In this episode, I speak with Kolby Kay about staying focused and in the game. Kolby’s story is fascinating, and you’re sure to be inspired by this author, serial entrepreneur, seminar leader, film producer, and one of the youngest C-level executives in Silicon Valley, whose story of reinvention is truly inspiring. As a leader, this episode will show you how to stay resilient and how to teach your team to do the same.

What I particularly like about this episode, aside from the fact that it’s my first, is the warmth, humor, and wisdom of my guest. I think you’ll really like this launch episode. Let me know! 🙂

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Listen to the podcast here:

Develop Resilience with Kolby Kay

I am really excited about being here with you. This has been a long time coming and just to go back to my origins, I’ve been speaking and writing for quite some time. I’ve been a guest on a lot of radio shows myself. In many of the cases, the host of the show that I’ve been working with has suggested getting my own radio show. They said, “You should have your own show. It would be great.” I always say no. It just sounded like too much work, quite frankly. I guess the right time, right place and the right person, Lisa McDonald, the host of a show called Living Fearlessly hosted me as an interview guest.

We had that typical conversation after the show and she said, “You’ve really got to look at this. It’s a wonderful opportunity to share your message and it’s a message that needs to be heard.” She introduced me to Cameron Steele, who was the producer of this show and the Co-Founder along with his wife of Contact Talk Radio and to Jeffrey Hayzlett from C-Suite Network, a great entrepreneur and speaker. One thing led to another and here we are. I’m absolutely thrilled to be bringing you the very first episode of my new show, Executive Zen. Why Zen? The Oxford definition of Zen is that it is a Japanese school of Mahayana Buddhism emphasizing the value of meditation and intuition. That is certainly the definition.

Become a student, stay humble, and dedicate time to read every single day. These are the paths towards success. Click To Tweet

We here in the United States, in the Western world, relate to the idea of Zen through books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and all the various ways that Zen has crept into our culture as a concept, as a principle of mind, how we live our lives, how we use our minds. In the context of this show, I’m using Zen as a special quality of mind cultivated through practice that confers wisdom, clarity, the precision of thought, personal responsibility, compassion, generosity and other mental qualities that happen to enhance leadership. This show is, by and large, for leaders, for aspiring leaders, for people like yourself who are curious about how your mind works and how your communication affects the actions of others. Maybe you’re a parent or a teacher and you want to learn how to lead others, how to inspire others, how to guide others. I think regardless of what your form of leadership is, even if you’re only leading yourself, your show can be valuable to you.

In fact, over time we’ll discuss very important topics for you, the leader, as your persona as a leader. For example, we’ll be talking about things like resilience, stress, culture. How do you adopt a particular culture in your company, conflict resolution, and social responsibility? How do you bring about a spirit of unity within your business and things of that sort? If you’re here regularly, I guarantee we will make you a better, more thoughtful leader. I will say upfront that this isn’t for everyone. If you’re the bottom line leader that’s only oriented toward results and nothing else and won’t be willing to open yourself to the impact of your consciousness on your results, then this won’t be for you. I’m hoping to change your mind. I’m hoping to inspire you, to entertain you, and give you tangible takeaways every week to improve your results, both personally and professionally.

If you like this, I am counting on you to let me know and to share this with everybody else you know. You all are also welcome to share your comments with me. You are invited to call in. The phone number is (844) 390-8255. To tell you a little bit about myself, I am an author of a few books. My first book was called UnHypnosis: How to Wake Up, Start Over, and Create the Life You’re Meant to Live. It is about reinventing your life using consciousness. That book I’m very grateful to say was a number one bestseller in the self-help section of Amazon.com. Stayed there for a while and continues to sell fairly well. I also wrote a book called The Magic of Inner Selling, which was released both as a physical and an audiobook. The Magic of Inner Selling teaches sales professionals how to be more conscious in their selling, how to deliberately changed their language and their communication so that they can influence others and so that they can develop rapport more quickly and do it all with integrity. I’m very proud of that.

My baby, which is an online study course called Procrastination Annihilation, teaching people how to be more effective in getting things done, how to get out of their own way. Most recently, my latest book is called Buddha In The Trenches. It basically teaches you how to be a Buddha in the trenches, not the Buddha or not the guy who the religion centers around but the Buddha meaning being awake, teaching you how to be more awake, more alert, more effective and more resourceful on the battlefields of life.

