[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome to the Victory Show.
Hey victors. Welcome to this week's Victory Show. If this is the first time you're joining us, I'm Travis Cody, best selling author of 16 books. I've had the privilege of helping hundreds of business consultants, founders and entrepreneurs write and publish their own best selling books as well. In that journey, I've discovered a fascinating pattern. Most businesses hit a revenue plateau, usually around a million dollars, and they struggle to break through it. So on this show, I sit down with some of the world's most successful CEOs, leaders and business owners to uncover the strategies they use to overcome those plateaus and scale their businesses to new heights so that you can do the same. So get ready for some deep insights and actionable takeaways you can implement in your life and business starting today. Our guest joining me today has a career that beautifully weaves together leadership, creativity and empowerment. Ken Goldie brings nearly 30 years of leadership training and development, having taught life leadership training to hundreds of private clients and mastering the art of leadership mastery at the Ohio Institute for Embodied Wisdom.
Today he's a sought after keynote speaker, an executive coach and corporate consultant, empowering leaders worldwide from Dubai to Australia, from Philadelphia to Florida to Alaska to la.
But Ken isn't just a teacher of leadership. He lives it as a film producer, director and a screenwriter. His storytelling brilliance shines through his work, including adapting Isaac Asimov's the End of Eternity for Fox Studios, bringing the worlds of Huls to life for Universal, and crafting the powerful World War II drama Walking with the Enemy starring Ben Kingsley, which is recognized by the Motion Picture Academy's core collection. Ken's unique blend of artistic vision, business acumen and leadership mastery empowers his clients not only to lead with excellence, but to inspire greatness and those they lead. Ken, thank you so much for being here today. I'm excited for our conversation.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: What a great intro. I have to give you kudos for taking my various backgrounds and resumes and putting it together in that intro. Thank you very, very much. That was lovely to hear.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: You're like I sound pretty impressive.
So what, what an interesting journey you've been on. I mean you go coming from the entertainment world into corporate and executive leadership and you know, I'm not going to take us down the topic but I having been been in Hollywood for 15, 16 years, I definitely say that Hollywood does seem to be lacking some good leadership as of late, which I mean think maybe feels like why some of the things are sort of flound.
So let's talk about that a little bit. So it sounds like you had the dream of, like, I'm gonna go to Hollywood. And I mean, look, you've done worked with Fox. You've got stuff made by Fox, by Universal. So, I mean, you. You've. You've got some stuff done. You had your foot in that world where. Like, how. Let's talk about that a little bit, because I'm super curious then as how that also. Then when did you pivot into. Into breakthrough leadership and. And doing the work that you do today?
[00:03:09] Speaker B: Yeah, it was a long overlap.
I always wanted to be a writer from the time I grew up reading novels. Want to be a novelist. I've written two novels.
I got into screenwriting kind of in college and after college, because I figured I could sort of make a living in Hollywood while attempting to make a living as a writer instead of being a bartender, being a novelist. And so I got jobs working at desks, you know, answering phones for literary agents and producers. And I gave notes on scripts and read a lot of bad scripts and read a few good scripts. And then I started working for producers and I was on set with movies that we developed. And I just sort of picked up filmmaking by working in town and being on indie films. I was an associate producer on a old movie with Burt Reynolds and another one with Rodney Dangerfield.
[00:04:01] Speaker A: And.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: Cameron Diaz's first role was in a film that I produced, this thing.
[00:04:07] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, what was that?
[00:04:08] Speaker B: It was called the Keys to Tulsa with Eric Stoltz and James Spader.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: And what was that before the Mask?
[00:04:14] Speaker B: Maybe it might have been right after the Mask. In fact, I think did the Mask, and she was still like that hadn't released yet in the Mask, and they wanted her to get something more serious. And we were doing this drama with Eric and Jimmy Spader and Deborah Unger and Joanna going. And so it was one scene at the beginning of the movie with Cameron. And so she was great. She came down to Texas where we shot, and I hung out with her and then saw her go on to be a superstar. And then somewhere along the way, I decided that I wanted to start directing. I produced a few films and kind of had this notion of you're not really going to learn the whole filmmaking experience if you're always just behind, know, the wall that says no producers on set kind of thing. I wanted to direct, so I directed a short film. I had the legendary David Ogden Styers from MASH in my.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
And then, you know, what's funny is like, I know everybody Knows him from mash, but his. My favorite role of his was in the the Dead Zone series.
