Achieve Outrageous Success In Business And In Life w/ Dan Waldschmidt [Episode 2]

Dan Waldschmidt, best-selling author of Edgy Conversations, and President of Waldschmidt Partners International, provides game-changing breakthrough ideas to transform the performance of your sales team and your company.

In this episode, Part 1 of an extended conversation, Dan, a record-setting ultra-marathon champion, talks about his unconventional journey from his first sales job (mowing lawns) to becoming a successful serial entrepreneur. Dan has worked with hundreds of companies, motivating change and developing winning attitudes and he shares his strategies for how to “unstick” your business. Each day Dan helps people achieve outrageous success in business and in life. Listen to this episode. Today it could be you!

About The Show

It’s time to accelerate. Hi, I’m your host, Andy Paul. Join me as I host conversations with the leading experts in sales, marketing, sales, automation, sales process, leadership, management, training, coaching, any resource that I believe to help you accelerate the growth of your sales, your business, and most importantly, you.

Let Us Introduce You To Our Guest… Dan Waldschmidt!

Hi. Welcome to the show. My guest today is Dan Waldschmidt, CEO, speaker, author, champion ultra marathoner, which I want to get into a little bit later in the show.

Dan. How you doing? Hey, I’m doing great. Great to be with you today. So rather than have me do a standard introduction, introduce yourself, tell us what you do and who you do it for.

A Bit About Dan

So just for people listening, Dan just recently won a one hundred mile ultra marathon race. And I think you set a record dinging?

I did, yes. Tell us about that. Where was that? Yes. seventeen hours. eighteen minutes. five seconds. I wouldn’t even have run the race, except it was in my hometown here in the southeast in South Carolina. And I thought, you know what? It’s close to home. So let’s go out and do it. And it was a lot of what I was planning for and a lot of what I wasn’t planning for, 92 degrees, 100 percent humidity. I think out of one hundred and fifty people who started the race, maybe a third or two had to drop out from some sort of heat stroke or heat exhaustion.

I can imagine. But what was cool about that, the races and my video team created a documentary, which I hopefully I will have done in the next few weeks, was I told my wife the night before, OK, I know I can do this. I just want to see if I can run from wire to wire. And so that was my goal.

I want to see if I can push myself to run every step of the way. And besides stopping at an aid station to grab a sandwich where you have to, you know, take a step. We ran the entire way and finished 24 miles ahead of second place. I think something like ten or twelve hours ahead of second place. So that was fun.

So bringing it back to Tulsa. What do you do and who you do it for and your boss.

So here’s what I do. I run a big consulting company that solves complex problems for big billion dollar businesses. We are headquartered out of Washington, D.C. We do work in Istanbul.

I had another office in Istanbul, Turkey, and another office in Tokyo. I think 12 or 14 different countries around the world. We have projects from cell helping laptop manufacturers, you know, sell the right products in Chile and South America to helping Oracle and Brazil and a bunch of stuff like that. So it’s really the problems we solve might be leadership problems. They might be marketing problems that might be our problem. They all come down to one really serious thing.

Andy, you know this. Most companies don’t really want to solve their problems until it impacts revenue or profit. And as soon as it touches revenue, it’s like we’ve got to solve this.

Then they call me and we go in and try to shake things up. But essentially, as you just said in your gracious announcement or introduction console to solve problems, speak. And of course, I have a book and a blog and things like that. Just trying to change the conversation and business around what it takes to achieve success. I think a lot of these businesses are stuck and people are stuck and being stuck is really frustrating. And so I unstick them.

Winning Attitudes

Yeah. I mean, I love the way you write about winning attitudes. Just go to your blog. Just this week. So people are interested. Go to Dan’s blog at danwaldschmidt.com/blog. I mean, this week you’ve got one on ‘Stop Whining Self’. Never give up taking stock from failures. How did you learn these lessons?

