July 30, 2024
Born to Win, Conditioned to Lose: Overcoming Limiting Beliefs
Get ready to elevate your business, sales, and leadership abilities! On this episode of "Shift Or Get Off the Pot," I sit down with Greg Schweitzer, a record-setting master coach, certified trainer, master practitioner of NLP, hypnosis expert, and founder of Catalyst Transformation Institute to talk about sustained success, work-life balance, sales, and imposter syndrome.🌟
Buckle up this is a fast-paced conversation with plenty of takeaways 💥
– Expedited learning & retention
– The surprising simplicity behind sales success
– Overcoming imposter syndrome
– How to fast-track your growth
– What pro athletes can teach you about balance
– Greg’s inspiring story of helping a client dramatically improve her finances
We cover the power of purposeful and attentive actions, the impact of conscious intention, and the key to unlocking your potential. Whether you're an entrepreneur, salesperson, or simply someone looking to take control of your life, this episode is packed with valuable insights and practical strategies to help you shift your mindset and achieve your dreams.
Timestamps
00:00 Embrace a sales mindset, even in corporate roles.
07:27 Understanding human behavior offers simplicity.
11:30 Human potential, subconscious power, and vivid imagination.
17:27 Value repetition, listen faster, and engage the subconscious mind.
21:37 Confidence, competence, intention, belief.
26:23 Understanding interconnectedness leads to successful leadership and influence.
28:24 Why is it easier to act impulsively?
37:50 Great coaches elevate performance, mentorship accelerates progress.
42:46 Studying NLP, neuroscience impact.
Connect with Greg: greg@catalysttransformation.com
Catalyst Transformation Institute: https://www.catalysttransformation.com
Follow Greg on Social: @catalysttransformation Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn
Visit the Shift or Get Off the Pot Website: ShiftOrGetOffThePotPodcast.com
Keep in Contact! Visit Kim's Website: KimKelleyThompson.com | Email Kim: Kim@KimKelleyThompson.com
Follow Kim Thompson on Social Media: Instagram (@KimKelleyThompson) | Facebook
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Production House: Flint Stone Media
Copyright of Kim Kelley Thompson 2024.
Transcript
Welcome to Shift or get off the pot, the podcast that helps you get out of your head and into action so you can make your dreams your reality. Let's get to it. Welcome back to another episode of Shift or get off the pot. I have asked my next guest to join me today because, as you know, this podcast is all about elevating your game in life, getting to the next level with really, without the hustle, without the burnout, without just all the unnecessary stress. I fully believe, and I like to always say that, look, life gets to be easy. Let's just keep it simple. And he knows quite a bit about that because he is actually a record setting master coach. So we are going to ask him about that.
He is a certified trainer and a master practitioner of NLP neuro linguistic programs. So we want to get into that as well because there's quite a bit of information behind that and hypnosis as well. He has also been a productivity coach and a sales trainer in the real estate industry. So we are going to get deep into sales, a psychology of sales, all of those things. He now has a company called Catalyst Transformation Institute where he really works on helping people step into their power, elevate their game in life, and stop settling in life. Isn't that something we all want to do? Please welcome Greg Switzer. How are you?
Great. So glad to be here. Thanks for the invite, Kim. This is great.
I'm super excited because I started in sales. That was my first real career in commission sales, and I was doing advertising sales, commission sales. I'm a big believer, by the way, in commission sales, because if you can write your own paycheck, wow. Even if you're in the real estate industry, financial industry, or you might have a company or a larger name behind you, you're still an entrepreneur. I mean, you're still writing your own paycheck. And there is nothing that's going to get you to understand yourself and what's going on that might be blocking your success. Because when you're responsible for writing your check, you got to figure out, uh oh, what am I doing? So I want to know, what are some of the things that you've experienced in working with people as a sales trainer, in productivity and helping them elevate their game?
Yeah. Well, there's so many good things about what you just said, because sales is an interesting dynamic, and some people sometimes may get uncomfortable with the word salesperson or being in sales, those kind of things. And the fact of the matter is, I don't care if you employ somewhere at some point, and usually even every day, you still got to sell yourself to the boss and make sure they keep you right. And so sometimes I found it to be really helpful to adopt a mindset, especially for people who aren't really sure if they're going to be moving into that entrepreneurial space, to maybe adopt the mindset of being an intrapreneur, wherever you are, start thinking and acting like you're the boss. Now, I'm being a little facetious about that, but just start taking on a new mindset of, like, I do have some control over my career and I have some ability to be able to change things. And so commission is just a way of being rewarded. Commission only is a way of being rewarded at a higher level for being somebody with that kind of mindset, whether you're inside or outside of a company or you have your own company sort of thing. So all of that's really helped to be able to say that, as many of us heard so many times, and that word mindset gets used a lot.
There are some interesting dynamics to how the brain and the emotions work in a human person, such that allows them to have a belief that I am an entrepreneur. Entrepreneur. Or I can do such. Or honestly, even just the idea of, like, some people look at commission based stuff and they go, ah, it's not secure. There's no security in that. And it's like, you know, there's just different ideas that have to think along those things. So that's just a first piece I would think of in terms of, like, how am I thinking about how I'm approaching my career, whatever that looks like, whether you're in sales or whether you're an admin or you're in janitorial worker, it doesn't matter which deal, right. Woodworking, those kind of things.
