John SmallMtn (00:00:00)

I’m really glad that I got to do all of this work because I got coachable and I worked with a coach for a very long time and then started working with other coaches, trying to just find any improvement that I possibly could. That kind of leads me to my next question because you talked about the work and being very goal-oriented and having a plan and everything needing to go according to plan.

When you decided to go out on your own, was it hard for you to seek out coaching and programs? Because you kind of strike me as this person who: have a goal, see a goal, hit a goal, just keep pushing, just keep pushing. Did you hit a wall that made you seek out coaching and working with all these different consultants and trainers and getting to this place? Or was that something you were already thinking about as part of the plan and process for going out on your own?

Blake Schofield (00:01:00)

Yeah, that’s a great question. I will tell you that in the past, especially growing up in corporate, I believed in three- to five-year plans and knowing all of the steps and figuring it out before I took action. Because I had built and turned around large businesses in corporate, when I became an entrepreneur, I’m like, “I know how to do that.” Very quickly, what I experienced was, I think, what most people do: I focused on picking up my logo and building my website and the whole thing before I ever served a client or understood who I was wanting to serve. Big mistake most people do.

I started researching online to figure out how to build the business and how to get clients. What I saw was a bunch of people saying, “This is the only way to do it.” I looked and I was like, “Clearly this can’t be right because I have 10 people telling me their way is the only way. That can’t possibly be right.”

By the time I really got into moving and trying to get clients and run my business, I was probably three months in and I was so overwhelmed and so confused. At the time, I remember saying to my husband at the time, “I can’t do this. I need a mentor.” So it took me trying to navigate it on my own to realize, “I am way too confused and I’m struggling.”

Investing in that very first program was extremely difficult for me. I had never invested in myself outside of college. I was petrified that I would invest this money and it wouldn’t work. I had saved about a year’s worth of income to become an entrepreneur. I thought, “A year, I’m set.” I was about six months into that entrepreneurship journey realizing, “I’m nowhere near my trajectory. If something massive doesn’t change, I’m going to have to go back to this corporate career that was killing me.”

When I invested that money, it was a significant chunk of the money I had left. I shared this with you when we talked about this yesterday: One of the best gifts that my ex-husband gave me was that at a time that I didn’t believe in myself, he believed in me more than I believed in me. He had watched me for 18 years be successful in my career, but I had such a limiting view around what I was capable of, as I think many of us do. He said to me, “You know, we invest money in the stock market all of the time for an 8% or 10% return, of which you get no votes on whether that works or doesn’t work.” He said, “I know you, and I know if you put your heart in it, you’ll get a better return than that.”

He was dead on right, and I’m very, very grateful because I felt so selfish taking that money to invest in myself at the time. I felt very worried that I had made a mistake leaving my corporate career and could not be successful. It was his belief in me and really essentially giving me the permission that I was struggling to give myself to invest in that program that radically changed the trajectory of my life.

While that program turned out to not be what I anticipated it to be, I learned how to navigate and meet other people, and the relationships I built there opened door after door after door after door for me for years. The program helped me really uncover actually that a huge part of the opportunity was mindset. A huge part of the opportunity was how I viewed what was possible and that my belief system that I had to take this huge pay cut in order to do more fulfilling work was wrong. The foundation of that set the course of the last nine years for me.

I went through all of the very traditional struggles that anyone that becomes an entrepreneur goes through. I sit here today now having invested a significant amount of money over the last nine years working with coaches and consultants, to numbers that are quite shocking to most people. Most people look and go, “She must just be brave. She must just have a lot of confidence. She must be different than me.” That’s just not really true. I had to learn how to do it step-by-step and learn how to build a level of confidence in myself that the success I had in one arena could be success in something else, that I could figure out how to navigate uncertainty and be successful.