[00:05:14] Speaker B: Oh yeah, that's right.
[00:05:15] Speaker A: I loved his character in that show. I was such a show.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: He was also the voice of Cogsworth the clock in the Beauty and the Beast animated.
[00:05:23] Speaker A: I did not know that.
[00:05:25] Speaker B: 90S. Yeah. So I met David on Meet Wally Sparks and then asked him to be in my short and he came down and I was in my short film.
And then I wrote and directed an indie feature with Daryl Hannah and another indie feature with Ron Perlman and Barbara Hershey. And I was just an indie filmmaker and then longer story. I wound up selling feature scripts to studios and getting into like the studio writing world. But the salient part is that I learned a lot about leadership as a film director.
It became really clear very early on that everybody on set knew how to do what they did way better than I did. In fact, most of them did things that I just didn't know how to do. I mean there were 19 year old kids who could load film into a, into a 16 millimeter film camera. I didn't know how to load film.
I wasn't a cinematographer, I wasn't a camera operator. I wasn't a set designer or a set decorator or a costume designer or an actor or a musician or an editor.
I couldn't plug a cable into a lamp. Like I did not know how to do what anybody on a film set did, but I was in charge. And so I really early on was like, well, it's not my job to go tell them how to do their job because, because they do their job better than I do their job. It's my job to help them be better at their job. And that's really what a film director does with actors. An actor can't watch him or herself acting, but the director can. We see things in talented people that they don't see and we're able to help them be better at what they do. That's what 95% of film directing was for me.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: I love that. You know, when I first did my, my first two short films, that was the experience that I, that I had because I, you know, as a director I'm like this got my vision, I'm good at this thing. And, and we, we hit a point where I was just so exhausted and I working on the scene and I like, I just told the editor because he was asking for notes because I'd been right over his shoulder, micromanaged and everything. And I was like, you know, Just this scene. Just like, here's. Like, here's the shot list. Like, do your thing. And I come back the next day, and it was so much better than what I had in my mind that I was like, I have been making. I just need to get out of the editor's way and let him do his thing, because it was so far better. And that was the first time I realized, like, oh, yeah, he's an editor for a reason, because he sees things differently, and it made my work look way better.
[00:08:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:04] Speaker A: So, yeah, that is definitely.
There's definitely some. Some parallels to there, for sure.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: And then you just keep. You just keep people out of the weeds. You know, like artists, they'll be walking down a road with, like, corn stalks on either side, and they're like, ooh, look, a bird down the cornstalks. And they'll go this way, and they'll go. You're like, here's the road. And they'll go, this. You're like, here's the road.
[00:08:23] Speaker A: You just.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: You. That's what leadership was to me on a film set. And then I. I sold scripts and I got, you know, great jobs. I worked with amazing producers at the studio level, and, I mean, Bob Orsi and Walter Parks and. And just great people.
Anton Fuqua, I worked with great people. I had so much fun.
And then, you know, it's a longer story, but, like, Netflix and the death of home video and streamers and 2019. Writers had to fire their agents in 2020.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: Covid.
[00:08:59] Speaker B: And then the Writers Guild so strike in 23. And I just started going, you know what? The movie business is going through some serious upheavals. And I did it. I did it for 25 years. I directed indie films. I wrote studio films. I had studio films made.
[00:09:13] Speaker A: You had a full career.
[00:09:14] Speaker B: A full career. And there were a lot of young people trying to claw their way in. And I was like, my identity as a creative artist had been more than fulfilled, and I wanted to do something else with the second half of my life. And so I looked at the skills that I had, and I said, well, there's not a lot of companies out there who are going to hire me to teach them filmmaking, but there's a lot of companies out there who will hire me to teach them the lessons I learned about leadership while filmmaking. And I started to see that what I did as a film director has now applied to CEOs in financial services companies and plumbing companies and clothing design companies and medical service companies. And, like, I. I've. I know 2000 CEOs around the country and, and they all are trying to achieve the same thing, which is to figure out how to get out of their own way and get out of the way of their people who they pay a lot of money to because they're really talented and just help talented people do their jobs better. And, and, and then, and it's working.