How am I thinking about, what do I do? And how am I thinking about myself in that role?
Yeah, that's a big part of it. How am I thinking about myself? And you're absolutely right. The word mindset, you know, it's almost like every year there's a new word that comes out, right? And it's almost like a new paint color, and it gets thrown around and thrown around. Mindset's been around for years. Let's just be honest. I mean, that is, there's nothing different. And it is such an integral part of how we show up in our lives, in our everyday lives, in our work. Whether you are in a commission salesperson or whether you're in a standard job, it doesn't really matter.
But I think one thing about understanding that, and like you said, it's yourself, right? Understanding yourself and who you are and how you're showing up and what you're bringing to the table from a mental aspect of it, because there's all those little things that kind of get in the way. And I remember years ago when I was in sales, one of the very first sales seminars I went to was by a man named Zig Ziglar, who later became my mentor. And I expected it was going to be all about objections, pattern interrupt, you know, all the understanding, all those little nuances and all those little strategies that you need to apply in order to achieve the sale, right? And it was kind of like you do through this whole process, and then you close, right? But to my surprise, yes, there was some of that. A lot of it was talking about, you know, you kind of handle the objections all through the presentation, so they don't really ever come up great. But it was a lot about. Here's the word mindset. It was a lot about really visualizing. It was a lot about the preparation prior to even having the appointment.
So the prospecting, like, how can you get yourself in a position where you're really going after the right prospects and not wasting your time? And that is. That is a shift in mind, because that's putting yourself like, it's elevating your game. It's saying, look at, I am worthy of these people. So that's an inside job. And then he talked a lot about visualization. And this was years ago, and I found it fascinating because I really did think when I was coming out of there, wow, I thought I was going to have all these listed. Then you do a pattern interrupt, and then you do this and this. And it was more.
It was all the prep work inside that took place prior to anything outside.
That's so good. That's so good, Zig. What a good man. That guy was just a cool dude. He was just great in the business front, but he was great on the personal front and just a really good guy to learn from even now. You know, one of the things I love about what you're saying there, the mindset piece, because you're going to take a look at myself and what am I believing, and what do I feel like I can bring to the world? One of the things I've loved about spending so many years studying the human person and how we function, why we do what we do, and why we avoid doing other things and so on, is that when we can start getting understanding of that, it's going to help that piece, that mindset, but it's also the same way that other people function as well. And so your dynamic of being able to communicate, to influence, persuade and sell, or whatever it might be, is going to be similar because it works for you, too. So over the years, you said mindset is an old word, or it's been around for a good long time.
And the truth is, it has. And we're finding, as even those things clear back as far as zig have remained true all this time, we're just getting a more robust understanding of what parts of our body and the parts of our life that it can affect and practices for how to do that. The core of it has been the same for a very long time. Human beings don't change per se in that piece. We're just getting a better understanding of how that functions. And when you start getting clearer understanding of what helps people tick, what makes them do or not do, and it's easy to have a conversation with somebody and be able to help them make a decision or to hire you or something along those lines. When I say easy, I just simply mean that it doesn't have to be complicated. It's simple.
Not necessarily always easy, but it can be a simplified process.
Well, there's a connection point there. I think that's a big part of it. It's all of a sudden now you've got a connection point and you're able to relate because you're understanding. And maybe that comes also, though, when you feel more confident and you feel more competent, that just comes through.
Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting dynamic because it's almost like a cybernetic loop, or kind of a loop, if you will. It's like competence. Having some level of competence and skill in something can naturally bring about the feeling of confidence. And yet, at the same time, since confidence is really just an emotion, and a person can experience any emotion they want to now, without doing anything else other than just deciding to feel that way, that level of confidence that you feel will automatically let you access the personal resources inside of you to make you that much more competent as well. You access your skills and your resources easier when you're more confident than when you're all puckered and scared. And so it can be this beautiful marriage between the two.
And so you have to decide which 01:00 a.m. i going to give attention to right now. Do I want to just change my level of motion and confidence? Great or do I want to and. Or do I want to add a layer of skill and competency that makes me feel like I can take on the next right thing. Right. So part of it helps the feeling, but that doesn't necessarily mean without the confidence, you can. You can have the feeling of confidence. Doesn't necessarily mean you can actually make the result happen.
I mean, one without the other.
Right, exactly. You have to have the skills there. There has to be that. But I love what you're saying there. And when you just mentioned the loop, it reminds me of kind of a funny story in my mind anyway, but I'll share it with you, is that after I came out of that zig zag conference, I will tell you that my income almost quadrupled. It completely changed. And it changed because of two things. My confidence increased, mostly because I was employing these visualization techniques.
Right. But the confidence also, the competence also did because I was now becoming more conscientious of what I was saying and the calls and paying a little bit more attention also to my prospects. And who was I going out to see? And then before. This is where the loop comes in, every time I get to a sales call, I would arrive. And these were the days, you know, you'd pull up in your car, and you'd go in and have an old form and have people sign it. Right. And I would sit in my car for about ten minutes before I would go into the appointment. And in my mind, I would do what he taught me.