I went from a person who took months or years to make big decisions, overanalyzed everything, got caught in absolute rumination cycles—that was my life, high anxiety, 50-plus, 60, 70-hour work weeks—to a person who lives pretty easily in uncertainty. I don’t plan things out anymore to that extent. I am really able to be present in the moment and capture opportunities and find new paths forward. Today I have a goal and a perspective about what I want to accomplish, but I now know that that goal or that perspective is just a plan. The minute it hits contact with reality, then I can change it. That is a gift to be able to say, “I didn’t fail because it’s turning out differently.” It is an understanding that that’s the reality of how the world actually goes, and that most people don’t believe that. They spend so much time attached to whatever they thought it was going to look like that they actually create failure for themselves because they aren’t adapting and they aren’t seeing the possibilities, the opportunities, the things that are coming their way.

I’m very grateful to my coach, Dr. Jeff Spencer, who was an Olympian, nine-time Tour de France mindset coach, and he coached Lance Armstrong and Tiger Woods at their peak. He’s really the one that helped shift my perspective about how to accomplish your goals no matter how challenging, and it has revolutionized my life in such amazing ways.

John SmallMtn (00:08:39)

Wow, the mindset portion, right? Working in sales and being a sales trainer and coach, I am forever kind of floored at just the wide range of the mindset conversation—everything from “fake it till you make it” and just lie to people until you’re at the level that you want to be, to so much the other side of it that you don’t have any business doing any of these things until your mindset is correct.

There’s a lot of mindset stuff inside of sales, right? If you don’t believe that the product is solid, you’re not going to sell anything. If you believe that it’s expensive, no one’s going to buy it. But it’s also interesting because it’s not a pill that you just take. It takes a long time to kind of look at that stuff, really sit with it, and work on it.

I think “fake it till you make it” does more harm than it does good in the grand scheme of things. Do you agree with that statement or am I a little too skeptical?

Blake Schofield (00:09:46)

I think we each have our journeys. As I said, I believe life is always teaching us lessons, and everything that we go through is an opportunity to get more clear on how we can create a life that we really want.

I think about that very first program that I went into. I went into a group program, had no idea that the group program was like 150 people and there were only like four or five people featured on each call. That was surprising. I could have taken that circumstance and said I was lied to, I was cheated, I was whatever. Instead, what I did was go, “I’m really struggling in these areas. Let me meet people.”

So I met an amazing woman, Erin File, who was in the program with me. She had a sales background, and she helped me understand how I could apply these things and get them to work for me. I met all of these other people that turned out to be such great gifts in my life that expanded my perspective because they had entrepreneurial experience and background.

As a result of that, I also started seeing patterns: “This problem I’m having, these six other people are having. Why is that? We’re all running higher-end businesses with more sophisticated consumers. This doesn’t seem to be working.” But yet when I go to the coaches, I’m told, “Fix your mindset, bro.” I’m told that my instinct about where my client is is not right, that everyone is in Facebook groups. I’m like, “I’m serving professionals doing XYZ that don’t have time. I hate Facebook groups; I don’t think that’s where they’re at.” “No, everyone is, that’s your problem.”

What I started to see were the gaps and problems inside their program and what wasn’t actually working, and the fact that most people believed it was their fault, including me for a good period of time. Through that journey, what I had to experience was three different coaches telling me three different answers.

Finally, I got on a group call—very difficult to be on a group call with 150-some-odd people and admit that you’re struggling—and I got so frustrated on that call that I just point blank called it out: “All three of you have told me three separate things. What’s the real story?”

It took evidence after evidence after evidence after evidence before I trusted myself to say, “They have a program that works well for a certain type of person. The program needs to be updated because it’s outdated and is not working for a substantial portion of the people in here. Some of the things they are saying are not ethical. Some of the things they’re doing—they’re telling somebody this and then they’re going and doing that. I have enough evidence to see that I need to leave.”

If I had not been through that experience and seen how I reacted in those experiences—how I didn’t trust myself, how I kept going back to ask people for help, how I needed evidence upon evidence upon evidence upon evidence until I got angry enough internally to say, “No, I see what’s going on here and it’s not what you’re saying”—I would never have learned that lesson.

