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Chief Change Officer
#409 Sande Golgart: Climbing the Wrong Mountain — Part One
00:34:17
Slam dunk champion turned high-flying exec, Sande Golgart looked like he had it all—until the ladder he was climbing started to feel more like a treadmill. In this two-part series, he unpacks what happens when success leaves you hollow, how overachievement can mask deeper misalignment, and why real growth begins when you finally hit pause.
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- [00:13]
A
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.
- [02:11]
B
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here, Vince.
- [02:14]
A
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.
- [02:56]
B
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.
- [08:16]
A
Three decades as an executive climbing the corporate ladder, chasing money, power, recognition. What was it really like for you being in the sake of it all? I imagine on one hand, there was pride, getting promoted, landing big roles, earning a great paycheck. But on the other hand, did you ever feel something was missing? Maybe stress building up or a sense that you were not really fulfilled, even if you couldn't quite name it at the time?
- [08:53]
B
Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't like it was this miserable time. It was just that I thought that's the way that the world worked. I thought, we're here. I grew up Catholic. As a kid, we're taught you're here to suffer, don't want too much, and life is supposed to be hard. And so I just thought that's just the way that it was. And as a man, oftentimes we're not taught that it's okay to feel. So I would say I spent a big part of those three decades numbing myself a bit to what was going on around me and not allowing myself to feel anything. I just had to suffer through it, go get the next thing, and I was accomplishing things. So it felt like the harder I worked, the more worthy I was, the more I would get rewarded. And that was something that, in my upbringing was taught to me, that you get rewarded when you do well. Something I had to unlearn later in life. But through those times, I was. I started as a sales rep and quickly ascended to a manager position. I've always had a propensity, a desire, and I'm very good at leading people. But more importantly, teams, I love the idea that we can get more accomplished as a group than we can as any individual, and I'm very good at bringing those elements out of a team to get great results. So I was working for a company Called Regis. People mostly know of WeWork. Regis was WeWork back in the 2000s. So I was running. I ran everything from the western U.S. canada to the northern U.S. about 250 locations, hundreds of millions of dollars in budget. And it was my job to go and take over different teams, make sure that they came together and that we produced great results. And probably the thing I look back on during that career was when I was put in charge of the western US which was the least performing, lowest performing, terrible culture, terrible everything. And I had the chance to turn it around and get people to work together. And we ended up achieving amazing results and outperforming everyone else and being able to get promoted and take another step forward. And I had just been amazing career there, but I was still chasing what's next, what's next. And so after 14 years, I felt this kind of anxiousness that the rest of the world was passing me up there. Not everyone is really into office space. There's all these technologies. And I felt like there would have to be more. So I left to pursue more. That taught me a really great life lesson that what I've now learned to appreciate in, through the teachings of yoga is that really you stop wanting. You just do what's right in front of you the best you can, and you let life, your life energy pull you in the direction. And when you jump off that path, life will become typically much more difficult for you the more you're trying to force something to happen and not use the energy that the world is giving you. And I jumped off to try to pursue disruptive technologies, chase a bunch of stock options, and try to make an even greater life for myself with more accomplishments, more ego, more power. And that was just met with a ton of resistance. Startup world is very difficult, but on top of that, you've got other people's egos. Venture capital. I jumped into a world that I didn't know a lot about, I learned a ton about. But we were constantly being met with resistance and watching the way people would react to that was disheartening. I think businesses and situations, you go as fast and as high as the leader allows. And that's the importance having great leadership. And so I could observe when you didn't, when you have not so great leadership, what are the consequences? And I could see a very clear lack of clarity, major lack of alignment for the company and for everybody involved. And then, of course, not the results that you would want. And it helped me really internalize, like, what things need to be in place for companies to really grow and grow easily. You know, when you have clarity, you have alignment. I've seen a bit of part of organizations and run large teams where the growth becomes very easy, but the clarity is the hardest thing to get. And then building alignment