I would sit there, and I would visualize the conversation flowing and seeing me shaking hands and walking out with a signed contract. But in my head, I did this loop. Like, I created this almost like a figure eight loop of this, I would say, energy that I was just kind of seeing, okay, we're connecting. And I was just. It was helping me with the visualization process. And what was really happening? Two things, my confidence was increasing because I actually had already been there. You know, it's like the more times you go to the hoo, you go to the line and you shoot, you know? So I was doing it, and I know a lot of athletes say this, too, the more you visualize it and you do it in your head. Right.
It was the same thing. I was doing it over and over again in my head. It was almost like I had had three appointments already, and I only had one. But it helped considerably. Helped considerably.
I totally geek out on this stuff because it's super fascinating that the potential, the mounds of potential that we sit on as human beings right. And so one of the things that's very fascinating is that our conscious part of our brain is the part of us that decides what we want. It's our subconscious part of our brain that gets us to take the actions to make it happen. And what's interesting is our subconscious brain doesn't know the difference between a real experience and a vividly imagined one. And so if you have vividly, vividly, right, turn up the brightness of this and then the sounds and those kind of things, you vividly imagine something. Your body and your neurology is going, wow, this is amazing. I'm experiencing this now. And by doing that, by practicing, even in your mind, you can't help but be able to improve.
And that's actually something that's really beautiful for us to be able to. So, honestly, if you're just laying around and you just want to think about all the other great things, right? You can. You can do a lot with that, right? You can do a lot with that.
So it is fascinating. I mean, I remember just being completely fascinated by that. And I was in my twenties, and it was when I was in the sales career, and I was just like, oh, my gosh, how can. How fast can I impress this stuff in my subconscious mind to. Because it's a sponge, and to really change things. And then again, it can also say, no, we're not doing that. Right. It can also be the thing that puts on the brakes where you feel like it's go time, and then you got 1ft on the accelerator, but 1ft on the brake at the same time, and you're not going anywhere.
And so it's like, you got to find that balance. But I was so fascinated by that that I did start reading a lot of the books and start going, okay, how can I start doing? How can I shorten that time? And honestly, that is the thing. Yes, it was the physical, outward activity. Yes, it is making the prospecting calls, but it's being also being conscientious about, okay, where am I spending my time and who am I going after? Instead of wasting my time on the little ones? It was like, I'm going after the big guys. I want the back cover. I was selling ad space, right? So I want the back cover. I want the inside cover. All of those things.
And it changed. Changed the game for me.
That's awesome. You know, when we had such a gracious introduction of me, one of the things that's fascinating about the world of neuro linguistics is that and the reason it works so well is because there are some things that we, that we can do something through, helping people through their subconscious. And often hypnosis is very much a part of that. Right. Or the characteristics of hypnosis. And then there's things we can do consciously, right. But NLP has this beautiful marriage of getting the subconscious and the conscious to work together, to communicate together. And so what's fascinating about that is that when we decide to be purposeful and attentive to what we're doing instead of just checking the box, it makes a big difference.
So to give you an example, one of the things, I'm working with a real estate team right now, and as part of their initiation and launch process, we have the real estate agents do what we call a thousand dial day. They spend an entire day making 1000 dials out to whomever they can get on the phone, right. And out of that day, who knows how many people they end up talking to. But what's interesting is the difference between making 1000 dial day and getting through the numbers and having virtually no leads from that, and then having a coaching session with a person where I say, look, all the dials are great. We just wanted to get over your fear with that. Whatever I want you to do is I want you to focus on setting appointments with people. And what happened was within 24 hours, this person set reappointments. The opportunity to win a piece of business, which is about a $15,000 payday per instance.
But that shift of consciousness, of being conscious about what you're doing instead of just running through the numbers is going to make a difference too. So when we're repeating things and trying to get them into our brain, we've got to have some sort of level of conscious intention with that. Otherwise it just isn't going to be.
As fruitful a hundred percent, then you're just going through the motions. Listen, if somebody was a sales manager too, and being in that industry for so long and an entrepreneur for years, it's like, it is easy, easy to say, okay, I'm doing, I'm gonna make all these different calls. But then if you don't have that intention, that intentionality behind it, you're right. You can sit there and go, I've been really productive, but show me the money. Right? That's what it comes down to. Okay, so where, what, what's come out of that?
Yeah, this is like, this is why they, well, necessarily why. But an example of this is in school, it's like the kids are like, yeah, I read my 14 chapters. I was supposed to read this quarter or whatever this semester or something like that. They go, oh, really? Let's take this test and see if you do right. I may have just flipped through the pages and read the stuff, but did I absorb it? Was I consciously, purposely trying to adopt that? It's funny that I say that because years ago when I was going to college, one of the areas of study I had was in anatomy and physiology. And that field is rather robust with language and Latin and Greek and all these ability and body parts and so on and so forth. So I used to take the workbook pages out of my workbook, and I go to the library and I'd make like 50 to 100 copies of the workbook page, and I'd fill that page out 50 to 100 times because that repetition in there, I had to. A, remember the answer and b, I had to put it on the page.
That repetition got me to the place where I was getting mostly, mostly a's on my tests for anatomy and physiology and chemistry and that kind of stuff. At that point in time, before that high school, I didn't know this stuff. And I was like, so I was deceased student. I wasn't being very conscious about it.