Those are my areas of interest. Beyond anything else, I’m also a holistic physician. I was a chiropractor. For a number of years, I had the busiest sports medicine chiropractic practice in the state of Vermont, I have worked with lots of different people both professional, amateur athletes and lots of others. I tell people to bring out their best. We did use some mind principles and some hypnosis principles to help people be more effective. I’m also a hypnotist. My work in the world as a hypnotist has been both for entertainment but also to empower people to get out of their own way. The reason that I wrote the book on UnHypnosis was that I was performing hypnosis for MTV Spring Break. I was the official hypnotist for MTV Spring Break. I was in Jamaica in front of 2,500 people. In the midst of this show where I had all these people hypnotized and all these funny things, I decided to try something new. I took one of my subjects and I said, “When you wake up, three things that are going to happen. Number one, you don’t believe you’re hypnotized even though you are. Number two, this is the worst show you’ve ever seen and you are aggravated with me. Number three, there’s an invisible wall, three feet in front of you.” I woke everybody up and I said, “How’s everybody doing?” This one guy screams, “You suck.” I said, “What’s the problem?” The guy said, “This show is terrible.” I said, “Then leave.” The guy gets up, he takes three steps and he hits the wall. He tries to get past it and after a while, he finally sits back down and he crosses his arms and he starts to tap.

I said, “What’s the problem?” He says, “Nothing.” I said, “Are you hypnotized?” He says, “No.” I said, “Are you having fun?” He says “No.” I said, “Why don’t you leave it?” The guy says, “I’m not going to give you the satisfaction.” At that moment I realized something which is fascinating and that is, that’s all of us. We all have a hope, a dream, a desire, someplace we want to go, something we want to achieve or accomplish and then we hit our walls, most of which exist in our own minds. We’ve pushed against our mental walls until we exhaust ourselves. Once we’ve completed that process, we get so exhausted, so disheartened and so frustrated that what we often do is we point the finger outside. We say, “It’s their fault. It’s somebody else.” We didn’t really want it anyway. We ended up depriving ourselves of all the greatness that we can produce in the world. By and large, I believe that is a form of hypnosis, that is the programming that can be undone. Over the course of this show and over the course of the time that we spend together, we’ll talk about breaking through those barriers.

We exhaust ourselves from pushing the invisible walls we built inside our minds. Click To Tweet

The most important thing I want to share is that my interest is in giving practical mindfulness. I want you to be able to use mindfulness principles to be practical in your life, to create positive results. This is why we’re calling it Executive Zen. This is not fluff. I’m not a fluff guy. We’ll share research, everything I’m going to share with you is vetted, and has been used in the battlefield so to speak. I’ll be sharing some neuroscience with you, a lot of really interesting stuff. I’ll bring you first class guests who could enhance your leadership skills, people who have done it themselves and who’ve taught other people to do it who are empowered. Success leaves clues. People who are successful because they have some qualities that they have developed or have been blessed to have been born with. We’d like to help you understand what those qualities are, what those mindsets are so that you too can have that precision, that Zen go-tuitiveness, to stick-tuitiveness to make things happen.

I’ll be speaking with a remarkable man by the name of Kolby Kay about resilience. We’re going to talk about how you bounce back from setbacks, achieve success and maybe even exceed your earlier successes as a result of what you’ve experienced or encountered in your moments of “failure.” Things that are really important to us as leaders. It fascinates me because I’ve certainly had my share of setbacks and it’s taken a certain amount of my resilience to move through them, get where I am. I’ll be speaking with executive filmmaker and thought leader, Kolby Kay who is the author of Why Your Life is Killing You? and creator of the Meltdown in The Desert Conference for entrepreneurs.

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I am thrilled to be introducing my first guest, Kolby Kolibas or Kolby Kay as he calls himself is an executive, best-selling author, film producer, keynote speaker, marketing and social media authority, loving husband and father. Kolby spent over fifteen years in corporate America. We’ll talk a little bit about that as an executive running sales and marketing for companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Dell, and many others. He has advised, built and partnered with hundreds of startups that have generated millions of dollars in revenue over the past ten years. Kolby has advised leading experts from the man behind the Chicken Soup for the Soul books to the first shark on the hit show Shark Tank. He has appeared in over 125 podcasts, radio and television broadcast and he has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine. His recent book, MY REASON. MY HERO became an instant best seller on Amazon across business and family categories.

Kolby has worked with over 2,000 business owners, thought leaders and spoken with over 5,000 young adults on the importance of legacy. His global impact on social media has a reach of over ten million impressions at 36 months. Kolby served as a facilitator to the Junior Achievement Entrepreneurship Program. He’s an Ambassador to Rising Tycoons. He has assisted over 500 families, helped them build personal businesses to escape poverty through arbitrage with a continued focus in helping our men and women in the military, get re-acclimated as they return from service. On a personal note, I met Kolby at a very prestigious business seminar called Secret Knock. I was impressed by Kolby because of his remarkable ability to share his journey and for his ability to take his setbacks and turn them successes and he’s got a great story to tell. Welcome, Kolby Kay. I think the first thing I want to hear about is your early days, your executive days.