[00:10:23] Speaker A: I love it. That's fantastic. You know, when.
So I have a lot of people that reach out to me on LinkedIn. And then I say, people, usually business owners, are C suite guys that have been thinking about writing a book, and they've been thinking about it for years because it seems like it's a big, you know, overwhelming project and a lot of work. And one of the things I hear all the time is I'm not a writer, right? And, and I, and, and, and the reason I'm giving that context is like, my response to that is, I'm like, that's great, because you don't need to be a writer. Amazon doesn't have a bestselling writer category, but they do have a best selling author category. And when you're an author, you're more like a director of a film.
You help the outlining, you get the rough draft done, and then you give it to other people that are going to do the editing and the CGI and the polishing for you. And when you're done now, you know, it's the same thing. You've got a team of people that you're working with to get the book done. So I love that. So what are maybe, let's say start with three maybe core leadership principles that you discovered as a producer and a director that now you apply into the corporate space.
[00:11:24] Speaker B: Well, the first one, I'm just going to dovetail off what you just said. I would say to somebody who says, I'm not a writer, I'd say, you don't have to be a writer, you just have to be a storyteller.
All CEOs are storytellers. That's their job. To stand up in front of the team and say, this is my vision of where we're going. You tell a story to stand up in front of the board of directors and say, this is my vision of where we're going to stand up in front of the shareholders, to stand up in front of your customers, your clients. It's why we see Ryan Reynolds doing Mint Mobile commercials, because we tell stories to people. It's the story that engages them. If you're already a person who is in a position of leadership where you're telling a story you're already writing. The only thing is just to get the story that comes out of your mouth onto paper. And these days there's AI tools and recorders and fathom and note takers and so many ways where you don't have to sit at the computer and look at a blank page and type. You just look at your computer screen like it's another person and tell them your story. And that gets your first draft out, and then you send that to an editor. It's not. It's not. You don't have to be Truman Capote figuring out how to put sentences together. You just have to tell your story.
[00:12:39] Speaker A: It's so interesting you say that and you'll appreciate this story.
So I had a couple of books written. My first book took me about two years to write. The second one took me a little over a little under two years. But I had a publisher, and it was miserable because it kept setting arbitrary deadlines. And, you know, nothing is more miserable to a writer than someone else giving them a deadline.
But I was working with John and Crane when Sally got the deal to write her memoirs. And I remember being in the office, walking by her, her office, and, like, she's in there and she's dancing around and she's laughing hysterically, and I'm like, poking my head in there. I'm like, hey, Sally, what's going on? I'm working on my book, Travis. And I was so confused because my first two books had been such a miserable experience of, like, self doubt and loathing and taking forever.
And my brain's just like, I. When I worked on my book, like, I wasn't dancing around. There was no laughing in my office when I was working on my book. And so I started talking to Sally about, well, so tell me what you're doing with your book. And so she started telling me how she was doing it. And it occurred to me that Sally approached writing a book like an actress, not like a writer.
And part of that was she was getting up and basically turning on a recorder and going, let me just act out that memory that I have.
[00:13:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:57] Speaker A: And then that's what went to the editor and her book. When people read it, they're like, this is the most entertaining stories ever. And I like, my brain went, wait a minute.
What I've been told about what it means to be a writer to do a book.
No one ever told me there was another way to do this. And so I used Sally's Model. And I went home in my next book. I finished my draft in three weeks.
[00:14:19] Speaker B: By just acting, talking.
[00:14:20] Speaker A: Yep. And now that's the process that I use with people, as I use that process.
[00:14:24] Speaker B: That's how famous people have written their memoirs forever. Like, do you think Winston Churchill sat down in a typewriter and typed 800.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: Pages by two fingers at a time?
[00:14:32] Speaker B: Can you imagine with cigar, you know, smoke going down on it? He stood up in a room with. With four people taking dictation. Well, when we were talking that, you know, going into Germany, we did, you started telling the story and they went, and then they typed it up and they gave him the pages and he went and he gave him the pages back. That's how people have been writing forever. We don't have to all be Dash Hammett with a manual typewriter and a bottle of scotch, you know, pulling our. What's left of our hair out to make the perfect prose. You just, you tell stories, and any way you can get those stories onto paper, then they become a book. So that's. That's number one.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: Number one storytelling.