Okay, listen, you didn't hear me at the beginning then, because I said, I like, life gets to be easy because I did something similar. Only here's what I did. I wasn't going to rip out all those pages or copy them. That's an extra step, writing it all out. So I would take out a recorder. Remember the old cassette recorders? And I would read the pieces to myself that I knew that I had to memorize and get it. And then, because I know to program my subconscious mind, I would play that tape. I'd be driving in the car to school, I'd be going to work, I'd be going to bed at night.
That tape was constantly playing, and that's how I'd memorized everything just so I could get an a. It just. It worked for me because, listen, I wasn't about to start going, finding a copy machine and doing all that stuff. You did more work than me. But hey, we got the results right? Because the intentionality was there.
And this was far, this was long before I knew most of those things, other than to be able to know that, hey, I needed some repetition, right? And I love that you said that too, because it can be very valuable to hear your own voice. And if we might throw out just something for everybody who's watching and listening, one of the other things that can really elevate this is to turn up the speed at which you're listening and just trust your subconscious mind as adopting this. You can do it. You can listen to the same material two, three times faster or more often, if you will, get more repetitions in at the same time. The part of our brain that learns, which is our subconscious, it learns better at very high speeds. So very often if I'm doing an NLP session with somebody and I'm getting them to do some shifting, I'm moving very quickly. I'm asking questions, I'm moving, I do this, put your attention here. And we move very, very quickly.
At first, people are thinking, that's a little bit weird, but what's happening is it's getting past the conscious part of us, which is generally the part that's trying to protect us, and going, hey, don't make me do weird stuff, or this is uncomfortable sort of thing. Once you get past that piece and subconscious records everything. And so when you get that repetition happening, you get past the conscious barrier, the protective barrier, if you will, then that stuff goes in faster and easier.
That is a great tip because I've done that with, you know, courses where I'm like, okay, I've kind of heard part of this. I want to get through this. So I'll, you know, up the speed, 1.5 or whatever, one and a half times. And, and you're right. I mean, I'm still hearing it. And if I'm in the car, I'm like, where did I hear, oh, I know I heard that before. And then, oh, okay. But that's a great point.
I love that because I think especially if you're doing some type of self hypnosis. Really? Like, if you're doing a visualization, you can do that, right?
Absolutely. Absolutely. And quite honestly, the hypnosis piece, I love that you said self hypnosis because visualization, changing your perspective, thinking through things or thinking about things is really a form of just changing your own perspective. And that's really all that hypnosis really ends up doing, is giving you new perspective on something and helps get past that protective barrier so that you can then take on new beliefs or new ideas and those kinds of things. And so you can literally do that when you're listening to an audio book, you could do it in your meditation time. You can. So there's lots of different areas where you can do these things for yourself. And so you can do this to increase your skillset.
You can increase your knowledge base, right. And so that that helps with all of those pieces we talked about making it easier, right. Because it's very interesting thing that we as human beings are very good at complicating things, right?
Oh, yeah.
Especially when things aren't going our way. We're really good at complicating why we have these layers of things that we're allowing to get in the way when in fact, they're really not in the way, or at least not much of it is. And so, and that's not to say anything bad about anybody. That's just kind of part of our human nature. It's a good feature for us to have because it's what's kept us alive for thousands upon thousands of years. That protective piece. Right. But once you learn how to be able to navigate that and bring that curtain down a little bit, then you're able to flow a whole lot more.
It's kind of fun.
Yeah, I think that's, I love that you brought that point up because you're making me go back to thinking about when I was visualizing and sitting in the car before I'd go into the appointments and such. And here's what happened, because everything changed quickly and because I became a top sales person, and now I was training other people, my clients. Actually, that particular client became my very first client. He brought me in to train his salespeople. Now, this was an automobile company, right? So car sales. And you think about, I'm in my twenties, female in my twenties. The majority of the people that were in car sales in this particular building were mostly men, and they were, like, in their late forties . And I'm thinking what do I tell them hey here's the process...
You just sit in your car and you just, you know, visualize. And like, I had, uh oh. And I'm thinking, how do I tell them that really, this is my trick. I just really kind of put myself in a hypnosis, in a sense. You know, I just kind of see everything ahead of time. And I realized that, you know, of course I understood the process, and I understood I could talk to him about basic things in sales. But I realized later, looking back, that it was really, it came down to, I started complicating the process, which is very, it's very simple. And, I mean, sales is kind of simple.
The, but the bottom line is, look, yes, it is a numbers game, but you have to have intentionality behind it, and you have to have that belief that you can actually do it in your hand. Part of that comes with the confidence, the competence, all of it. But I was complicating it because I was trying to really, I think it was more that I was, I felt like a little bit of imposter syndrome because I'm like, oh, this now, I had elevated my own game. Now, mind you, I just completely put aside the fact that I'd spent a year trying to figure all this out and get into it. Right. And then it was a very quick jump, which a lot of times we see that things can be a. Appears outwardly as a very quick transition, which can be. But there's.
There's this other stuff that's going on behind the scenes that's prepping you to get into that point.
And I think this is why most, when, when people struggle, this is really the core piece of work. Is that what I mean by this is that oftentimes I've come to get in a coaching session with somebody or I want to coach them or train or something like that. I don't want all that mindset or that fluffy emotional kind of stuff. Just tell me the skills. Right. And the fact of the matter is, is that people can get really good at skills. As a matter of fact, your skill can take you where your identity can't keep you.