Thank you so much for having me on the show. It’s the first show. I understand the power of that. Thank you so much for having me as the first guest. I am honored and it feels great to be on the show. Anytime I can share a message with anybody where there’s this one person takes something away from a tactical perspective or any word of wisdom that we can share especially with the new audience, I am honored and humbled for that chance. There are a couple different ways we can go. Those who know me have heard that the first part of my diatribe as to how I got started is I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah with two hardworking parents. My mother was an entrepreneur, my father was a laborer working for the water company and they split up and I’ve traveled a lot.

 

I spent ten years in the music business, as a producer, DJ and an agent for some pretty large acts. I thought that’s what I was going to do. I got married, had a baby, got divorced, got single full custody, all in whirlwind and I had to make a decision. This is where I entered Corporate America. It was I want to be a rock star or I want to be a father and I chose to be a father. My father lived here in Phoenix, Arizona. I packed up everything I had, sold all my music equipment and moved to Phoenix. I’ve put together fifteen different resumes doing anything you could think of that I had a skillset doing. I just got to it and found myself working in a warehouse building computers. That was the beginning stages of building a career. Yet here I was thinking, I was going to be in the music business then I got into technology and it was this weird overlap.

As I got into my journey to being an executive, it was interesting because I never finished college. As a single dad, it was one of those things where I was working two jobs, building a business, my entrepreneurial spirit started young while raising a daughter. I just did not have time to finish school. I was in survival mode. When I got into Corporate America, there’s a movie called Broiler Room. It’s one of those movies where you walk in the door and all the agents are on the phone with ties on selling stocks. This is this high-level of excitement. When I walked into a Fortune 500 company, a technology firm selling technology to businesses, it was like that. I walk in, the energy’s high and I’m like, “Where am I?” This fits very much like being a musician. I come on stage and like, “I like this.” I attached myself to the top performers. Who are the best people doing what they do? The men and women that are really making a difference, how do they do it? Why do they do it? Where do they do it? I sit my desk next to them so I could learn.

As I went through that over a three to four-year process of becoming one of the top performers in sales, my goal changed too. I had a financial goal. I grew up with very humble means. I had a mattress on the floor so money was a gauge of success. I set a threshold of six figures, then once I hit the six figures, it was time to set a new goal. I saw the men and women in those corner offices driving the sports car and I thought, “Instead of being the player or the coach, I want to go do that. I want to be the executive.” That became the goal. I was very blessed and humbled to have spent fifteen years within two Fortune 500s as the youngest executive of both firms. That was the beginning point for me. I learned more in those probably ten years inside of a large organization than I ever probably done in school.

It’s never been about the money. It’s about getting to the goal. Click To Tweet

There are a few things that you’ve said that I wanted to highlight. First of all, how old are you? I can’t even imagine that all this happened in this one lifetime.

I’m almost 43.

That’s quite remarkable. Youngest executive in two Fortune 500 companies over ten to fifteen years. The other thing I wanted to mention, you said you had the mattress on the floor growing up. Of course, we get successful enough that eventually, we had to make enough money that we could again have a mattress on the floor. The other thing I wanted to highlight and what you just said that I thought was remarkable is that you right from the very beginning got this idea that success leaves clues. You sat next to these people in steady success. That’s a real takeaway that the audience can benefit from.

I wish I could tell you I knew why that was. I don’t know why I did it that way. I wasn’t always super humble, but I’ve always been gracious and grateful. My parents raised me with a lot of respect. “Yes, ma’am.” “No, ma’am.” “Yes, sir.” “No, sir.” Open up the doors, and have manners. I saw both my parents work really hard. A friend of mine, Tom Bilyeu, he’s the Co-founder of an amazing company by the name of QuestNutrition. He spoke at Meltdown in the Desert and he said something to me I’ll never forget. He said, “You’re as good as you’re ever going to be right now.” If you think about that, I’m as physically fit, I’m as smart as I’m going to be and I’m going to have the best relationship. Right now, it is as good as it gets. If you are okay with that, then there’s probably not a lot for us to talk about, but if you’re not, you’re like, “I can feel a little bit better physically. I could make a little bit more money. I could get out of debt. I should have a better relationship with my wife and kids.” What are you going to do to change that?