[00:15:11] Speaker B: People. Just be a storyteller in your leadership. Because I, I have a thing that I say to people when I go on my, my, my day trainings. I just did one yesterday and Omaha, Nebraska, I said, leaders are in the future business. One of my coaches, Scott Cody, gave me that line. Leaders in the future business, no matter what you sell, whether it's product or service, you are selling the future to somebody. You are going to somebody and saying, your future will be better. With my product and service, you can't sell them to fix their past. Their past is done. And if they order, buy, it's not going to happen in the right now, in the present. They want your product or your service because you are going to say to them that you believe they will have a better, more successful, more fulfilling future. In whatever arena you're addressing, you're selling the future always. And you're doing the same thing with your employees and your clients and your customers and the board of directors who has no power. They just want to hear the CEO say, everything's going to be great, and, you know, go believe him. And if the stock price reflects it, successful, you're always selling the future, which means you're always telling a story about what is to come. So leaders are in the. In the future business. That's our job.
And so I say to my clients, what is going to stop you from achieving the future that you say you want to achieve?
And almost Always the first thing that people rattle off are tangible, visible, what I call external obstacles. They'll say, well, the board of directors or the stock price or the law will change, or the competition or the market or my team. And they'll point at all this stuff and they'll say, all this stuff is what I foresee as potentially stopping me. And I come back and I say, but that stuff's never going away. I mean, this particular team problem might go away, but another team problem's gonna come. This particular guy on the board of directors might go away, but somebody else on the board of directors is gonna come, another law is gonna change, another politician's gonna get elected. There's gonna be another medical outbreak or snowstorm or train derailment. There's always going to be something in the outside world coming at you, trying to stop you. And if that's true for everybody in life, no matter what you're trying to achieve, all always, we really can't say that it's the external things that get in our way because they're always there.
What really gets in our way is how you face those external things, what your internal belief system is about that external thing, and about yourself and what you can bring to the table in, in, in meeting head on and moving into or around or through or over or dissolving that external thing.
Leadership isn't about eliminating problems because they never go away.
Leadership is about changing how you individually and the others who you're leading view those problems and tackle those problems. So when you have a CEO who just wants to say, we're going to do this and we're going to do this and we're going to do this and we're going to do this. But their belief system is, but it's terrible and it's overwhelming and it's crazy. And that shows up through their body and their words to their employees. And they're not doing the this in an effective way.
My work is really based in having people identify how they're viewing themselves and how they're viewing their problem and how that lens is affecting the actions that they're taking. And if those actions aren't effective, instead of just throwing a bunch of new action at it, which doesn't work, that's why people get frustrated. They throw this action, throw that action, throw this action that, and then they go, nothing works. And then they give up and they get resigned, they get frustrated and I come and I go. It's not about the action, it's about what you're telling Yourself about yourself and the action. And when that guides your actions, the chances of success increase exponentially.
[00:19:15] Speaker A: I mean, yes, on the business, but like, I'm just thinking about, like, how deeply this shows up in Hollywood as well. Right. I think Matthew Perry is probably the most tragic example of the inner voice that just, you know, even in his biography, he just talked it like he just hated himself. You know, was one of the richest, most famous people in the world, but his internal belief was like, I'm a fraud and everyone's going to find me out. Yeah. Which it was just fascinating to me that you could reach that level of success and still.
Still have that. Right. And so.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: And yet it's so very, very common.
[00:19:48] Speaker A: And to your point, right. It doesn't matter how successful or how rich or how famous you get.
Everyone has problems and those problems are never going away.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: So this is why I gave my title to you before we started. But I'm going to say it now again for the purpose. So the program I have is called the Fast Way. FAST is an acronym, stands for feelings, action, Speech and Thought. I'm very proud I had it trademarked. My first trademark. I've got 50 copy.
[00:20:11] Speaker A: Congratulations.