It took me a while and many layers to really learn that lesson: to trust my inner compass, to really be able to understand how I felt and what was it telling me and what did that mean. But it was the first place that I began to really see what were my patterns in this circumstance and what is my lesson. I’m so grateful for that because, by the way, I saw that before many, many people in the program. Then I was able to say to my friends, “Hey, by the way, this is happening to these eight other people and they have the same circumstance. I think this is what’s happening.” As a result of that, I was actually able to help a number of friends who were struggling and believing it was their fault too.

When you say, “fake it till you make it” and all of those things, I believe so much in integrity and honesty. It is the core foundation of who I am as a person. Getting really clear on that as one of my deepest values in life means I now see the signs and symptoms of when I’m in environments or with people that don’t value that, and I no longer question myself. I no longer allow the gaslighting of what people sometimes do when you see those things.

It was not necessarily an easy journey to be willing to see that not everyone shares the same value system that I share, but it was an important lesson because it was a lesson I kept getting over and over and over again. So to your point, this “fake it till you make it” and whatever else, I know that we all have an inner compass. We know in our body when something feels wrong, but so often we’re listening to somebody else telling us that that’s not it—you just need to push through, it’s your mindset, it’s XYZ.

I think it’s important to understand our brain does lie to us all of the time. We do absolutely have survival-based reactions to things that can create panic and project out a future that is not true, and our body never lies in that it’s telling us always the truth, even sometimes when our brain is trying to override it. For me, a huge part of my personal journey in unlocking how you get there was to learn how those three things showed up for me and almost build an encyclopedia of evidence to really be able to trust myself.

John SmallMtn (00:16:57)

It’s so interesting because I had my phase of buying every program and course that I could get my hands on after I’d gone out on my own as an entrepreneur. Now, I’d already kind of changed my thinking about investing in myself and I’d been working with a coach for a long time and everything. One of the things that I tell people is I had to unwind a lot of different things that I’d learned on my path of being in corporate sales for a long time and then transitioning.

A lot of what I really had to unlearn were things that I was learning from a sales trainer that I was paying to go to, right? Because he didn’t have a problem bending the rules. I can remember one time asking this question and him just treating me like I’m the dumbest person on the planet for asking this question, because it felt like lying. He goes, “John, it’s not lying.” Thankfully, I’d had that experience. Then I went and I talked with my business partner, and he was like, “Well, man, if you can’t feel good about it, you shouldn’t be doing it.”

So I’d already kind of unlocked some of that, but that idea that you’re paying for this, therefore it must be true and must be valid, is very real in some of these programs. One of my biggest pet peeves is the whole—and you hit it on the head—”Well, you’ve got to go fix your mindset, and then everything is going to work according to plan.” I’ve seen that over and over and over again, and it goes all over me because it’s just not true, right? It gives them a lot of room to be like, “Well, it’s not my fault.”

That’s a very real thing, because courses and consultants and coaches—most people have had bad experiences with them: no lasting change, no lasting impact. So I don’t begrudge people for having kind of the negative association with the terms “coach” and “consultant.” But I never really thought about the idea that I’d already been in a spot and in a place to where I was allowed to do what felt right for me, including making changes.

By the time where I’m going through some of these marketing programs and they’re trying to talk about, “Here’s how you should sell it,” and everything, I’m like, “Nope, this is just wrong,” and I could go ask for a refund and get my money back. I’ve never really thought about the idea that if you’re not in that environment to where you’re really empowered to be yourself and call your own shots and do what you feel is right after spending some time realizing how easy it is to sell ourselves on these things, that that’s probably a very high mountain to climb.

Blake Schofield (00:19:31)

There are so many things that we inherently assume. Mark Twain has that quote: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

John SmallMtn (00:19:42)

Heard that today actually in an audiobook, and it’s one of my favorite lines anyway, so it’s weird that this is coming up again because it just showed up in an audiobook today. But yeah, it’s little things.