I want to attach myself to people that are in a stage or a state that had done that and are doing that. I’m going to read, I’m going to get a mentor and I’m going to put the work in. For me it was, I wanted to make six figures. That was my first goal set in Corporate America and when I saw the men and women doing it, I just quickly said, “How do you do it?” Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, the goal for me was I’m going to shortcut it. I had a funny interview where my goal is six figures. It’s never been about money. It’s about getting to the goal. It’s about, “I’m going to lose weight. I want to run this race. I want to raise these funds. I want to build a business.” It’s always been about the goal and then getting to the goal for me. I just call it six figures. The way that I got to six figures was interesting because the global economy will tell you that it’s a 4% raise rate year after year. If I show up and do everything I’m supposed to do and the companies financially in a place where they can give a raise and they feel my value of the year and I’ve provided enough value to give me the 4%.

I started at probably $40,000 a year and I was a call center agent. I am making a ton of money. It’s all commission-based. I knew that sales would directly impact as much as I could sell. I was the first one in, last one out. It’s not that I knew anything more, I outworked everybody. Every three years something really interesting happens, I get a tap on the shoulder like, “You’re doing really well here. Do you need some help over here?” I would do that for three years. I get a tap and say, “Do you want to do this? You go over here.” Look at my resume, it’s like three years as a clip level and I move around within an organization or back and forth between two. Each one of those moves was not lateral. They were a move up because I’ve got a $20,000 to $30,000 raise every time I went up. Within that, I was able to shortcut the system instead of starting at $40,000 working all the way through. Having that all go and literally just showing up hoping that I would get to this number, I was able to go through that system and find success by getting tapped to contribute.

It sounds like by virtue of the hard work and the clarity and the focus that you were noticed and you were given opportunities to take what you knew and apply it elsewhere. One of the things that I’ve noticed in my similarly checkered past of doing so many different things, is every new thing that you do is informed by things you did before. It’s not like you throw out the baby with the bathwater. You come up with new skills, new understandings and attitudes. As time went on, you rose the ranks in business and at some point what I heard you talk about is you hit a wall, something went wrong. What happened?

 

I have had a couple.

There came a time where you ended up telling the world about your journey back up to success and that must’ve been preceded by some downfall.

It’s not that I hit a wall. As I was moving through and going through these adjacencies, a couple of things happened. One, there was this need that continually came up. I started learning how to code on the weekends and after work. As I was doing this, there was this need that continually came up with our customer base, they need to have this one software thing fulfilled. I kept asking our company for two years if we’re going to fix it because we’re a software development house. After getting clients asking over and over, I started teaching myself how to code to see if I could solve it. What happened was I didn’t have to leave. I improved the concept. It took six months to strategically exit and went into my own business full time.

That was a new journey.

If you look at where things have happened in my background, I don’t want to say I’m the king of the pivot, but it definitely has been being able to overcome adversity. There are lots of things that have happened along that way.

I watched a segment from Meltdown in the Desert. You had a piece on YouTube and you were talking about sharing your vulnerability. I’d love to hear more about that. That’s something that most executives don’t talk about. Most leaders don’t think in terms of letting themselves be vulnerable. There’s that, “I’m tough, I’m strong, I’m invulnerable and I can’t be broken.” Where does vulnerability come into all that?

There’s a huge shift that’s happening. You’ve got leaders and then you have managers, there’s a difference. From a leader to a manager, I think from an executive perspective in your readers, they get the difference. Managers are micromanaging people, telling people what to do where leaders show. In this, being able to connect is one of the biggest thresholds. How do I connect with my team? How do I connect with others? How do I connect with my business partners? That’s one aspect of it. How are you building your personal brand? What’s happening around that? How do people connect? People connect their stories. What people are looking for, the fact that you’re human and that you’ve overcome some set of adversity but so often we feel like we have to be stoic, show up and not share what any of that stuff is.

There are two different answers to this. One is inside the corporate construct, as an executive, one is if you’re leading and building a business, how do you use that to your advantage? I teach and showcase both. As a leader, what people want is the ability to see that you’re not superhuman. From subordinate perspective, they’re looking up to you as the status of, “I’d like to be doing that,” or they look at you and go, “That guy’s really not that nice. He’s a jerk. He barks down orders.” A big piece in that construct is being able to say and listen. Here’s a great example. I’m going to speak at a Fortune 500 company, a large microprocessor company. I’m going to speak to 800 of their teammates and we’re doing a session about leadership. Then we’re doing a session about the willpower to not just be happy with your base salary, but being able to contribute at a bigger level by understanding where you fit.