Well, you know, I had made up a bunch of money at a very early age from hard work. And that’s kind of how I was raised. No TV in the home at all. You know, seriously, I tell people, kind of like the analogy like Tiger Woods was raised. You know, you see him on TV hitting a golf ball at three and four years old. That’s how I was raised, from starting taking piano lessons at five years old. And now, you know, in university, my minor was like concert piano. Right. So it’s like I still play classical piano. So from those days of having to practice again and I realize how I was raised, and it was funny and looking back on it, I go, why did I, like, go along with that? But as a kid, you don’t know any better. So your mom says you have to read a book a day. You read a book a day. And oh, by the way, my mom said to me, guess what? We don’t want you to read fiction because it’s a waste of your brain. You’re going to have to read biographies. And oh, guess what? At 12 years old, I’m reading my dad’s Blackstone law books. Right. It’s like it’s crazy, but that’s how I was raised.

But your friends weren’t doing that. I mean, my friends weren’t. They were watching Seinfeld and doing all of this fun stuff. Going to the pool.

Apparently. Very religious, he said, you know, you’re not allowed to go to the pool or wear swim trunks or things like that. You have to be modest. And basically it was you. We only want you to do things that are worthwhile and really laughing and joking and all of that craziness.

We had fun. Don’t get me wrong. But it was like, look, you know, let’s build mastery in your life that you can use it to be successful down the road. And so that’s what they were really focused on. So it’s no wonder my first company, my first job, my first company at 12 and 13 years old was mowing lawns. Some 200 of them, I think, you know, and gave that money my parents when I got home. Took that money and said, we’re going to help you invest and save it and store it and keep it.

I basically paid my own way through college using the money I saved as a young teenager. And so I learned a lesson. I mean, there was no label on it. No one was calling me an entrepreneur at 12. In fact, I was like some sweaty dude with a lot of grass stains on my knees. All right.

Now, everyone’s a fancy entrepreneur. I’m an entrepreneur. Back then, I was just like a dude who was hustling, trying to earn my keep. And so but I learned lessons. I learned that a home closer to my house, I could give them a little discount because I didn’t have to walk as far. And I learned that, you know, a home that was further away, I need to charge them more.

I remember when I first started mowing lawns. I mean, again, this is a rude awakening. Twelve year old kid, I go and borrow twenty dollars from my mom and go down to the store where they print flyers. And I printed flyers and handed them out. People called the house. I picked up the phone. OK, I’m glad to come. I go outside and my mom opens the back door. She says, where are you going? So I’m going to mow this lawn. And she said, Why? Why are you pushing the family lawnmower down the street? I said, I’m gonna go mow the lawn. She said, That’s not your lawn mower. You don’t own it. Now, how can you use that lawn mower? And I said, well, I hadn’t thought of this. I said can I use the family lawn mower? She said, sure, happy to let you use the family lawn mower. But you don’t have to pay any price. Nothing.

You know, with mom in the world, no one put a label on that. But guess what I learned? I learned about vendor relationships, right? I learned about the cost of goods. All the stuff that I would have never learned. You know, I would have to know 10 years later in an MBA class, I have a fancy title for it. I learned as a 12/13 year old kid. And at twenty five, 26 years old, it’s no wonder I made millions of dollars in this tutelage.

Business Beyond College

What was the first business you started professionally beyond college?

My first one was actually a business that I didn’t start. I worked at Enron for a couple months, believe it or not. And then jumped to a plumbing, heating and air conditioning company that was very, very, very small. And I didn’t start it, but my best friend’s dad did. And we’re at a football game. And he said, hey, I hear you’re good at sales. I’m going to think about firing my sales team. Would you think about coming in and doing something from scratch? And I thought, sure, why not challenge. And in two years later, I’d build it into a 20 million dollar empire. And by the way, back then I was kicking and balls. You know what I said to him, by the way, for all you young sales guys out there looking at, oh, I need to get paid more. I want you to know, I told him, I said, don’t pay me a salary. Give me 10 percent of every bit of revenue this company brings in that I contribute to.