[00:20:12] Speaker B: Thank you. 50 copyrights and scripts and books and everything over the years. But my first trademark, that was great. So it's called the Fast Way. Defining your feelings, actions, speech and thought to express yourself for ultimate success. Defining means you get to choose. You get to say, this is how I choose to think and feel about myself and about where I fit in the world and about what the world is and my role in the world and how I apply it. And through defining on the inside your thoughts and feelings about yourself and your role in the world, you get to choose how to express that inner self to the outer world through what you say and what you do. And most people don't do that. Most people let the events of their lives create emotion in them. If things are working, they're happy. If things aren't working, they're unhappy. And as the events of their lives create emotion in them, that emotion comes out in words and actions that are not intentional. And it's steering them down paths that are not constructive.
[00:21:12] Speaker A: But not even that. A lot of the times, it's like this bad thing happened when I was 14.
Well, how old are you now? I'm 54.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: And you're still blaming it. Exactly. You're still reacting. So when you start becoming aware of and intentional about how you think and feel, and through that awareness and intentionality and how you think and feel, become aware of and intentional about how you talk and the actions that you take.
The end part is defining and expressing yourself for ultimate success.
I define ultimate success as joy and fulfillment in all areas of your life. And people tend to only point at money and career. When you say somebody's successful, it's because Matt Perry had television shows and made tons of money. But Matt Perry wasn't ultimately successful because he was unhappy in himself, in his relationships, and they suffered. And friends loved him, but he didn't let them love him, and he couldn't love them back. And he wasn't successful in his health because he was taking drugs. Ultimate success is you are joyful and fulfilled in your career, in your finances, but also in your love, relationship or relationships, in your relationships with your parents and your children, in your relationship to yourself, to God. If you're spiritual, your health, your body, your lifestyle, your home, your travel, when all of it is joyful and fulfilled, that is ultimate success.
And so what I do with my clients is I say, okay, great, you're making money, but are you happy?
Well, I'm happy with work. Okay, but are you happy?
Well, no. Well, this is suffering a little bit. And this is suffering a little bit. Great. So how much more money do you need to make for your marriage to be working?
And there's no amount of money that's going to make their marriage work. Their marriage is not working because they're not putting effort into their marriage the way they're putting into work. How much more money do you need to wake to. To lose 100 pounds and be healthy and get your cholesterol down? No amount of money, no amount of money is going to have them lose weight. All that's going to start with changing their belief system about themself and their relationship to whatever area of life they're in that's not working for them and creating a belief system that's more effective in solving the problems that they have.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: So I love that. And I'm gonna. Again, I'm gonna do another movie analogy. You're gonna get this. But for people who are not in Hollywood, I think they sometimes have a hard time accepting that this is the way it is. This is probably the. The lesson I learned after I had transitioned out of Hollywood into marketing, but I had moved from LA to Las Vegas. And it's around that concept of.
And I'm gonna say this is a very American sort of mindset of I'll be happy when. Right.
And so, and, and. And you see this, like, I'm going to use this for actors.
You go to Hollywood and you're trying to make it and the first thing you want to, like, I just go get on set, get on set, get on set. You get there as an extra and you start showing up a little bit as an extra and you're like, oh, but the extras with the SAG card make the more money. So if I can get there and then you get your SAG card and you're like, oh my God. Guys that do commercials, you work two commercials a year, you make 110,000. Like, if I could just do commercial. And then they get the commercial and they do, you know, a couple of, you know, three or four years of making a hundred thousand a year working two days to do commercials. And like, that's that TV show. I'm as good as those guys on the TV show. I need to be a day player. Let me get a tape. And then they're day player. And then they get to the co star and they're like, well, I'm as talent as the.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: Yeah, but now they're making a lot less money than they were on those two commercials.
[00:24:50] Speaker A: And then like, and now I'm gonna, I want to be the star. And eventually maybe they'll get to be a point where they're a star. And this is when it really drove home to me. It was the, it was the ninth season of Big Bang Theory.
I forget who the main actor was, but he was. They, you know, everybody, I think it was everybody on the show was getting him 2 million an episode. So. 2 million a week?
[00:25:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:10] Speaker A: And the main show, the main star was one of the talk shows and they were talking to him about, oh my God, you set this record. And 2 million a week, episode, whatever. And I would never forget it. He's like, yeah, it's great, but God, I really just want to be doing movies and I can't get into the movies. And I'm like, oh my God, this guy's making 45 million per year.
[00:25:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:32] Speaker A: And he's still like, there's. I'll be happy when.