Every new thing that you do is informed by the things you did before. Click To Tweet

The management team is having a problem with their subordinates but then also connecting with other managers because they had a bunch of these weird acquisitions. As we started talking, it’s like, why are you in the position that you’re in today? If I could ask that question, there’s an exercise called the Five Whys. If I say, “Why are you doing this show, doctor?” You’ll give me an answer. I’ll say, “Why are you doing that?” You’ll give me an answer and I’ll say, “Why are you doing that?” Finally, I’ll get down to the point where in the last two questions are going to get really uncomfortable where it’s, “I was sleeping on a floor and I know what it’s like to go days without eating. I don’t want my kids to ever know what that feeling’s like so I worked really hard to provide a space.” There is a level of that that can be shared among your constituents and those who report up to you that’s a connection value. I’m in this position because I refuse to settle for mediocrity. Let me tell you why. That’s one series. That’s where vulnerability comes in as I’m trying to find that human connection instead of just being a robot in the construct.

I think that’s wonderful. You said that really well, this idea that it’s all about connection. The connection comes from stories and those stories can bind us together. They could separate us. If I’m up there telling the story of bravado and there’s nothing wrong with me, I’ve never had a problem. That’s not going to fly but when you play this why game, you’re digging more deeply into, “What’s your real why?” At the deepest core level, your why and my why are probably not that very different.

This is another example. I had the opportunity of teaching. It was probably 65 kids in a youth summit called Rising Tycoons. It’s an annual event here in Phoenix. It’s like Shark Tank for kids. Once the kids have ideas, they built these businesses and then they pitch them for investment. They use of word journey and JOURNEY is an acronym that I teach on. It’s about your specific journey. It starts with J, this is just the beginning and I talk about, right now everybody has a starting point and that starting point happens when the adversity hits. It doesn’t happen at the beginning of your life or when things are going well, it happens when everything’s falling apart.

Each one of these points in the journey is actually a subset of experiences that you should be sharing what builds your personal brand on why am I creating this business? “I’m in my basement, I’m learning how to code. I’m going to have a camera. I’m watching YouTube videos. I completed these courses, here’s what I learned. I’m going to keep going.” Post those videos and leveraging social media and your online presence to actually build your personal brand. People buy from people, they don’t buy from companies or businesses. We buy from those that we relate to. Unless you’re a big brand that has done an amazing job like Apple.

As a business, we’re trying to figure out how to connect. A big part of that is being able to capture your story. If you’re an entrepreneur, “Why did you go into that? What are you building?” All of the struggles. People get stuck on this, they want to share the highlight reel. Instead of sharing the highlight reel, you share the real aspects of the stories of what’s happening around it. That’s where in my bio, where I hit ten million impressions on social media, are likes, views, shares, comments, that that’s how I hit it was I started sharing. When I left the corporate construct, I got sued. What I learned in the process of doing this is that it took six months to the exit. I did everything right. I had a lawyer, nothing we did would infringe on the company.

There was no competitive. I wasn’t the same business. They want to manufacturer. I did everything the right way to leave because keep in mind, I worked fifteen years to get to a point where I was making really, really good money. I remarried. I built the house from the ground up. I didn’t have that as a kid. I remember picking out the tiles and the color of paint and doing the office. Two of my kids, that’s the house they were born at. For me to just leave that, there’s a lot there because I’ve worked my whole life to get to that point. It was very strategic on how I left and I got sued. What I learned in that process is as an executive, you’re on the clock 24 hours. You don’t have free time. As a shareholder too, you can’t go create a company and start working for another company.

The ego got in the way. Once the ego got out of the way, I gave up essentially and said, “What am I going to do now?” I started showcasing my personal journey, not when I was at the top and we were like traveling the world and doing all these crazy things and the sports cars and teaching my kids how to surf. I didn’t do that. What I documented was I pick up my phone and hit the record button when I was sitting inside my kitchen with everything I own boxed up behind me and what my wife had left. I didn’t know what I was going to do next because I’ve risked everything and here I was losing everything.

That’s when I started to showcase my journey and build my personal brand on social media. There’s one thing I know that’s for sure is I’ve never been a victim and I am resilient. It’s how you can’t kill me. It’s like, “Can we put those two things together?” It was like, “I don’t know what we’re going to do, but I’m going to figure it out. I’m going to take you on this journey on social media. I’m going to share my stories through my blog, my website and through social. I’m going to shoot a ton of videos and you’re going to see what it takes to rebuild.”

When I hear you talk about that, that really inspired me in particular. It takes a certain courage to be willing to say, “I’m lost. I don’t know what’s next. I decided to do this and then I have this opportunity and this is how I dealt with it.” You really took people through a process. The idea of sharing vulnerability had impacted others. That was the other thing that I noticed in this video, somebody who was acknowledging you and saying that, “That was a gift to them.” You’re sharing your vulnerabilities. Let me ask you. I know one of the things that you and I talked about was leveraging adversity. I think we’ve covered some of that. We will probably do more on that. You also said something interesting. I wrote it down because I knew you’d want to talk about it. You said, “By the age of 25, we’re hardwired to be a certain way unless there’s a setback.” Talk about that.

