactly what you're saying, continue to be curious. Continue to be curious. I do note, and I'll, you know, again, you got to move on, I will just note that people sometimes in our process ask questions. Like we'll bring something up or whatever, if you've ever done something in your life that you later on realized wasn't maybe the smartest thing you've ever done, and you ask yourself this question, why did I do that? Have you ever asked yourself that question?

It's a tough one, because sometimes I don't want to know the answer, but yeah.

Well, what I've been working with people, because they'll ask that question, or they'll ask it of someone else. Jason, why'd you say that? Okay, so let me ask that question again. Jason, why'd you say that? I tell people, if you'll pause and really listen to the tone of that question, it might as well be Jason, why'd you say that, comma, idiot.

Right.

And when I do it internally to myself, oh, Steve, why did I say that? I'm an idiot. It's not really a growth mindset. I actually think the question's good to your point about fostering curiosity, provided that we can rethink the tone. Why did I say that?

So good. Yeah, that's the nuance I was talking about.

We didn't change the question at all, we just changed the tone. And it to your point about fostering curiosity, we don't have to learn a new script. We're already asking the question, let's just reframe the tone. I recently had one of our senior leaders, one of the companies that we coach asked the whole group people like, why are we doing this? And they came into
a coaching call and they were like, I didn't get a lot of good response. He's like, I asked a question. You told me to ask questions. I'm like, did you? And so, I was like, well, maybe we go back and go, why did we do that?

Well, what you're referring to is really the spirit of this tangible key. It's literally for the purpose of curiosity, satisfying curiosity, not anything else. Not to get your point across, not to suggest something else, but just literally for the sole purpose of being curious. There are so many breakthroughs that can happen in conversations and challenges and conflict with, “tell me more about that”. That that type of curiosity. And you will notice many of you that are hearing this, watching us live, maybe viewing the recordings your leaders, boy, you use that one that one question, tell me more about that, as opposed to launching into fixing it, reacting, getting upset, whatever it is, boy, that just elicits a totally different response, totally different neuro chemicals that are happening, different conversations that are happening, opening up to solutions that may have not been there otherwise. So, fostering curiosity.

Yeah, you got to get to the last one, but the last thing I'll say is, you know, if we're always right about everything in our own minds, curiosity becomes virtually impossible.

Yeah.

Curiosity helps me know I'm not always right about everything, and it allows me to listen. But you know, I'll steal this from my coach, who came to me one day and he said, I'm a recovering know it all, and he goes in from time to time I have relapses, right?

So good.

And so, curiosity, health of that. Dude, we got one more.

Yeah. It’s really about your community, the people around you, and you know, we call it coaching. We happen to run a coaching company, and so we think that's very important. You know, it's funny, we didn't start Rewire to go make a bunch of money, we started Rewire because we said, huh, what's something that helps with mindset? Yeah, the people around you and the people that are fostering your growth, and so it is to obtain coaching. And this isn't a commercial to hire us at Rewire to be your coaches, although we would love that, but there are people around you that are your cheerleaders, that you can have conversations with, that can hold you accountable. Whether it's friends or colleagues, certainly coaching companies like ours, and there's other great ones out there, but we think obtaining a community around you that can cheerlead you, ask you questions, have satisfied curiosity, hold you accountable, well, gosh, we just think that that's so important. The more that you're sharing and caring and holding each other accountable and lifting one another up, if you can be the coach yourself, or you can obtain coaching for you and your people, gosh, we're just big fans of that.

And to bring it back to the iceberg model, we're mindset coaches. We do care about results a great deal, and we care about actions, but not before mindset. And so, mindset coaching, I think, is a real thing. You know, as you were saying that, I think it was Albert Einstein, someone's gonna correct me, that's the problem with being live, but I think it was Albert Einstein that said you cannot solve a problem with the same consciousness that created it, right?

And you typically need people around you to help come up with that solution.

Yeah, especially with mindset. That's why you and I work with people in our own thing. Like, we know a lot about this, but at best, I have a 90 degree thing, and I think certain things or whatever, and so, getting someone outside of you to look at that is just absolutely great.

And there may be those of you that are that are watching right now that do want to reach out to us about anything that we're talking around mindset, or maybe it is coaching, we've put a QR up on the screen, QR code, you can hit that with your camera and set an appointment with us and chat with us. We would love to do that, even if it's just to discuss this further. We actually enjoy that, but we also do workshops on this topic, we get in front of groups, we have people do exercises around this, and we certainly coach a lot of leaders around the country. And if this is something that you think would be helpful to you, we’d consider it an honor to coach you as well. So, Steve, I'll put this slide up, just so people remember what the heck is it is that we talked about today, but, man, you want to close this out?

Goodbye. How's that for a close? No, we're honored that you would be here. Thank you so much. We look forward to bringing you great stuff in the future. We really try hard not to be hard to find so reach out to us if we can help in any way. We truly hope that you will go and experiment and practice with your own mindset as you help others as leaders, so thank you very much for being here. Honored to always be with you. And as we say, every time at the end of our Insight Interviews, Jason and I our thoughts and stuff, they matter some, I guess, but what matters most are yours. So, what are you walking away with? And that's what matters the most. So, we'll see you next time on the Insight Interviews. Thanks for being with us live and have a great day.

So good. See you later. Everybody.



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