Blake Schofield (00:19:52)

It’s so true. I think often a lot of people might say for their career, “I want work-life balance,” and then we assume that we’re talking the same language. This is some of what I learned moving roles, like when I went to work at Target in 2010. There were 12 of us that were brought in to be apparel and accessory buyers. Three months in, the 11 other people are complaining about the job. I’m not kidding when I tell you literally we’re all together and they’re all complaining, and I’m confused because the job is exactly what I thought it was going to be. So I’m like, “What did I do differently than the rest of you?” because you clearly are disillusioned, it’s not what you expected.

What I began to realize was that I had a process of diving deeper and really uncovering and getting to those things that most people didn’t. I think, again, this is a place where so often we’re so focused on believing that we’re talking about the same thing, we believe the same thing, or that we just have to tolerate some of these things, that we don’t even realize the potential friction, challenges, and problems that come from that.

I had so many clients that are like, “I want work-life balance.” I’m like, “Great. What does that mean to you?” When you start talking to people, it’s very different in terms of tangibly: how does that show up in your life on a day-to-day basis?

One person’s like, “I want to work from home. I only want to go to the office once a month. Once set meetings, so the rest of the time I can work freely.”

The other person’s like, “I want to be able to take my kids to the doctor without having to worry. I’d like to be able to come in at 9:00 instead of 8:30.”

These are very, very different perspectives about what work-life balance will look like. So when people are going to interview at companies, they’re saying, “Well, what do you value?” “Oh, we value work-life balance.” “Great!” Then when they show up and the boss’s view of work-life balance is, “I don’t have you working on weekends”—then we have these huge disconnects where it’s like, “Oh, this is not what I thought it was going to be.”

John SmallMtn (00:22:03)

Yeah, “that should be enough, you should be happy.”

Blake Schofield (00:22:15)

One of the greatest things I think we can unlock is self-awareness. I had no idea the value of that. By the way, a survey was done that asked people, “Are you self-aware?” Do you know what percentage of people said they were self-aware?

John SmallMtn (00:22:19)

Could not agree more. I’m going to say like 98%.

Blake Schofield (00:22:36)

It was like 80-some-odd percent. Do you know what percentage actually are when you do it to metrics?

John SmallMtn (00:22:41)

Wow, what a great question. I’ve always kind of had this notion that most people aren’t very self-aware, but trying to put a number around it, I’m going to say like 15%.

Blake Schofield (00:22:56)

Yep!

I think it’s one of those things, right? We assume because we don’t know the gap. It’s the same thing I would have people come to me, either unclear on what to do next in their career or in their job search and struggling, and they’d be like, “Well, I pretty much know what I want. I just need help with X.”

Then I would start asking them questions: “Tell me. Tell me exactly what you’re looking for. Tell me what you’re best at. Tell me how you do that work. Tell me…”

And I was like, “No, you have about 10%. You have about 10% of what you actually need in order to truly get where you want to go.”

I had no idea when I started entrepreneurship that it was a personal development journey. I had absolutely no idea that developing myself from a level of truly understanding who I am would radically improve every area of my life in the most amazing ways that I could have never imagined. I can sit here today and tell you that I didn’t know it then, but I know it now because of where I am in my journey: that when I was in corporate and doing this work, I was probably an 8 or 9 out of 10 in anxiety every single day. The level of stress and anxiety I was carrying was unsustainable.

I had shingles at 28 years old. I really thought it was a spider bite. When the doctor told me, I said, “Wait, that’s an old person disease. How do you get that at 28?” He told me, “Stress,” and gave me no help. Then I did what we all do, which is try to normalize it. I found other people in my industry that had also had shingles in their 20s, and I went, “It’s just this industry and I’m not alone.” But it was my body giving me warning signals very, very early on.