Okay, wait. Say that again.
Yeah. Your skill can take you where your identity can't keep you. So let me give you an example. There was a woman here in the state that I live in, this was years ago, who had the skill to go down to the store and buy a lottery ticket, paid for the lottery ticket, waited and watched the tv. She won $87 million. Within about four years, she was completely broken. And what we have found is that when somebody has an identity of being somebody who is like, ive never had money before. I dont consider myself rich and those kind of things.
Theres a self sabotage type of behavior that happens subconsciously. And she ended up spending on getting rid of all that kind of money, and she went back to the old way of being. So you think of us in terms of a thermostat or thermometer. Its like, you know what, 70 degrees is comfortable. And as long as my life is 70 degrees, this is my life. This is great. The heat gets turned up, right. Or something exciting happens kind of thing.
At some point, we got to come back to baseline. Same thing with its truth. Our life gets kind of boring and stagnant, right. And then the temperature drops. We do something even subconsciously that brings us back up to that comfort zone and comfort area that we are in. So what's interesting is when people will give themselves only to try to develop skills and language patterns and those kinds of things. What they end up doing is they could end up getting some results, but I then eventually it crashes and burns or they jump from thing to thing to thing because their identity is going. I don't know that I fit here.
And so the people who seem to be the most successful, the most quickly, and for the longest period of time are people who are willing to do the inner work, which, by the way, is, in my opinion, is a quicker path because if you can get rid of some of that inner stuff that's getting in the way, gaining the skill is ten times easier. You don't have to push yourself, right. It's like when you're thinking about making sales call and everybody's just like, I'm procrastinating. I don't want to make those calls because I'm a worried about this and this and this. All of that's going on inside. That has nothing to do with your skill. That's all the junk that's getting in the way. But once that is out of the way, I make any call to anybody about anything, right.
And results come faster and easier. So that's a pretty powerful thing that I learned early on. And honestly, all of us are in a different place on our path of unwinding some of those things, right? My skill can take. Skill can take you where your character can't keep you. I became really skilled at certain things around coaching and training and sales and those kinds of things. And then I get in situations, I'm like, hmm, my own junk's coming up right now. And it was affecting how well I could maybe lead a seminar or some of those kinds of things, go back and work through some of those things as we go. So it's not a way to shame people.
It's a way to be able to say, hey, when you pay attention to these things, number one, we're all on the journey and we're growing as we go. But number two, don't cut off the insides. That's where all the magic happens. That's where all the magic is 100%.
That's where all the magic is. Because I listen. What I know to be true in my experience in sales first, but then as an entrepreneur, is that your business can only grow to the degree that you grow, because it's a direct reflection of the individual that's running the show. It's just like the CEO of a company. If something's going on in the company, you have to look at okay, how is that leader leading and what's really going on? Because you might have a great team of people, but at some point there can be a breakdown down in there, and that's just a matter of, okay, who's really running the show here? And when you're an entrepreneur, when you're in sales, whatever, it's even in a company, a major corporation, you always have to take a look at, okay, you're only going to be as strong as the people. So how strong are your individuals and how well do they know themselves?
So good. So good. It's kind of like you can take a look at a group or a company or a city or nation or whatever, you can say, hey, we are basically like one body. We each have our little parts here. You're the stomach, I'm the arm, and all these kind of things. And if one of them is not functioning well, there's illness, we're not well, right? And the individual human being is a siloed example of that. And so it does exponentially work that way. If you can understand that, you can be a really good leader, you can be a really good salesperson, right? You can be really good at influence those companies because you understand how your stuff works and how that works, and then how the interaction between you and the other people, because it's kind of like you mentioned before, you think about the psychological term ego, right? And ego is the part of us that wants to protect ourselves.
It's a part of us that wants to look good and be right. And so all this growing and growth mindsets and becoming better and those kind of things, over time, there are good things, with the exception that our ego keeps popping up and going, but I want to look good and be right. And so sometimes we all allow ourselves to go after the external skillset and not do the internal work because that allows me to look good and be right, because I look like I'm working on myself and growing and those kind of things. To some extent they are. But then people do really well and they're become successful and their marriages crash or they go bankrupt or, you know, they, they become addicted to something or something along the line. And again, we all have our own versions, higher low of those, bigger small of those kinds of things. It's just that when we can, when we can understand those things, that, oh, there's this part of me that wants to look good and be right, I'm trying to protect myself. That's a good thing.
But at the same time, if I only let that part of me rule I can't grow. And if I can't grow, then there's certain going to be certain things in my life I'll never be able to get to because like you said, your life, your business, your experience only grows to the extent that you do it. We've got to die to some things to order to be able to come to life about the bigger and more exciting things that we want for ourselves.
Why do you think it is that so often we know, look, if I just spent a few minutes visualizing this or taking a step back and just saying, I need to calm down before I, whatever, make that phone call or before I address that person or I need to this, but instead it's almost easier to just, boom, I'm going to just go, skill, skill, skill, or I'm just going to go do, do, do. I'm just going to go pick up the phone and hammer out these dang calls. Instead of saying, holy cow, let me just take a break here and just, like, get into the flow of it. Let me set the intention. Why do you think it's easier? Because what I have found is it is a lot easier. And this is, I'm talking about my sales training days and as a manager, well, sales managers, like, it's a lot easier for people to say, yeah, I know I've got to make 100 calls. I got it. I'm on the phone and I'm thinking, but did you get the prep work mentally done first? And they're like, you know what? And that's, is that just human nature? Is that just our upbringing?