Now, if you just heard what I said a few minutes ago, I said I grew this to be a 20 million dollar company in two years. So as a young punk, I think I’d join the company, I was 19 years old, maybe 20. I was making a lot, a lot, a lot of money at a very early age. But I had the guts to go and believe in myself and say, don’t pay me anything until I sell a lot for you. And then I want you to pay me.

Now, the other lesson I learned was, guess what? Hey, I left after two years. You know why? The guy who was running the team said I want to stop writing checks. That’s right. Yeah. Let us say number two, Andy.

And you’ve written about this. You’ve talked about it. But, you know, I was young. I made a rookie mistake as I priced myself out of a job. I had built a company for somebody else and made myself a lot of money. Don’t get me wrong. But that was a short term deal. And like a professional football player for a special sportsperson, you know, negotiating that process can be pretty frictional.

I said, screw it. I left and went to another. I found another very small company, about one hundred thousand dollar company selling legal services.

Can I use the same process I used in mowing lawns, building an empire there to selling air conditioners and toilets? Can I do that? Selling legal services to wall street lawyers. On Wall Street and on K Street in Washington, D.C., and in one year, the group grew that from one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to eight million dollars. It would have been twenty five million. But unfortunately we were physically unable, literally could not do the work, so we could not sell it. Every single person, was working tremendous amounts of overtime. There’s just no way to scale it that fast.

What was your secret to transforming the sales so dramatically? Let’s take the legal services company. And what did you do differently than what they had been doing in the past?

I think one of the big lessons I learned was perspective matters, a lot perspective. And so a lot of people know about their industry. And so there’s something magical about being a little clueless about what what an air quoting here, what will work. Right. What should work? I went in with a take no prisoners approach.

One of the things I did, which was I think I’ve talked about this in interviews before, I gathered a motley crew of sales people around me to go sell it. And when you joined, I would literally get you a sword that was engraved with your name on it. Now, this is back in the time when Gladiator first came out, right? I think it’s the first movie that I’ve seen about like 20 times. And the soundtrack to it, you know, like when I’m running, sometimes I’ll put on the soundtrack to where he’s in the stadium. Yeah. And in the stadium fighting. And it’s like dun dun dun dun. And you’re like, wow, yes. Your blood’s pumping and you’re thinking about swinging swords and tigers jumping off chains. But when I would hire people and I would say, listen, we are not salespeople, we are warriors and we don’t fight each other, we fight everybody outside. And I really changed the tone from process from aptitude to attitude.

I really brought in guys who wanted something to prove their chip on their shoulder. Then I began to add a process to refine them. So I didn’t refine that. I didn’t look at coherence or adherence to a program.

First, I went into guys who were hungry and angry and frustrated and wanted to leave their mark on the world. And I said, join me, my brothers. And literally, when you joined. Their name was engraved on it. And it was a heavy sword, like the sword from Gladiator, it looked exactly the same. I gave it to them. When they left, we said, you have to give us your sword back. Did you break it? Did you break up like the ceremonial? Oh, no, we did. We hung them up on the wall. We had a wall that was hung up on what we called ‘past heroes’. And so literally what happened was people.

It did two things. One. We became legendary in a short period of time. By the way, I went on to take this company. I was going to leave and build a competitive company.

The shareholders said, no, no, no, no. And then how about you run this company and we did it. We grew it two hundred and fifty locations. And I eventually sold it to a company that I have. They went big. So the end of the story was, things went well. They grew and this actually worked. But part of what worked was, I had the right timing, was an industry that was growing. So I got some natural buoyancy.

The thing that really made it work was, we brought in guys who were willing to scrap and the reputation got around that. Wow. These guys were like, they were serious. And so our competitors knew that if we were coming after you, that, you know, it was going to be up, it was going to be a fight. So when we moved into Philly, it was a fight. I moved into New York. It was a fight. We went to Miami. It was a fight. And every location. It’s like we’re not backing down an inch and we’re hiring warriors. And so that attitude, again, that’s that idea of capturing the will. Right. Will and stimulating, that was something that I learned very early on, is that if people don’t want to win, I can’t change them. But there are a lot of people who want to fit when they don’t look pretty winning, then, you know, they sweat too much. They stink too much while they’re sweating. You know that grunt, why they’re doing push ups, right? Right.