 

Here I am chugging along thinking everything is great. I’m building this new business. We had $800,000 in revenue. We’ve raised $10 million in capital to scale. I’m moving in. We’re going, things are great, and then everything fell out from underneath me. To unpack what you said, a few of the major institutions have done a scientific study on how our brains are hardwired. When do we start to inherently fall into a routine? Making decisions, our belief systems, how we view things. When does that set or is it always evolving? The study comes back and said by 25, that’s really how we’re hardwired unless one of three things happens. You have a health scare, there’s a health issue. To your readers or with you personally, if you know anybody that’s ever been diagnosed with cancer or diabetes or been in a car accident or something’s happened, how that affects not only them but everybody around them.

The next one is relationships. How many people do we know that have gone through a nasty divorce or a heartbreak? They don’t come out the same. The third one is financial. What happens if you go bankrupt or lose everything? I had all three of those things happen to me. I had it two times in two years. I got diagnosed with Lyme disease. I didn’t know I had it. I went nine months without it being treated. What that did to me, I got arthritis in my blood. I wasn’t sleeping. There’s a lot that happens to that. I just kept working through it. That’s one of my things. Working hard is what I’ve always done. What does that do to your relationship if you’re just working all the time? I’m doing it for my family, but I didn’t bring my family along so it put a huge strain on my relationships. Then what I realized is I was $1.2 million almost in debt from the business we had built and I didn’t have a contingency plan.

When you look at all of that, I’ve built two businesses from the ground up, they both did six figures and I shared that on social media, the whole experience. I just didn’t make enough to get out of where I was. I couldn’t pay back money fast enough. I did it on personal guarantees and I couldn’t get back to where I was fast enough. All of those things all happened all within the same time. When I say this story, usually it’s a family member where when you call them they’re like, “I’m so sick. I got a flat tire. I lost my job.” Every time you talk to them, it’s like there’s something wrong with them every single time. I’ve just never been that way. I’ve always looked at these things. I’m like, “That really sucks,” but it’s, “Now, what?”

The more time I spend dwelling on that, that’s less time I spend getting out of it and getting through it. I had all of those things happened at the same time to me or within a period of time and it made me really reflect on purpose. As executives, why are you doing what you do? You’re doing it to provide something for your family. Give them some financial things. There’s some respect. There’s ego. When you peel that back, if you’re not working from a sense of purpose, you’re going to lose everything. Your health goes, your money goes, and your relationships go. I can’t tell you how many executives I used to look up to who had poor health or had bad no relationships with their wife and kids because they just worked. If you’re not coming from a sense of purpose and the things that you do, you’re doing it all for null. That was the big rewiring aspect of it for me is I came through all of this. It was like, “What am I doing all this for?” Then I reset. It was a huge reset for me.

Starting with the quote, “By the age of 25, we’re hardwired unless there’s a setback,” and as you said, a health scare, relationship scare and financial scare. These are the things that shake us and hopefully don’t break us. In a case like yours, because you start with this, “So what, now what attitude, I’m going to figure it out. I’m going to let it help to inform my purpose so that I’m even stronger about why I do what I do.” What’s the biblical quote? “A man who gains the world, loses his soul.” You don’t want to lose your soul, you want to be present.

Refuse to settle for mediocrity. Click To Tweet

That’s one of the reasons I put this show together. That’s why we’re doing this is because you’re speaking my language, you’re speaking everyone’s language for the people who are willing to open up to this idea that you want to do this for the long haul. You want to be successful for the long haul, not just that you make a million dollars but what do I need to do with myself so that it is sustainable, it actually supports my happiness, and that it actually inspires others.

There’s one thing that you’re going to find in all of your guests is you start to find out what they do. It goes back to being a student. I started a radio show podcast and I started interviewing top performers. One of the questions that I would ask was around morning routine or evening routine, how do you start and end your day? Through the 30 or 40 guests I had of the interview series that we did where these are Olympic athletes, these are best-selling authors, these are seven-figure earners, these are founders of companies, all different walks of life, what I found were a couple of things. All of them had a meditation practice. All of them had some physical activity. All of them had a give back method that they were doing something for a greater cause and we’re contributing to something more. They were donating time, energy, money. The last one is they are students, they were always learning. They were reading or studying. They had set times that they were doing that. They have time with their relationships.