Here's my take on this, and I'll give you one statement that I'll explain it. We were born to win and conditioned to lose.
What I mean by that is that we have such massive potential and genius inside of us, and it's in there, and we're not always great at peeling back the layers of the onion and letting it out. But our world, our society, the pace of life has conditioned us to be, hurry, hustle, push, grow, go hard. Otherwise you're not enough. You'll never have enough. And it creates a world of scarcity, if you will. It's actually doing some major damage to our nervous systems and our ability to cope with things in life because we feel like we always have to be on. When your nervous system is always on high alert, sometimes it can't turn itself off. And then we start having some serious troubles, and then what ends up happening is we don't feel like we're good enough because we can't perform because we're not doing well.
And at the same time, we're not taking the time to do some self care kinds of stuff that helps us to be able to pause. When you look at professional athletes, I mean, I'm talking about the people who are the top 1% of whatever field they're in, that they're athletes. These guys are pushing and humping really hard when it comes to training time, but they're off time. It's massages, it's naps, it's meditations, it's physical therapy. It's all the stuff that rejuvenates and restores and re energizes them so they can go out and do it. You can't do something at that level indefinitely. And so we, as entrepreneurs, as salespeople, as human beings, need to be able to find a cadence. That's the key word there, a cadence that helps us to be able to grow and take care of ourselves from a restoration perspective and then also get out and push hard on the other pieces.
And we're going to have this counterbalance that's so beautiful, this army that's so beautiful and so born to win. There's all sorts of goodness available for you and in you. We're often conditioned to lose in comparison to the battleground.
Yeah. So good. So good. I know that for so long, and it took me a while to really understand this. It took self reflection, but I I truly tied. I didn't realize at the time, but tying my worth to the amount of things that I could do, the amount of projects, the amount of work kind of thing. And it was directly watching my mom do that. And it was a belief that she had mostly from her upbringing, mostly.
I won't go into all that, but basically from that and some of their beliefs in growing up. And it was that, it was so linked to that that if you sat down for a moment and took a break, it was kind of like, what are you doing? There's dishes to be done. There's stuff to be done. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And you're like, uh oh. And so you find yourself going, okay, I got it. I can do this, I can do that, I can do this, I can do that. And at some point, you just go, oh, I can't do everything.
I can't be everything. And go ahead.
You just demonstrated exactly what I'm talking about. And what I mean by that is, I said, comparison is the battleground. We're born to win. Condition, lose, comparisons and what started happening there is that mom was like, what's wrong with you? You slowed down. What's wrong with you? And so we're competing or comparing ourselves against the version that I want my mom to approve of. But this is who I really am sort of thing, right? Or my boss or the other salespeople or the other entrepreneurs that I'm in business with or competing with and those kind of things. It's like there becomes this comparison, and we don't often recognize it as comparison, right? We don't always recognize it as that. But there's some version of us that lives inside of us that really wants out, like how he wants to come out, because it's the part of you that's going to be killing it as an entrepreneur.
Be an amazing person in a relationship, be physically fit and super healthy. All that part of you wants out. It's just that it's looking at a myriad versions of itself based on how other people see things or how they think they're supposed to be or how the world's telling them to be, and it's going, how am I supposed to compete with that? I will stay here. I will stay in here because that does not look safe.
Exactly right. And then you can take a look at and you say, okay, wait a minute. What parts of this, what serves me and what doesn't serve me and what can I lean into? And it was kind of shifting the perspective, all that, and saying, okay, what part of this is good? And honestly, having gratitude for part of it, because as soon as I started to change, seeing this as, okay, that's not a bad trait, because it's for so long was like, oh, that's a bad trait. Too bad she has that. Why did she push that on me? You know? And that's not the case. It was kind of turning it and saying, wait a minute. What parts of this can I be grateful for? Well, the parts of it that allow me to be productive and get things done quickly, because that's what I learned. How quickly can I get things done so that I can have the time to do what I want to do? And so I started creating deadlines for myself.
And when I have a deadline, then I also learned from that, mostly through the gratitude part, is that I reward myself when I finish a deadline. Like, I can go gangbusters on a deadline. When I finish it, man, I get a reward, usually a massage or some kind of spa treatment. I mean, honestly, something fun like that. Because I've learned that. Why not? Because I watched my mom not do that. And I, when I became a mom, I thought, I'm not teaching my kids that. So what part of this does work for me and what doesn't work for me?
Yep. Yep. And it's a beautiful way to consciously be able to, like we talked about, pay attention and generate some different perspective. Milton Erickson was the most, one of the most phenomenal, if not the most phenomenal hypnotherapist on the planet. He got results that nobody, nobody else could ever get. And he's one of the major people that were model to create the world of NLP. He had a person that came to see him one time, and she was beside herself because she would vacuum the floors and they'd be perfect. And then her family would come and walk on the floor, and there'd be footprints on the floor, and she would just be like, so upset.
