Transcript
A (0:13)
Hi everyone. Welcome to our show. Chief Change Officer, I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is is a modernist community for change. Progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today's guest is Sandy Goldgaard, former slam dunk champion, long time corporate leader and founder of seg, which stands for Simple, Easy Growth. In this two part series, Sandy opens up about chasing titles, burning out, getting lost and realizing he has climbed the wrong mountain. We talk about ego, clarity and the Life pills method. A way of becoming more of yourself by stripping things away, not adding more on. It's personal, it's short, is philosophical, but it's also practical. This episode might just change how you measure success. Let's get into it. Good morning, Sandy. Welcome to our show. Welcome to Chief Change Officer.
B (2:11)
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here, Vince.
A (2:13)
Wow, your background is great. It got you in the center with Albert Einstein right beside you. It feels like I'm hosting not just one guest today, but two. I know we'll be talking about topics that even Albert might have appreciated, which is growth, energy, change and transition. Before we get into all that, let's start with your story. Tell us a bit about yourself, your background, your journey, how you evolved over the years. Then we'll dive into different paths of your experience and your approach to growth.
B (2:56)
Yeah, so I think as I look back, the best place to start is as a kid growing up in Denver, Colorado, I had this growing obsession with the ability to fly. And I would dream about it and really started to embody that. And then one day as I'm watching the tv, Michael Jordan, basketball player, says, I can fly for a brief amount of time. And I said, that's what I want to do. And like himself, Dr. J. Dominique Wilkins. I just said that's exactly what I want to do. I get to feel it in my heart. That's what I wanted. And from that moment forward, I would spend every night. We had 14 stairs in our house and I would do a hundred toe raises on every stair, 1400 every night before bed until I was able to dunk. And then I went on to win the national slam dunk championship in Lubbock, Texas. Our basketball team won the national championship. A lot of things started to unfold. And then I became a four year starter at the University of Colorado in Boulder where I played college basketball. Life was amazing, taking on these experiences and I was set to go to Sao Paulo, Brazil to play professional basketball. Then I had a skiing accident and that's when everything changed. That basketball was no longer this dream of flying. You are now grounded, so, so to speak, and you have to figure something out. So I went with what I thought I knew at the time, which was in athletics, you size up the competition, you outwork everybody, and you get ahead. So I picked an industry at the time that I thought I could make a lot of money. I knew I wanted to be successful, I knew I wanted to make a lot of money. I knew I was an athlete, I knew I was capable. But I applied those things to the business life. So for the next almost three decades, I practiced sizing up the competition, outworking others, and trying to get ahead. And that worked fairly well. By most definitions, I would say I was very successful in the corporate world. Then my kids reached a point where they were now out of college, they were debt free, off in the world. And I started to finally have some time to focus on me. And I started asking myself, is this everything that this was meant to be? My whole focus was on my kids, making sure they were successfully launched into the world. And I just had this kind of feeling in the pit of my stomach that this wasn't Apex Mountain. There was more here. And I was getting some signs and signals that I look back on that caused me to clean up my diet, stop drinking alcohol. I really start to strip away layers of interference to help me get in tune with nature and really listen to what was going on. And it was started to point me in a direction. It was like tracking these opportunities to allow the best version of myself to come out and see if I could drop my ego, if I could, if I could resolve my identity, not put these outside pressures on who I thought I needed to be, but let who I am really surface, come to the surface and flourish. What would that be like? How amazing could life be? And I learned so much from that pursuit. Then I launched two companies, and that has led me to really understand what true success is for me. And of course, it has to do with money and success and doing the things you want. But I've been able to rewire myself to think as wealth in terms of being able to do what I want, when I want with minimal effort. That's wealth to me. That can have a monetary component, absolutely. It could involve a private jet, or it could involve just being so content with the miracles happening all around you that you can sit in peace and just know that this alone is an unbelievable miracle. This is all I want to do today, is sit and enjoy the miracles going on around me. And that kind of turns. What my priorities were going into those three decades as an executive was money, success, power, and ego. Those were the things I was focused on. I thought, I want to be this. Now my number one most important thing is my health, taking care of my mind, my body, being fully in tune, managing stress levels, and letting amazing things. I'd say allowing amazing things to happen to me and for me, and then have the awareness so that I'm experiencing them as they happen. And now I have this kind of calling or feeling. There's nothing I get more pleasure from than helping other people be the best at whatever it is that they do. And that's a big part of what we do. At Segway Consulting, you talked about spending.