I didn’t know it because I had been under such high stress my whole life that it was the frog in boiling water. I could see it, right? I have these knots in my shoulders. I wake up ruminating or thinking about my to-do list. I can’t shut my brain off. I have a hard time relaxing. I can’t sit still. I certainly couldn’t have meditated. I mean, sitting still for 5 or 10 minutes back then was horrific. Today I can tell you that I love just sitting. I can sit outside or sit for an hour. My mind is quiet. I feel a sense of peace. I can navigate chaos without chaos overtaking me. I have a sense of joy and peace that I never thought was possible, and I’m present in my life in ways that I really struggled to be.

I thought so much of what I was trying to solve was like, “I just need this job that will let me do these things so that I can experience the type of connection and presence and joy and peace and ease that I wanted.” It took me this whole journey to really be able to understand that it wasn’t just about the job.

I hear from people that are like, “Can’t I just take a quick assessment there? Can I just whatever?” because we live in a society that wants things to be fast and easy, and that’s part of the problem. The work that I do with my clients, they’ll tell you openly, it’s 10 or 20 years’ worth of rapid movement in months. These are things where they would have died death by a thousand cuts over and over and over again and lost all of that time not enjoying their life, to within a matter of weeks, rapidly improving their life.

So if I were listening to me and going, “Like, this woman’s done all of this work and that would take forever and I don’t have the time or energy,” what I would tell people is you absolutely do. It can start really small, and you can see progress literally in three or four weeks where you are doing the work while you’re improving your life.

I talk about a methodology called raising the floor. Most people are chasing their highest highs, and they’re not satisfied—it’s this whole struggle: “I’m not happy until I get my goal.” Hit my goal, I’m happy for like a hot second, and then I’m off to the next goal. Most of your life is chasing something in a horizon that’s never moving. But what one of my mentors taught me was the greatest way to sustainable success and real growth is raising the floor. So how do you shorten the depth and duration of your worst days, moments, or years?

John SmallMtn (00:28:16)

I’ve been on this kind of path for probably 13, 14 years now, getting really comfortable with myself, challenging myself, and really diving deeper into who I am.

First of all, there was that period to where I didn’t really like silence or solitude because it was easier to fill my time with goals, conversations, coping, and trying to move forward and hit my goals as opposed to getting to the place where I’m really comfortable with myself. But one of the things that I tell everybody is it doesn’t have to take that long. Now, I think it takes a while for the place to show up to where you can get better at this.

Sometimes I’ll have this mode to where I’ll be going through a season of struggle in the business, or I’ll have a lot of deals not go my way. Even with all the work about being able to detach from the outcome and focus on the process, I’ll have these moments where I’ll get in my head and old John comes back up with all the negative self-talk—beating myself up and spiraling. Then I’ll have this moment of, “My God, I do all this work, and then I’m still in my head and doing all these things.”

I’ve had to reframe that to: It doesn’t last nearly as long, it doesn’t go nearly as deep, and it’s not nearly as damaging as it once was. So let’s just appreciate it as a signal and not like a character assassination of myself.

All during COVID, trying to keep this business moving and trying to figure it out, it was obviously the hardest time I’ve experienced being a business owner. I would have these moments of “woe is me,” and I would get back in my head about it. Now I’ve gotten to the place where I can just appreciate that it’s not going to be as bad as it used to be, and finding the greatness in that. I have the tools to get out of the hole, and I’ve got a worn path of getting out of the hole. So as opposed to beating myself up that I’m in the hole, I can now just turn to the tools and frameworks I have to get out of the hole and back on the path.

Blake Schofield (00:30:57)

100%. I think when you can reframe success as a human as, “If I can shorten the depth and duration of my worst days, moments, and years, that’s significant progress,” because when you raise the floor, you also raise the ceiling. I’m so grateful for this lesson because it started as a business lesson in profitability, but what I came to be able to see is that it’s really applicable to every part of life.

That’s really the work I’ve been doing for the last nine years: helping people shorten the depth and duration of their worst days, moments, and years. Because when you start removing the things that are creating that stress, friction, unhappiness, and those cycles for you, life does get so much better.