So the big businesses who want the guy who’s wearing the bow ties and the white shoes go, oh, he doesn’t fit our classification and he doesn’t have the right skills. They are not the right pedigree and not the right resume. It’s not the right CV. And they kick him to the curb and I grab that guy and give him a hand up and say, listen, are you ready to battle? If you’re ready to battle. I’ve got a place for you, you know?

So I learned that now, the problem was I couldn’t exactly describe what I was doing looking back on it. I’ve got labels for it. Looking back, I’ve got, you know, processes for it. But while I was living that I was horribly frustrated because it was a lot of touch and feel and I knew someone wouldn’t work out. But I didn’t know why. So take, for example, before we sold Dedmon Scientific, I was planning to do two things. Either take the company big or really big or sell. And so I was hiring a CFO. I thought if we go public or something, I need a CFO like Knight, not a bookkeeper but like a real CFO. And so I interviewed a gentleman who’s still a very close friend of mine. We became friendly in this process, who was the first CFO of AOL. So this guy knew his stuff and I brought him in. I thought, what the hell am I doing right? I’m a college dropout twice. Right.

Dropped out to two different universities. Five years, no degree. Like on one hand, I’m thinking like, Dan, you’re just like an epic loser. How are you going to interview a CFO to take your company public? And so I sat across the chair from this guy and I he was telling me all this stuff. And I said, look, thank you. What’s your biggest weakness? And he said, (gave me this long answer, like two minutes) and it was like, I care too much, love too much, give too much, always work too hard, all that stuff.

I said, what’s your second biggest weakness? And I don’t even remember what he said. So what’s your third biggest weakness? The first answer I gave. I thought you said that. I think right around the fourth or fifth time I asked him what his biggest weakness was. He said, I don’t know sometimes. And I said, oh, OK. I can live with that. I learned this lesson early on, is that there’s something inside all of us that either propels us magically forward towards our goals or limits us. Sometimes people say that self limiting behavior, it limits, it stops us.

So despite all of these skills we have and the experience, the tutelage and the capabilities that we do, things that cause ourselves to either be wildly effective beyond what we should be right. Beyond what other people think we should be, or it it handcuffs us so that we don’t even rise to the minimum expectations of our pedigree.

So that’s what I said, I realize, and of course now in working with big companies all over the world, I see this time and time and time again that most of what stops us from being amazing, I’ll use the word awesome a lot is has nothing to do with raw knowledge, all like, oh, I didn’t know that it was illegal to stab somebody in the chest. Right. It’s not about like me. It’s kind of silly. Right. We don’t know. It’s that we don’t do it so we don’t change. It’s that we’re not motivated to want to change. And so it’s being able to help those organizations, not just create strategy for the sake of making more money, but creating purpose and meaning. So that long after its stops being fun or funny, that you’re still winning. Right. And that’s that, my friend. That’s the Holy Grail.

All right. Well, we’re going to back after a short break. I want to talk further about that. Stay with us after the break. As Dan Waldschmidt shares with us his secrets for developing the attitude you need to succeed at everything, I guess, right? Yeah, everything. Yeah. Aiming right. Life. Business, you name it. So stay with us. We’re right back.

Back To Accelerate, Dan Waldschmidt Talks About Taking First Steps

Welcome back. My guest today is Dan Waldschmidt. Make sure you follow Dan online at danwalterschmidt.com.

Make sure you read his blog every day. Great stuff, about developing the attitude you need to win and succeed at work and in life.

So right after the break, you’re talking about, you know, attitude versus aptitude and developing these, consistent winning habits, if you will. For a CEO of a small business, or a salesperson for a small business, or medium sized business, what is the first step they need to take? How do they do that? The self assessment of what these limiting, self limiting beliefs are, as you talked about, you know, how did they do self-assessment? What’s the first step to making a change?