around that clarity, it makes it easy for everybody to contribute. And that's kind of part of what I was pulling away from these experiences. The most important thing I pulled away. As I felt as I launched into this disruptive technology world and we missed on our first attempt, I could feel a sense of failure. Oh, shoot. Maybe I'm not as good as I thought I was. Maybe I'm not as smart as I thought I was. And I could feel my own energy lowering. And then I was attracting worse environments, worse cultures, worse leaders, because that's where my frequency was going. I was starting to blame shame, criticized more than I ever had. And I was now finding myself attracting other cultures where people blame shame and do those kinds of things. So my last corporate job, I found myself in this highly toxic, super low vibrating culture. But again, I still thought I could help change. I could help bring this somewhere. And that's where I learned another really important lesson, that you can only help people with an open mind who want the change, no matter how hard you want someone to want something. And I was giving, really leaning in and trying to give a group of people everything that I had to help them see how much better a life, an experience, a company they could experience. But I learned really quickly that people have to approach that with an open mind. They have to want it, or it doesn't matter what you're willing to do for them. They have to be willing to do it for themselves. They learned that lesson. They also learned to lean in to what's right in front of you, which was one of the lessons I had learned six years previous when I left Regis. You really owe it to yourself to lean into what's right in front of you and not chase something you think you want. And it was right about that time I actually read a quote from Rumi that changed my life forever. Like, it's what my core mission of being here from today, moving forward. And that is, Rumi said, when I chase what it is I think I want, my life becomes a world of stress and anxiety. I think he says, a furnace of stress and anxiety. When I sit in silence, I realized that what I want also wants me. It's looking for me, and it will find me. And to the man that can understand this great things, there's a Great lesson. And, and I something when I read it, like I got a surge of energy and it was like there's something to that. You have to explore that and start to figure that out. And I've now dedicated my life to, to understanding what exactly that means, what a lot of the great Buddhist teachers. And there has to be something amazing to that that you can actually sit in silence. And there's the law of attraction. But I want to find out and understand how does it actually work when we have bills to pay, mortgages, the real life stuff, like it sounds beautiful to read it on paper. How does it work in real life? So I've dedicated myself to finding it out, document everything along the way. It's led me on an unbelievable amazing journey. And I'm looking forward to sharing it at some point with others who are interested in finding a lower stress way of managing their life but not giving up any anything in fact attracting more of what they really want into their life. Because I believe we're not here to suffer. We're here to have an amazing experience. And so many of us are numbing ourselves to how amazing this opportunity is that we're missing this opportunity. I think the Earth is a giant playground inside the universe. We're so lucky to be here, but so many of us are walking around shuffling, complaining or trying to figure out our purpose for being here. Our purpose for being here is to enjoy the heck out of it like it's here. Just enjoy it, lap it up, do the things you love, be productive, love your neighbor, love yourself and make yourself available to help other people. And you'd have an amazing life. But there's a lot that we've learned in life that led us to this point point different constructs, teachings which are all designed for the right reasons that we have to unlearn at a certain point to really appreciate and experience life to the fullest. So that's what I'm, that's my whole core purpose and mission and then to share that with people so that people can understand. What is it really like to not do anything for six months? What is it to not make any money and no money is going to come surging back into your life? Are these things possible? What does it really look like when you think of things like manifestation and different things? I'm exploring them as deeply as I can to be able to bring back to as many people who are interested to find out, like, how did it really work? It sounds good on when I read it, but can I still pay my mortgage Can I still have a nice car? Can I still have some of the guilty pleasures I have in life? Or do I need to get rid of all of those things? And I think the answer is what I'm learning. There's a bell curve where we have a life energy that's programmed. If we're all energy, there's a life energy that's pulling us individually in a certain direction. Your energy would be very different from mine. And it's up to us to understand what our energy is, what our true self is all about, what are our unique gifts. Let those come to the surface and let us ride that life energy. And at any point in time you can go along this bell curve, which the first one would