I think that there’s a belief that this has to take a long time, and it doesn’t. That’s the one thing I really hope to impart with people. We feel like it takes a long time because we have this belief system that it’s so far away. But when you can reframe it, and you can have a system and a process to where every single week you see you’re winning, every single week you see your progress, and every single week you realize how much better you’ve gotten and how much more you’ve learned, you don’t look at it that way anymore. It becomes this beautiful journey of being able to appreciate it.

To your point, there are things today that would have literally taken me out for more than a year, and I can process them in a matter of hours—maybe 24 hours. That is significant progress as a human: my ability to navigate, be resilient, look at the challenges that life brings me, have confidence that I can get through them, know that they’re not going to take me out, and know that I can find a lesson in it and move forward.

I did not have that a decade ago. I really did believe that I was powerless in a lot of respects to create that change. In the world that we sit in today, my hope is to be able to help people understand there’s a path to a much easier way of living without blowing up your whole life and without spending years or decades trying to figure out the right path for you, so that you’re not having to consistently feel this feeling that there should be something more for your life. Those are signs and symptoms that you have misalignment.

When we can understand why, and when we can have a system and a process that enables us to see that growth and keep moving forward, it’s game-changing. That really is how I’ve been able to create so much change in my life, in my clients’ lives, and in my team’s life. It is the map I so desperately needed that took me decades to learn, so that other people wouldn’t have to.

John SmallMtn (00:34:06)

It’s funny because we had a great conversation yesterday to get prepared for this, and I left that conversation humming—like, “My God, I’m so excited.” But talking about it today, I struggled to communicate to people that I didn’t even know how stuck I was. I didn’t even really understand the corner that I was painting myself into. So now I’m just so thankful and glad that I did get access to some of the mentors and coaches that I’ve worked with, and that I was able to pour myself into this stuff so that way it could get better.

I think we could probably talk for about three days, but for the sake of time, I’d like to move into the rapid-fire part of this with the repeatable questions. Please believe I think we could keep talking about this and helping people out for days, but I want to be super respectful of your time.

When it comes to struggle, every founder has so many options and it’s an endless process: “Am I making the right decisions? Am I spending my time well?” When should a founder specifically be thinking about finding a coach to do this kind of work? Is it something that people should start with, or is it something that people should come to whenever they hit a wall, a struggle, or start to feel a little bit burnt out? What would be your advice to someone who’s going out as a founder with this idea?

Blake Schofield (00:36:03)

As you know, I made my first investment within six months of becoming an entrepreneur, and I’m very grateful because I was wasting a lot of time. Up until the last year and a half, when I finally got really locked in, I consistently had a minimum of one, if not multiple coaches that I was working with. I believe so much in the power of having people that can help you see your blind spots and unlock a faster path.

I’ll take it two ways depending on where someone is. If you’re in a place where you can’t financially afford getting that support, get yourself into a community of people who have already done what you’re trying to do, who can be accountability partners or a board of directors for you to give you that advice, help you see your blind spots, and shortcut the path.

I used to be somebody who didn’t want to ask for help because I didn’t want to burden people, or I felt like I should know the answer. What I really came to understand is what I call the 48-Hour Rule: If you’ve been trying to solve this problem on your own for 48 hours and you don’t have clarity or you feel stuck, that is the time to go ask for help. It has changed my life in the most amazing ways because when you start building intention behind having people that you can go to to get those answers, it saves you months or years of time, and a ton of unnecessary energy and stress. So I would say that as an initial step.

For people who are at a place where they can invest, I look for patterns. The first time I did a more in-depth partnership, I was seeing these same patterns happening in my sales and my client fulfillment, and I was having a lot of stress. I had one client who didn’t show up for a call, and I immediately beat myself up: “It must be me. She must be unhappy. She doesn’t like what’s going on. I’m not a good coach,” all the things. Two weeks pass, and I don’t hear from her after emailing her and everything. Then our next call comes, and I find out she was in the hospital. It had literally nothing to do with me at all. It was one of those beautiful moments of: “Wait, what is life teaching you in this moment right now? You were so focused and immediately took it internally that you didn’t even contemplate that there might be something else going on.”