If I look at that and I say, “If these top performers, golden medal Olympians, people who have sold over 300 million books to people that have built ten to twelve-figure businesses, if that’s what they’re doing, I’m going to do that. Instead of getting in my way, why don’t I do that?” I start my day with gratitude, I end it with gratitude. I have it scheduled on my calendar so it pops up, so I remember. Brendon Burchard’s got a great quote, “Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter?” Every day I end my day with that, “Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter? Did I make a difference every day?”

First of all, we only need to do this one show. I don’t need to do a whole bunch of shows because this one is enough information for everyone’s lives. Those questions or those attributes that you just mentioned, being a lifelong student, meditating every morning, having a physical activity, giving back. These are the things we’ll continue to tease out in greater detail, but what I find funny is that it’s the successful people who are doing those things and the people who aren’t successful, they say, “I don’t need to do that. That’s a waste of time.” It’s ironic. It’s funny. Let me ask you this, how can leaders up their game? You’re a leader, what are some of the things that a leader can do? I’m specifically curious if there’s any way that a leader can share their journey in order to make themselves more human, more vulnerable, or what else as a leader?

Be a continual student, be gracious and be humble. Continually be learning. At the end of the day, 40 hours a week plus sleeping eight hours a day, plus go to the gym an hour a day, it’s like at the end of the time. When you unpack how much free time you have left, it’s still over like 60 hours a week. I start it with twenty minutes. For me, I start with twenty minutes. Every day I would read and then I expanded that to just education as a whole. There’s a lot of aspects that go into that.

YouTube and find videos of something that you want to learn about?

I would say probably two, becoming a student and being humble. Dedicate time every single day to read, to educate yourself whether it’s podcast, it’s videos or books.

Let me ask you to say a couple words about your books, either one that you want to talk about.

I would say the most recent which is MY REASON. MY HERO, which is focused on true stories for my kids and then true stories I’ve learned around entrepreneurship by my kids. One was my son’s resiliency to never give up on learning how to skateboard. He kept falling, he got to the point where here doesn’t want to do it anymore and he overcame that and how he got better. The second one is for my daughter. We taught her how to do arbitrage, so how to essentially buy things at Goodwill and sell them on eBay to raise money for her fun run. I share my story around that. That’s my favorite. I’m working on a book now that’s about the journey. It’s about adversity and overcoming adversity and using adversity as your superpower.

If you don’t mind, I’d love to have you say a couple words about Meltdown in the Desert.

It is a social media entrepreneur conference on the outside. If you were to take Tony Robbins, Gary Vee and shake them up and then pour that into something, that’s what the event is. Entrepreneur Magazine rated it the number one event that you don’t know about. We have about 300 people that come in, we keep it very tight-knit and it’s everything for personal branding, to marketing, to tools, to doing video, to the things you can do around your business, but then ripping it apart. We talk about why is it that you do what you do and how you show up every day and then give you the tactical tools to go execute against that.

I hope someday you invite me to be a speaker. Did you mention that the proceeds of that go to?

It goes to Tomahawk Charitable Solutions. It is a nonprofit 100% and 100% out that focuses on supporting our Special Forces men and women in service.

 

How can people learn more about you or join your world?

My handle is just, @ImKolbyKay on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

I want to thank you so much for being here with us and I will let you go solve other people’s problems for now, but for now, I think you’ve already solved a lot of our guests’ problems and giving people a lot to think about. Blessings to you.

I appreciate you. Thank you so much for the chance to be on the show.

I think you will agree that that was a remarkable contribution. Thanks, Kolby.

If you enjoyed the show, I hope you will share your comments with me. You can email me at SteveTaubman@Gmail.com. Feel free to suggest a topic that’s particularly meaningful to you. Remember, your host is an author with deep knowledge of mindfulness, positive psychology and communication. I believe that we get our best results by simplifying, by taking a set of ideas and concepts and rather than try and remember lots of little details, pulling them all together in shortcuts that we do better. That’s why things like proverbs or quotes or little songs are helpful. That’s why you hear jingles for commercials. We remember little things and we usually remember one thing that hopefully will jog our memory about other things so we can go deeper as well.

I intend from now through the course of this show that every episode will end with a metaphor, a quote, proverb and a challenge. What I’d like to do now is share with you a few of those and as I said, each of the shows will be met with a metaphor, a quote, a proverb, and a challenge so that you have something, one thing that you can grab onto and take away with you from the topic or a theme of the show. I was very pleased that we had Kolby with us to talk about resilience and bouncing back and really developing the qualities of leadership and we’ll be talking of course more about those same qualities as time goes on.