Yeah. So part of it is really knowing what you want. And perhaps some people call that knowing your why. But you know, why are you doing this? What makes you tick, is attaching it to something bigger than than just making money.

It has to be attached to something bigger than making money, maybe. Or, you know, look, and sometimes we’re not honest about this. I talked to a friend of mine. He’s running 700 miles. And I said, why are you doing this? He said, I don’t know. Because I can. I said, no, stop. Don’t give me that bullshit. Why are you doing this? Is it to prove to yourself that you’re tough enough to do it? And he’s like, Yeah, probably. And so I said, I get it. I have those same drives. I’ve run almost 8000 miles in the last two years. Right. I get it.

But what is it? And not being afraid to put it out there. I want to change the world. I want to create a financial giant launchpad for my family. I want to better my committee, whatever it is, whatever your thing is, attaching it. Here’s what I ought to tell companies who often say to me, oh, we’re just not inspired to change. Then I’ll say this. Then your dreams aren’t big enough. I don’t have to. I don’t have to motivate you to get out of bed. When your house is on fire, right, I mean, you’re pretty damn motivated to get out of your bed on your own. I want us to run around with an air horn. No one has to come around and say, well, you get out of bed. You’re out of bed. In fact, you’re not just walking down the hallway. You’re running down the hallway. Right. No one else to saying to work up a sweat. You’re doing it. Why? Because your house is on fire. So you’ve got to find a way to set your house on fire. Right. And by the way, there are literally sometimes small business owners who have the wrong thinking. They’re playing it so safe they’ll never grow. I talked to someone today who said to me, well, if we improve our service, we might drop our revenue by 40 percent. And I said, you might, but you also might attract customers that you have. You don’t even know where they are or that they exist. Right. They’re out there. They want you. But you’re so focused on what? I don’t want to lose what I have right now.

Burning Ships

I often think whenever I find these sort of business questions very confusing in my mind, I try to go very primitive. So I love the story, of course, of Hernando Cortez. Right. Ships. That’s exactly right. I’m getting a new tattoo in the next two weeks. I’ve already drawn it up and everything’s on my arm, to add to the ones I already have of the ship burning and saying burn the ships right here.

For listeners that don’t know, Hernando Cortez was the Spanish explorer that landed in Central America somewhere. Mexico, maybe.

You know, basically when he showed his troops off a loaded ship. He didn’t want fear to conquer them. So he burnt the ships that came over. So there was no return. That’s right.

The only way to get out of the hole was to conquer it. So, I mean, literally. So that’s the lesson. You have nailed it. I mean, like you. The only way to move forward is to find a new path.

You know, now that’s that takes guts. And I’ll tell you it’s hard. It’s hard to do it, the couple times I’ve done it. I got to tell you, it’s scary, but you find a way. So attaching what you really want to change in your life.

By the way. Another silly example. My father was a very high level government official under George Bush and running the NSA and at forty forty five. He went to the doctor. Th doctor said, oh, you were having pain because you just had a heart attack. That was a small one. But you need to change your stress level, a diet and a few things like that. Well, you know, obviously, if you’re in the government during the Bush years, that was, you know, 9/11 and all that stuff. So stress level was high. He said, here’s one thing you can do is change how you eat. So he went home the next day, threw out the butter, threw out the salt, threw out all the crap and started eating healthy. Now, prior to that day, my mom who raised me, nagged him about not eating donuts and that he needs more lettuce. I’ll tell you, my dad lost 25 pounds and he didn’t hear nagging words from my mother.

What changed? Well, my mom still had the same beliefs, right? My dad still had the same want for donuts. But what changed was he wanted to live more than he wanted donuts. Right. Until you want to live more than you want donuts in your business.