And she went to go see Ericsson and she said, I just. It's driving me crazy. There's footprints all over my floor. And he goes, well, what would it mean if they were gone? Those footprints were gone. She goes, my family wouldn't be around anymore. And she had a completely different perspective of the same pain that she saw as pain before, when maybe it didn't have to be pain. And just like you, you're like, well, that wasn't necessarily so bad about me. It just means, what am I going to do with that? And that starts changing that perspective piece and start moving us in a different direction.
Because you, how do I say this? You are going to drive or ride your bike exactly in the direction that you're looking. You can't help it, right? You can't help it. If you're in a bike and you're looking at the mailbox, eventually you're going to head towards the mailbox, right? And then you can't help. So perspective is the same thing. Whatever the perspective is that you have, you're going to move toward and act like that perspective. So if you want to go to a different place, you want to have a different result to shift that perspective. And sometimes we need help, right? Because sometimes it's hard to see through our own junk and we're in the middle of stuff that's really important and emotional to us, you know, mostly important to us. And so we might need a Kim to come into my life and say, hey, Greg, did you find out this, like, what if they were gone? What would mean.
What would that mean about your carpets, those kinds of things? And that can be really helpful in the shift, if you will. We've all had experiences of this same kind of shifting you and I are talking about. That has gotten us to work, gotten us from where we are to some newer, better version. It's just that we didn't do it consciously. And when you can learn how to do this on purpose, then you have much more control and much more influence over the trajectory of your life. And that is fulfilling in and of itself.
I think we all need help. I mean, quite frankly, I think because it expedites the process. Plus also, you can't, you know, can you coach yourself to a certain extent, and you can read plenty of books and watch plenty of videos and such, but you're not going to be as objective with yourself. And I don't think, and also, you might not be either you won't have as much grace with yourself or you might not be as firm with yourself. And so you do have, we have blind spots. We just do. It's no different than, listen, my kids were athletes. My boys played college baseball and international baseball, and they always had coaches.
And you could tell there were some coaches that were really great at seeing something in them and just pulling that out. And that's being able to pull it out. Even though they train and train and train, sometimes somebody else would see something that would elevate their game. And it's always been just, I think because after excelling in sales and meeting zig Ziglar and getting into personal development and understanding that I started realizing, wow, I can elevate my game and change things much faster when you have a mentor around you to help you through all of those things. So I want to ask you a question, though. In the intro, I was saying that you were a. A record setting master coach. So record setting in results that you've been able to get for people.
Yeah, so great question. So in this particular, this one particular instance, I ran a coaching program of self employed real estate people. Real estate people are licensed. They're self employed, 1099 people. But I was working at a particular brokerage. I was at any given time coaching somewhere between 71 hundred people at a time. What I mean by that is that I'm not the same moment usually, but watching these people. And over the course of a couple of years, the one year we had a scenario where I was able to get these agents moving in a direction with all these things that you and I are talking about, where they started to sell more.
And we set a record for this company's national, maybe even international program. So our coaching program was able to generate a certain amount of income for the agents with generated income for the company at a level that had not been accomplished at that point in time. I did have a partner coach I was working with a little bit. He came into the game a little bit later on. But here's what I love about that story. It's not me that got the results. My genius, my job is to be a catalyst for other people, because all the genius resides inside of you. And like you said, we need, we sometimes need help from other people.
That's, that's what I love to do. It's my job is to like, look, there's amazing stuff inside of you, let's get to that and let it out so that you can roar like a lion and be who you want to be and do what you want to do and have what you want to have. And by being able to do that, it was just showing you that some of the things I've been learning and trying and testing over time was actually starting to work because people were starting to become better versions of themselves, personally and professionally, and it started to show in the results. That's more exciting to me than anything else. I love watching people win. I love watching people go. I love flying their flag and singing their song and all that kind of stuff. Right.
So that's, that's really part about it. But it also does testify to the idea that, you know what? Some of these people I was working with were top producing people, and even they found the value of a person to help them wherever they were. And maybe I had a stuck moment or maybe it's an idea. I didn't think of a perspective or something like that. And that's what changes the game.
Yeah, yeah. It helps you to shift. Shift your energy and shift your game and elevate things for yourself. Let's talk just briefly about NLP neuro linguistic programming. I am certified in that as well. I didn't go through the same as you did. And, yeah, I mean, listen, I've been in personal development. I owned a franchise in personal development when I was a sales trainer, because again, it's just something that I've always been so curious about and understanding the subconscious and the conscious and bringing those two together in alignment.
So. And I, that's what I liked about NLP. But let's just, for our listeners that aren't as familiar with that, give us a little brief explanation about NLP and then how you use it.
Yeah, great question. All right, so NLP stands for neuro. Linguistic programming. There's a thing that goes around the world of NLP, that it's the lost user manual of the mind. Ultimately, what happened was there was a couple of people, actually, there was a handful of people that started studying and modeling. Why do people get certain results and other people don't get those results? What are they doing? And when I say, what are they doing? They were looking at a lot of the internals. Like, how is this person visualizing something? What are they hearing in the moment? What are they feeling? Is there touches and smells that are going along with this sort of thing? What are they doing with their body? How are they breathing? What actions are they specifically taking when they broke it all down? And what they started to find was there was some thematic, regular things that people would do that would create, in a certain order, a certain sequence, if you will, what we call syntax. And by doing it that way, they got the highest level of results possible.