What I would tell people is when you are seeing a pattern where something keeps happening that’s creating stress, anxiety, or a roadblock for you, that is absolutely when it’s time to get a coach. Or when you lack clarity on what is the right next path or how to create what you want, those are the perfect moments to bring in somebody that has that level of expertise to help you navigate that.

People have no idea how high the cost is of doing it on your own. If they knew, they would not do it on their own. They really have no idea how limited our perspectives are when we don’t have the experience or knowledge to do new things. So often we can get caught in imposter syndrome, feeling not good enough or having shame around the fact that we need help. But it’s a human thing, so we’re shaming ourselves for being human. If a little kid had never ridden a bike before and was struggling, you wouldn’t say, “That’s your fault that you don’t know how to ride the bike, you should figure it out.” We would look at that kid and say, “They’re doing their best. They’ve never done this before, and they need somebody to help guide them.”

Especially if you are someone who has been a high achiever, it’s so easy to get caught into believing that you need to do it on your own or that it’s a negative to need help. But what I’ve found over and over again—and if you look at the highest performers—is that they have the most help. They have people around them from whom they’re constantly seeking guidance and support, opening doors, and looking for the most effective path.

If you’re a founder running a business, you need to be looking for the most effective way to do what you’re doing because your energy and your time are finite. If you are spending a lot of energy and time trying to figure out something that you don’t have clarity on or don’t know how to do, that’s not a positive—that’s a negative. That is you using a fear to stand in the way of the work that you’re actually here to do, and that fear is driving your inability to show up with your family, your health, or your business the way that you want. Once I could shift and see that more clearly, it became evident to me that what I thought in my head was responsible—”I’ll do it myself”—was actually probably one of the most irresponsible and honest-to-God selfish decisions, because it was stopping me from being able to really show up and support the people I wanted to support.

John SmallMtn (00:42:10)

Epic answer. Next one: What is a piece of business advice that you can now appreciate in the form of a tweet or a business maxim that you had to learn the hard way yourself?

Blake Schofield (00:42:26)

It would be my golden message, which is: Life is always teaching you lessons, and you’re going to keep getting them until you learn them.

We get what we tolerate in life, and many of us are tolerating too much and then are disappointed with the experience that we’re having. I was tolerating circumstances where I felt like I had to work 60 hours a week in order to achieve what I needed to achieve, even though I wasn’t given the resources that I needed to do that work. Rather than figuring out what my line was, how I could protect my health, and what I was willing to do, I self-sacrificed, and that cost me tremendously.

It can become really easy to get upset that we feel like we aren’t given what we need, that people are taking advantage of us, or that the circumstances are requiring us to do things that are too much outside the boundaries of what feels good to us. But if we tolerate that, we’ll keep getting it. What I didn’t realize was my belief was that if I didn’t do those things, I would be branded, my career reputation would be ruined, I would lose relationships, and I would create all this risk. That keeps so many of us stuck instead of beginning to ask, “Can I get to a place where I am operating in alignment with things that are healthy for me and giving back to me, without creating that risk?”

There are some people and some circumstances that maybe you do need to walk away from. Learning and understanding that not everyone and not every circumstance is for us is okay. That’s not a judgment of you; it’s honoring your value system, just like what you talked about before.

That person you went to work with had a very different value system than you did. Continuing to try and force that person to have the level of integrity that you have or see things the way that you see them is a huge waste of your time, energy, and effort. Instead, just acknowledge: “You know what? This person has this value system, and it’s incongruent with mine. Rather than abandoning myself or trying to change somebody else, I can say this isn’t working for me, and how can I create an outcome that is best for everyone?”