What’s sweet and sexy in your belly? Right. When you want to grow and change so badly that your bones ache. If you don’t have it right until you get to that point, then guess what? You probably won’t make the change in your life. That will be a catalyst for transformation. And you’ll talk about it and you’ll still read Inc magazine in Fast Company, have all the blogs, Harvard Business Review. You’ll know the right terms. Be tweeting the right tweets. Right, sharing the right content. But you’ll never be the somebody you want to be, the somebody you dream about because you’re not willing to just burn the ships and change. Just burn it. Burn it all down. Burn it.

Right. Dance around the flames and say today is a new day. Instead, you know, you make excuses. Wow. I go, wow, I got to do this. I mean, you know, I got to do that. You don’t have to do anything.

What you have to do is pursue your dream at all costs, you know, and we realize this intensity from time to time. We get a chance to observe it and others.

What I know with the blogs that I write and the articles that I have done, I find is, I try to find these people and bring them to life. We found a guy two days ago in China. He was kicked out of school because he’s handicapped. Had no arms. And he became kind of a big story in China because he took the standardized testing in China with his toes.

I love it. And he didn’t do well enough, so he retook the test to get a higher score. And so, again, that level of commitment is, of course, revered. It used to be revered in our country more than it is now it feels like. But when you see that, you have to stand back and cheer. And of course, those stories are all around us. They don’t often make the news. But those are things that I try to illuminate to say, look, if you want that same breakthrough in your life, then listen, you probably have to act differently and not just act a little bit differently.

Act a lot of it differently. So I think the first thing that busy business leaders of any size business, whether you think you’re a small business, medium sized business or a big multibillion dollar company like like G.E., Aetna, Siemens or the NFL, one of these big, big, big, big companies. Right. Big enterprises is from time to time, you have to make time every Monday, every Tuesday, something like every Saturday morning over a cup of coffee. Sit down and say, what do I really want? Do I really want to be doing what I’m doing now? And if the answer is yes, then that’s great. You’re in a good spot if the answer is no. The next question is, what do I need to do right to get there? What’s changed? Maybe it’s a small change, you know, maybe it’s like your life is good, but the person right underneath you is passive aggressive and maybe you need to pull that guy aside and say, listen, I really love this company and I like working with you, but if you can’t be more direct, you can’t work here anymore. I know we’ve worked together for 35 years because you’re an incredibly talented person. But if this doesn’t change right, then you’re going to have to leave, you know? So these are things that we often avoid. And inside were sweltering.

Right. We’re just we’re just steaming. And it builds up and builds up. And instead of becoming better versions of ourselves, we’re just worn out, bitter and angry and end up giving up.

Then I think you hit such a key point is that for so many people and I see this with companies, I’ve worked with clients over the years, especially small, medium enterprises, a lot of times they engage because they’re stuck. This is what happens. They reach a certain level of proficiency at what they do. And they sort of get satisfied, but the instinct is now to protect what they have. Just the point you talked about. What are they really protecting? And they’re protecting themselves against success. Yep. Exactly right.

Mechanics and Mindset

Mike, I think our my good buddy Tom Searcy said to me the other day, you know, it’s in a lot of business. There’s mechanics.

So the mechanics might be H.R. might be sales. It might be cold calling, marketing, outbound, e-mailing, inbound, e-mailing, lead generation, whatever it is. There’s lots of mechanics. And so guys like me and you write books about the mechanics. You know, we write books on how to improve your cold calling and zero time selling. You know, it was a masterful book he wrote about a year ago. I think. Right. But, you know, we write books about these mechanics and well-intentioned books. We write these books going, how do we help small business leaders, you know, fix them mechanics.

If they adopted the principles that you outlined in zero time selling, guess what? They would have more time in their life and they’d have more sales. So it’s frustrating. I’m putting words in your mouth.

I’m sure when people read your book and don’t implement it and you want to shake them by the neck and go, dude, I spent a year writing this book and if you would just follow it, you would have a better business. So it’s like, why don’t they do it? Why don’t they listen to these mechanics who can fix it?

Here’s the scenario. If you’re a business leader, this is important, is that there’s mechanics. But ahead of mechanics, there’s mindset.