And so they studied people. At first, this started happening in the world of psychological therapies. This is why early on, it was hypnosis, and it was Virginia sirtier, who was a. A family therapist, who was getting results that nobody could. And they went and studied and watched. These people started seeing patterns in how they operated. They consciously sometimes didn't even know they were doing it, but they were able to break that down and make it be something that you could actually turn and learn and teach to somebody else. And then it blew up.
They started studying not just world psychology, but it was sales. It was military sharpshooting. It was just about anything you can imagine doing. And they started to figure out that there are certain ways that human beings organize their experiences in order to get certain results and to feel certain ways, and you can actually utilize this. And so, NLP, oftentimes in the world, since we're talking about sales, oftentimes in the world of sales, people think it's just simply influence and language patterns, and it is a lot of that, but it's so much more. Oftentimes, and nowadays, with the growth of neuroscience and understanding a little bit more about the human nervous system and how that functions, and that we are much more pliable than we ever thought before, and that our brain and our gut have the same amount of neurons in them. And so all of our bodily experiences is shifting a lot of things in the health industry as well. So healthcare industry, if you will, mental health, I mean, post pandemic, there's a lot of stuff that people are doing some work around, anxieties and the things that came out of a worldwide pandemic in the like.
So hopefully that kind of helps you get an understanding. It was basically came out of just figuring out a, how do people do what they do? What makes a person tick at the most micro level so we can understand how to reverse engineer that and utilize it to become better and do better.
Become better and do better. And it's really fascinating because the human body and the human mind is, like you said earlier, it's just absolutely just born, born to win and filled with potential and so much potential that I feel like we've just barely scratched the surface of everything that we can actually do. Yeah, it's crazy. It's really crazy. So tell us a little bit about catalyst transformation institute that you started, and just briefly, how do you work with people?
Great question. So, as I mentioned before, when I brought up the idea that, hey, I'm a. I'm a catalyst. I don't. I don't do this stuff. I don't get the results people. I just help them unlock all that stuff and gain access to the genius that's already inside of. That's where the name came from.
Because, how do I say this? My aim in life is to try to be humble when I can. I'm always great at it, but humility. But I also had to take a realization that I'm not a person's savior, I'm not the one that fixes them. And quite honestly, nobody wants that. There are a certain level of things that we want to be able to do for ourselves, and it starts at a very young age, right? You got, your three year old wants to tie his own shoe and quit bugging me and try to teach me the right way to do it, because I'm going to figure it out. Right. And so by doing so, it took a lot of pressure off me to feel like, oh, no, I'm not helping this person. Right.
And at the same time, it empowered other people. And quite honestly, that's. It was because that's the way it actually works. So that's where the name came from. Ultimately, what I've been doing over time is I do. I do some one on one coaching with people like me and I having this conversation right here, doing some shifting, usually conversationally. Sometimes we'll do specific NLP or hypnosis techniques when necessary. I had a client a few years ago who asked me to do some hypnosis work with her.
This was probably two years ago, and I got a text from her, like, a couple weeks ago. I haven't talked to her in year two years. And I was just like, hey, I just wanted to let you know, the work that you did with me around my money, my money beliefs and why I was broke all the time, changed my life. And I'm like, who is this? It's just beautiful to be able to see that that person was in a place now where they were doing really well and she was getting her own training in neuro linguistics and the like. Right? So one on one, I've done group coachings. I get out and I speak. Oftentimes I'll do a seminar with people where we'll do an event either over a weekend or maybe one full day a week over the course of three, four weeks, five weeks, something like that. So lots of different methods for being able to be able to connect with people and help them really be able to access that genius inside of them so they can stop settling for those things.
Everybody wants to be in power around the results in their life as much as possible. Right? There are certain things we can't control in life, but we certainly can't control or influence how we respond. And so ultimately, that's what all my work is about, whether I'm speaking or I'm doing a one on one coaching session or groups, or I'm doing a seminar or something like that. It's all about helping people be able to understand this part of themselves and access it so they can just go.
It'S all about being a catalyst for everybody. That's what.
Here's the beautiful part about this. The process of catalysis, which is the fancy term for when things get catalyzed. In the world of chemistry, there are two elements, right? Two pieces of material here, and they interact with each other. A catalyst is merely the thing that helps it to happen better and faster. So people already have the potential in them. I'm just helping them do it better or faster.
And what's happened is they become a catalyst in their own right. They become the catalyst of making results happen easier and faster in their own life, simply by me teaching them how to be able to do so, whether it's through coaching or an LP session or whatever.
Easier and faster. I love that because you know what? It gets to be easy.
It gets to be easy. You just have to decide, are you going to give yourself the gift of patiently learning how to make it easier?
Yes, that's true. And it comes down, and it is a gift. Yeah, it is a gift. And it comes down to that because we have free will we have? It's our choice. But what's nice is that the tools are there. If you choose, you can lean into that. So thank you so much, Greg for being here today. If people want to get a hold of you, they connect with you on the social on social media at so.
Instagram, it's catalyst transformation. So you should analyst transformation at Facebook. You can reach out to me personally, it's Greg Switzer and then my personal email address is Greg catalyst transformation.com.
Okay. And we will link all that information down below so people can reach out to you and get in touch with you and see how they can quickly change their life, elevate it and get the results that they want. Thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it.
I appreciate you.
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