[00:25:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:37] Speaker A: And the funny thing is, is you look at all these guys trying to be something they're not. And they look at the movie stars, you know, and I'm not.
This could be taken out of context, so I want to make sure I understand. This is not what I'm saying, but the argument could be made. A lot of the top tier A list actors that get paid 20, 30 million a movie, they pretty much are just playing the heightened version of themselves.
And I thought about that going, so here's everybody fighting, trying to be an actor to be something else. And the guys that are making the most amount of money are the ones that are 100% the most authentically them.
So anyway, that was a long tangent to say even in Hollywood you got guys making 50 million a year going, I'll be happy when.
And so let's talk about. But I want to talk about that.
[00:26:23] Speaker B: Because I fully support ambition. Look, we get, we get a hundred years on this merry go round if we're lucky, right? And there's nothing wrong with wanting to grab the brass ring, like, take the biggest bite out of life that you can. If your company's doing a million, you talk to people who are stuck at a million and you want to make 10, go make 10. If you've got a 8% market share and you want a 30% market share, go get a 30% market share. If you've got a home in Beverly Hills and you want a vacation house in Aspen and another one in Cape Cod, go do it. I fully believe in taking the biggest bite out of life possible with the caveat of unless you're doing it because you think that acquisition will bring you happiness and fulfillment. If you are chasing tangible success in order to make yourself feel successful, you are setting yourself up for failure. Because you will never be happy with the success that comes. You will always be chasing the next level of success in order to feel successful. The only way to feel successful is to choose to feel successful at whatever level of success you are at and give yourself gratitude and experience the joy and celebrate the win of being where you are. And then saying from that place of I feel successful, I want to go take a bigger bite. And maybe you'll get that bigger bite and you'll go, that was cool. And maybe you won't get that bigger bite. But if you're chasing success in order to feel successful and you fail, the sense of personal destruction is huge because you're looking for the success to give yourself validation, which means if you don't get to point the success, you feel invalidated. And, and that's where you see Matt Perry go into drugs. Because the success would never make him feel full, which means whenever it didn't come, he felt empty, or even if it did come, he felt empty and was looking to fill it in, in, in chemical ways. When you say, I am a full, worthy, successful person and through that feeling I am going to go after tangible rewards.
If you don't get it it doesn't matter because you're still you going after the next one. And when you do get it, you really feel the joy of it because you know that you created it out of your sense of creation, not out of your chasing validation.
[00:28:59] Speaker A: You know, that's, that's really interesting point. Right. And you said something earlier with, with regards to Matt Perry is that he had a lot of people around him who loved him, but he wouldn't let them love him because he didn't love himself. Yeah. And he kept thinking, well, when I love myself, then I'll let me look. And then I didn't work. Right. I think Jim Carrey said it best in the. Was it probably the late 90s, early 2000s? His quote where he said, I wish everyone could get rich and famous and have everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that's not the answer.
And you think like that was his journey, Right. When he was young, he was homeless and he was like, I'm going to get all the money and the fame and I'm going to show everybody. Right. And then he got there and was like, oh, wait, I'm still like, there's still a part of me that like, is broken.
And I thought it was very evolved for him to get to that point of realizing like, oh, okay. So my belief and part of it is, you know, a lot of this, like, I'll be happy when is. I think that's a big part of American culture. I think a lot of us are conditioned around that from a very young age. So how do we break out of that to get to the point where if I'm only making 100,000 a year, even though I want to be making a million, that I'm just as happy at a million or at a hundred thousand as I am when I make a million.
[00:30:08] Speaker B: So again, we go back to belief systems.
You've heard of the financial thermostat? I think you mentioned that word. Yeah, we have thermostats around time and energy.
I'm good expending this much time and energy, but when something comes in that makes me need to expend more time and energy, I will subconsciously, like not do it to stay where I am. I'm good. Go talk to anybody who's had a series of five month relationships and they go, I just can't get past a five month relationship. Yeah, because your thermostat is set at a five month relationship, which means in three and a half months you're going to start tanking that relationship because past five months, you're outside of your comfort zone.