I did some research on the web and I was looking for a good metaphor for resilience. In the process, I came across a woman by the name of Patricia Morgan. Patricia, who I might very likely invite as a guest in the future, is herself a motivational speaker on the topic of resilience. She and I shared that. She uses the metaphor of a rubber band. She says that resilience is like a strong rubber band. Of course, a rubber band is vulcanized, which is rubber that’s been made tougher by heat. Like us, we become tougher when we allow ourselves to enter into heated situations. It makes us more resilient. Like a rubber band, we can stretch only so far and if we stretch any further, we break. Part of being resilient is knowing when you stretch as far as you can and also maintaining the constant stretching out and then back again. Why? If you don’t, then rubber band starts to become crisp and stiff. It becomes brittle.

We as leaders don’t want to be crisp or brittle. We want to make sure that we’ve got that flexibility for the times when we need it. The metaphor for today is being as a strong rubber band, think about that. Be a strong rubber band, allow yourself to stretch, but be aware when you’re reaching your limits and make sure that you continue to stretch. You would be aware of letting that happen. My challenge to you is I want you to challenge yourself to take one seeming failure, something that’s happening in your world. It’s a failure, a setback, an obstacle, something that doesn’t feel good. I want you to reframe it. I want you to think about what you can do to take that frustrating experience, that sense of hopelessness and turn it into something of greater value.

Connections come from stories and those stories can bind us together. Click To Tweet

Before you try to solve the problem, before you beat your head against the wall, just take a few moments and see if you can reframe or rethink that failure, that frustration, that challenge in such a way that you can see it as a positive. Anything can be seen as a positive. If you would just take a moment now, close your eyes, take a deep breath in. Relax and allow yourself to feel very peaceful inside. In that sense of peace and quiet, I want you to affirm to yourself the possibility that you can be successful under even the most challenging of circumstances. It’s okay for you to let yourself feel those moments of disheartening, discomfort, fear and frustration, and then reframe that. I affirm to myself I will refrain my fears, my frustrations and failures so that I can go forward and have a better day, a better life, a better week, and make a bigger contribution.

I want to end this by suggesting this quote, this proverb that I found online. I thought it was pretty funny. It says, “The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.” Never begrudge yourself. There were times when you do fall behind because that just gives you all the more time to catch up, to reframe your life, think of ways to do it better the next time and to have a good time. I want to thank you for joining me. My next guest will be the remarkable, Aaron Scott Young, consultant to the business legends talking about adversity and he’s got quite a story to share, so don’t miss it.

My name is Steve Taubman, this is Executive Zen. It’s been an absolute pleasure being with you here. If you’d like to check out my website, it’s SteveTaubman.com. If you’re interested in having me come in and speak to your group, I’d love to do that for you. If you’d like to share this with your friends and family, you’ll be able to find it on iTunes. We’re also back at CTRNetwork.com/SteveTaubman.

Important Links:

• Living Fearlessly episode with Steve Taubman
• Contact Talk Radio
• C-Suite Network
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• UnHypnosis: How to Wake Up, Start Over, and Create the Life You’re Meant to Live.
• Amazon.com
• The Magic of Inner Selling
• Procrastination Annihilation
• Buddha In The Trenches
• Kolby Kay
• Why Your Life is Killing You?
• Meltdown in The Desert Conference
• Chicken Soup for the Soul
• MY REASON. MY HERO
• Secret Knock
• QuestNutrition
• Rising Tycoons
• Tomahawk Charitable Solutions
• @ImKolbyKay on Facebook
• Kolby Kay on Twitter
• Kolby Kay on Instagram
• Kolby Kay on YouTube
• SteveTaubman@Gmail.com
• Executive Zen on iTunes
• CTRNetwork.com/SteveTaubman

About Kolby Kay

Kolby Kolibas is an Executive, Best Selling Author, Film Producer, Key Note Speaker, Marketing & Social Media Authority, loving Husband & Father.

Kolby spent over 15 years in Corporate America as an executive running sales & marketing for companies such as IBM, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Dell and many others. He has advised, built and partnered with hundreds of startups that have generated millions of dollars in revenue over the past 10 years.

Kolby has advised leading experts such as the man behind the Chicken Soup For the Soul books to the first Shark on the hit show Shark tank; he has appeared on over 125 podcast, radio & television broadcasts; and has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine.

His recent book, My Reason My Hero became an instant best seller on Amazon across business and family categories.

Kolby has worked with over 2,000 business owners and thought leaders, and spoken to over 5,000 young adults on the importance of Legacy. His global impact on social media has a reach of over 10 million impressions in 36 months.

Kolby serves as a facilitator to the Junior Achievement entrepreneurship program; he is an ambassador to Rising Tycoons; he has assisted over 500 families build personal businesses to escape poverty through arbitrage; with a continued focused in helping our men and women in the military get re-acclimated as they return from service.