be. You have no interest, totally empathy. You're. You have no desire. You do nothing. But you do it because you have a really down outlook on life. Then you start to work hard and you think it's all your responsibility, but life is harder. You're trying to chase things you think you want. And then you get can get to a point where you start to get in tune and in touch with your own natural talents, your own life energies. You start to see things you really like, enjoy. You're passionate about passion being coming from the root word of suffering. When you're passionate about something, this is something I'm willing to suffer for four because it's so great. So that's like me on those stairs doing 1400 toe raises. I was so passionate about getting to fly for a brief moment. I would willingly jump on the stairs and do 1400 every single night because that's what I wanted to do. I love know if my dad or my mom said you have to do 1400 of these every night before you go to bed or you're not worthy, I would have hated it. So that's where some of the difference comes in. And as you get in touch with your dharma, your purpose, the things that you're truly passionate about that you can feel energetically then yet you're. You can jump off that bell curve and start to make things happen in your life aligned with where your natural energies are, you could also keep going all the way to where nothing really needs because you are so convinced that you're that worthy. Miracles are happening all around. You don't have to go and do anything. But that's for very few yogis and Buddhists that can make it to that level. But they're available to all of us. And some of them aren't necessary for us to go all the way to the end. So there's a safe jumping off point. You can jump off wherever you want and start to apply what you know with some cleaned up energy and start applying it to what you're passionate about and go make an amazing life happen for you. It's just the further down the road you get, you realize I don't have to make an amazing life. Life is amazing. And that's where some of the magic happens.
- [22:31]
A
You brought up a lot of important ideas and I want to unpack one in particular, which is action versus inaction. Just to be clear, I know you're not talking about sitting back and doing nothing or being lazy, but some people might misinterpret it that way. And in extreme cases, like in China, during and after Covid, there's been this trend where some younger folks choose to opt out entirely. No drive, no ambition. And that kind of passive inaction can lead to poor mental health and is not helpful for society either. But I know that's not what you mean. So could you give an example from your own life? What does your version of intentional inaction look like?
- [23:36]
B
Yes, so that I don't lose anyone that's listening. The best way to understand that is that action is better than in action, sitting around and doing nothing. Like you mentioned, that's not productive, but it's. With what intention are you taking action or choosing inaction? And when it becomes inspired action, that's when it's amazing. So in oftentimes, what you're waiting for or what, what we're all guilty of is we're so busy and we want to do more. We want to do more. We're adding things to our life, not subtracting. We're busy for the sake of being busy. We're busy because our ego tells us it sounds cooler. If I tell you how busy I am, somehow it makes me seem worth more. If I tell you how busy I am, if I tell you I get up at 4am, some people are impressed. Why? I have no idea. But we get programmed that way and then we start to numb ourselves to what's actually happening all around us. We're missing millions of opportunities that are available right around us. Our awareness goes down and now we're like in the grind, making life harder, creating that furnace of stress and anxiety. And now we're immersed in it and now we're just blindly going back to the well, being overly stimulated and having this pressure on ourselves to just do more. Now, conversely, when we allow ourselves to relax, especially our mind and Calm, pay attention to our thoughts, pay attention to our feelings. Start to manage our energy so that we let things flow through us and we don't hold on to past traumas, previous experiences. We don't start worrying about a future that doesn't exist. We're not creating a future that we don't want in our mind. You're just being. Now you can allow yourself to start to feel, create awareness for what's really going on around you. And you will then become incredibly inspired to take action when it's the right time. That's when you spring into this. I've studied Gandhi's life quite a bit. And in Gandhi's life there was this magical moment where he was mediating two different sides of a divorce. And he realized, I have this amazing power to bring peace to situations and to mediate. And he went from being a very unsuccessful person that's wandering all over the place to this very inspired person that had an amazing amount of energy that he could pour into his life's work. And then we all know the story then of Gandhi. Same thing with Albert Einstein. For a long time, he. He couldn't get three people to show up to one of his talks. He had to shut him down. No one was interested in listening to him. He wasn't all that interested in being anything other than pursuing what he could see