You’ve got mindset and mechanics. And so what happens is if your mindset is I already know what there is to know. Right. I’ve been doing this business and my grandpappy did this business and my Grandpappy’s Grandpappy did this business, and I know what to do and I know it all. That’s your attitude. Then you’re right. You get stuck and you know, you might not even know that’s your attitude. Someone might have to point it out to you, then the mechanic that changes, that can help make you better, just get left to the side.

If those mechanics don’t get tweaked, then the last section, the magic is missing. So companies like Amazon can send a package to us anywhere in the world in like 24 hours or so. That’s incredible. Right. And Zap and Zappos can send you like endless numbers of awesome shoes. Right.

It’s like these companies have certain things that they’re known for. And it’s magical. You know, Disney World, literally magic. Right. But that comes from this. It comes from great mechanics. But the mechanics comes from a belief system of mindset. By the way, that’s what I talked about earlier, a few minutes ago, about what are you thinking about? What if your mindset is I can always improve that when someone criticizes you go. OK. And you take the good stuff and throw away the bad stuff.

If you’re right, if your mindset is our customers are stupid, guess what? Everyone’s picking on me and I never get a break. And guess what? When someone criticizes you, you’re like, see, that’s what I’m talking about. Everyone’s picking on me. And life isn’t fair. And so what happens is your mechanics become defensive. Right. And guess what happens to your magic if that’s like a candle, a flame. It just starts getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and eventually it goes out.

So I think it’s important to realize as a company is that, you know, guys like you and me who who try to help these leaders get unstuck. They come in and they say to us, you know, Andy, I know you’re an expert in sales. So come on, give it to me. Give it to me, baby. Show me how to improve my mechanics, and you will, they listen to you, they will improve. But part of that change in mechanics really needs to include as well simultaneously a change in their mindset. What are they doing, not just to hire you, to fix their mechanics? What are they doing each day to fix their mindset?

You know, in sports, we see it right in sport. Lindsey Vonn, for example, who’s who’s won the most downhill skiing events of any alpine ski event, I think of any woman. Yeah, I think of anyone. Yeah, it’s crazy. She goes to these to ski with three coaches. One of them is a ski coach and two of them are head coaches. Right. Helping her focus. You’re right. High speeds around corners, all it’s a focus intensity mindset. All of that. You know, it’s why Phil Jackson, the Zen master, how can he help great basketball players like Michael Jordan. How do these legends like Michael Jordan look up to Phil Jackson? Because he’s able to reach inside their soul and help stimulate what really matters.

So, you know, one of the reasons why I go running almost every day is to keep my head in shape, which is why I try to meditate every day to keep my head in shape. One of the reasons I wake up every morning and try to tell myself a few important things, you know, like I refuse to worry about things that are outside my control. Why do I have to repeat that to myself? Because there are things outside my control that frustrate me. And if I don’t remind myself, hey, idiot, guess what? That’s out of your control. Don’t worry about it. Don’t waste your motion on it. My mindset goes to crap, and if my mindset gets lousy, guess what gets lousy? My mechanics get lousy. Guess what? I don’t sell. Even if I have a great book on my desk called Zero Time Selling, guess what? It ain’t working for me because my mindset is horrible, right? Or Amp Up Your Sales. That will ramp up your sales. It’s funny. I have two copies of Amp Up Your Sales on my desk.

Make sure you give one to a friend. There you go. So I will take a short break and come back and talk further with Dan Waldschmidt.

Wrapping Up Part One

Hi, this is Andy. You’ve just listened to Part 1 of my conversation with Dan Waldschmidt. Part two is even more incredible. It’s going to air on December 8th. You know, make sure you don’t miss it. Now, the way to do that is to go to Itunes, subscribe to this podcast. You not only will catch the next episode with Dan, but also all the conversations we’ve recorded with amazing leaders, sales and marketing, business development, professional development people to help you grow and amp up your business. So until next time, this is Andy Paul. Good selling, everyone.