John SmallMtn (00:45:25)

Epic. Last question, Blake. This has been such a cool conversation. We didn’t really spend a whole lot of time talking about your founder path, but I think that everything we’re talking about here is going to help a ton of people—whether they’re thinking about becoming a founder, or they’re on this path themselves and maybe selling themselves into things that don’t make any sense.

You’ve been in the space for a while and you’ve gone through some things. What is your word of warning for someone who’s going to go off on their own, hang a shingle, or try to go down the founder’s path? Is there anything that you think would be helpful for them in their early days?

Blake Schofield (00:46:03)

Especially as an entrepreneur: We live in a society that benefits from keeping people stuck in believing that they’re broken, something’s wrong with them, and they should fear the worst outcome. So many businesses are built on that as their entire foundation. If you look at what’s happening globally or in the United States right now, it is built on creating the belief that people don’t have the power or aren’t capable of creating what they want. When I look at the landscape from what I’ve experienced and been through, people are very quick to sell you on what’s wrong with you and why you need all of these things.

Be very wary of believing that there is a silver bullet that’s going to solve all of your problems—like, “Just build this one funnel and then everything will be great,” or “This one thing will only take five minutes a day.” The reality as a founder is that you have to develop the skills. There are many different skills. It’s not learning one thing; it’s learning marketing, sales, customer fulfillment, who you are in the market, and what kind of results you create. It’s a constant evolution.

So often what I see is founders chasing the next program or the next thing that’s going to solve their problem, and they’re actually often solving the wrong problem. We have so many people chasing money, thinking that is going to create the life they want, without really getting clear on: “What are the things I need to create that life, and how can I start creating that now? How am I moving into that now versus hoping that a program is going to give me that solution?”

What I always say is there’s so much value in finding an expert who can really help you get clear on how you operate best, what you value, and what you want to create, and then understanding what skills or tools you need in the right sequence to get there. So many other things are selling all of these tools and tactics, and it’s really easy to believe that all these tools and tactics will solve your problems and give you what you want. But what I often see is it creates a lot of chaos, wasted time, and wasted money, and ends up creating a very frustrated founder because the things they’re doing aren’t actually what my old mentor would call “the first kink in the hose.”

If you think about a water hose that’s all built up, so many times we’re focusing on the third or the fourth kink, but we’re not focusing on the one thing that, if you fix that kink, the water would flow and it would help undo kinks two, three, and four. Having somebody who has a holistic understanding of that versus just selling you tools and tactics will get you where you want to go a lot faster.

John SmallMtn (00:49:50)

100%. Oh my God, so well said. I love that analogy of the hose with the kinks in it. I’ll talk to people and they’re like, “How do I overcome this objection?” “What did they tell you the problem was?” “Well, they didn’t really tell me they had a problem.” “Okay, what are we doing here?” It’s very easy to get sold on something that you think will help, but it’s actually not going to be very helpful.

If people want to come hang out with you, learn more about the work that you’re doing, or keep up with you on your path, where’s the best place for them to catch up with you?

Blake Schofield (00:50:27)

I have a weekly podcast called Impact with Ease, and they’re welcome to come join. It’s really where I talk to professionals to help them understand how they can have sustainable success: “How can I do work that I find fulfilling without having to sacrifice my income, career, health, or life?”

Also, I’m very active on LinkedIn, so that’s a great place. Anybody listening to this that got value, I’d love to hear from you. For me, it’s always about the ripple-effect impact. If there’s anything that I’ve shared that was helpful, it’s always fun to be able to hear that from people and just know that the time that we spent together had that impact for somebody else.

John SmallMtn (00:51:13)

Awesome. Blake, again, I know we didn’t normally dive very deep into the path of the founder, but we got so deep into this other topic that I think is actually going to be so helpful to a lot of people. I really appreciate the time. We really appreciate you coming in and talking through all of this stuff. I think it’s going to help a lot of people. Awesome. Have a great day. I’ll talk to you soon. Cheers.

Blake Schofield (00:51:32)

Thank you, John. It was a pleasure. Thank you.