in his mind that he was being fed through lucid dreams. Somehow he knew what it was like to stand on the front end of a light wave and travel through outer space. He was receiving those kind of messages as he was paying attention. He just knew light bends when it goes around a planet. It bends. I can't tell you why or how. I just know because I've been on one. He's never physically been on one. And so he hired mathematicians who were actually smarter than he was to prove the things he already knew. And then it create the theory. He. They just basically delivered the mathematics to prove the theory of relativity. But he only knew it because he was being fed that information which became his life's purpose was, how do I prove that this happens? I know deep in my soul. And he was willing then to go through whatever it took to prove that those theories. And he sat through two different eclipses until they captured it and he had it nailed to the decimal point, which you just couldn't know, except he was being fed that information. So it all comes down to waiting and allowing yourself to be quiet internally and externally. Sit in silence. Not forever, just until you really tap into who. Who you Are your own self worth and a touch of inspiration. That's a first track. Go check this out. So go check it out. Do it the best you can. Then look for another clue of what you should do next. And then do exactly what's in front of you, being a hundred percent present. And then your life will lead you in tune with your life energy to an amazing experience. And I think that's what we need to get all of human consciousness more dialed into is just the ability to listen, to feel, and to look for the signs. And then when you have the sign, jump in and do it the best of your ability with what's right in front of you. Not worrying about your past, not worrying about your future, not worrying or fearful of anything. Just do what's right in front of you. An amazing life will unfold. And that's what I'm experiencing myself.
- [29:17]
A
As you were speaking, I realized you were describing my exact experience as a podcast host. This show is about one year old. I came up with the plan just two weeks before Christmas 2023. Hosting a podcast was never part of any plan. But after Covid and sometime in reflection, I felt this pool. Maybe I should start one. I've done a lot of public speaking before. On stage, in group one, on one in finance, raising money. I figured if I could move people to invest millions and billions of dollars, maybe I could move them in a different way too. I didn't start with a business plan or goals around monetization. I just followed the idea. And along the way things unfolded, guests referred more guests, the show built momentum. A podcast network even reached out. At first I thought it was bam, but it was real. Now that's ad revenue too. So, yes, everything you just described, I've been living it and it's been a really meaningful ride.
- [30:53]
B
And I would venture to say the more now you keep listening, like to whether it's different guests or and you start asking different questions, you'll be a better and better tracker of your life energy, where you recognize clues, cues, and things that speak to you that are inspirational because you feel it and you go, I got to pursue that. Something's telling me. I got to look into that deeper. The more you keep listening and responding to that which I would call inspiration, as opposed to doing something someone else is telling you, Right? If you have a coach that says, vince, you need to do 30 episodes with these people and do it this way, it becomes work. And that's when change becomes really hard. But change becomes really easy when you're listening and you're in tune with yourself and you're incoherent vibration with the universe. And you're like, that sounds exciting. Do it. And that's what I've learned through Segway Consulting. That's how I came to know that simple change is easy, right? Simple, easy growth. Simple, easy change. It's there. You have to allow yourself to be inspired, because when you're inspired, you can do amazing things. When you're uninspired, you just don't want to do anything. And so many of us are trying to chase what we think we want and do what other people have told us is the right way. And we're trying to fit ourselves into that mold. Life is very difficult. It's hard. I'd spent almost three decades acting that way and I feel like with when you look at the mental health stats and everything else that's going on around people, it's a clear signal that we're doing something wrong and that if we can just get in tune with more of these inspiring thoughts that will spur action, then we'll actually be more productive, aligned with our true self and act and treating each other better. But it has to happen one person at a time.
- [33:13]
A
That's it for part one. We heard how Sandy chased success get lost. And realized the summit wasn't even his. But next we get into what happens after the climb. How to grow, how to heal, and how to build something that actually fits. We'll also dive into the live peels method and what it means to strip down without falling apart. Don't miss it. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show. Leave us top rated reviews. Check out our website and follow me on social media. I'm this Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.