Comfort zones are just belief systems. They're just stories that we've been telling ourselves forever about what we can do. And then we use the evidence that we produce as validation of the truth of the belief system. So if you've made $100,000 a year for 20 years, it's really easy to go, I'm not capable of making 20 more than $100,000 a year. That's not true. It's just what you've set your, your, your belief system at. And a lot of it comes back to self worth and value. Not always. There are a lot of people who have a very high self worth and still can't break out of, call it $250,000 a year, but there's still going to be some other belief system in there that's causing them to develop patterns that maintain that stasis. I had a client who asked me to give you examples of clients. So I have a client. I'll use his name, George. We've become very close friends and I've interviewed him, so I have no problem saying his name. He runs a health insurance brokerage here in Southern California and he had a business partner for a lot of years and it wasn't going well. And it took a lot of years to buy the business partner out and cost a lot of money to buy the business partner out. So he had a lot of years of struggle to try and maintain and keep the business going and growing to get under the weight of having to make the investment to buy the business partner out. And like 15 years down the line he goes, I finally paid myself a decent salary. And I'm like, really?
So what'd you finally pay yourself? He says, $800,000. I'm like, that's amazing. You paid yourself $800,000. It's like, that's awesome. And then I said, why? Why did you hire me? Because you're making $800,000 a year. A lot of people hire me making 150 and they want to learn how to make $800,000 a year. And his answer was, I'm not enjoying it.
I live in the same two bedroom apartment I moved into 15 years ago. I'm driving the same truck I bought 10 years ago. I'm not dating.
I, I could go into this office and make $800,000 a year for the rest of my life and be really wealthy, but I feel like I'm going to be really miserable the whole time. I need to figure out why? I'm not enjoying it. And the conversation we had was around success and the definition of success. And I was like, well, you can afford a house, why don't you go buy a house?
And he was like, I don't think I really deserve a house yet.
I'm like, well, why don't you think I deserve a house yet? And he goes, well, I don't think I'm successful enough yet to have a house. I'm like, okay, well how successful do you need to be to make a house? Do you need $2 million, you need $5 million? Like, what's your level of success to, to be successful enough to get a house? And he goes, I don't know, I don't think I have one.
And this is something that limits a lot of people, whether it's in love, dating, relationships, the relationships with their kids, the car they drive, the house to live in, the clothes they wear, how they treat themselves, the vacations they go on. They have some vague sense of what finally deserving the thing that you want is, but because it's undefined, you can never reach it.
So what he and I worked on was, what's your definition of success?
And, and when he began to define himself as a success, his belief system around deserving the things that he wanted changed. And within three months after our, and I'm not kidding you, 10 one hour sessions, I mean, changing your belief system changes the results of your life very quickly. Within three months he had a girlfriend who I'm going to his wedding in, in two months from now. This is over. This is over two years. Two years. So he had a girlfriend, two years later they're getting married. He bought a house in Huntington beach and remodeled it and has his dream house and he sold his company for seven figures.
[00:34:52] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:34:52] Speaker B: And it, and but he, that none of that would have happened if he kept going with, I don't deserve it. It all changed with, yeah, I am a success and I deserve to have the things that I want. And then he got the things that he wanted.
Because if you're going after the things that you want, feeling like you don't deserve them, or you can't put the time into them, or you can't put the energy into them, or you can't sustain them, or they're going to be taken away, or you're afraid of what people will think of you when you get them on and on and on and on, you're going to talk yourself out of getting them.
[00:35:24] Speaker A: Wow.
So how did you discover your fast Process. What was the evolution of that?
[00:35:31] Speaker B: So, like a lot of people, I did a lot of research into coaching. Like, I mean, I felt pretty good in the, in the, in the coaching of it coming out of film directing. But what does this look like? And how do you market yourself? And like, what.
And so I read, started reading books. I started watching Russell Brunson videos. I don't use clickfunnels because I found a. Sorry, Russell, better one. I'm gonna plug them called Funnel Cures. Go to Funnel Cures. Don't use clickfunnels.
But. But I love his videos and I love his marketing material and he uses storytelling and Epiphany Bridges and all that stuff. And that was all great. And I found Alex Hormazi and everybody was talking about framework, framework, framework. Like, unless you're Tony Robbins or Dean Graziosa or Brendon Bouchard or Brian Brown and you're celebrity enough that you can sell your coaching based on your celebrity, there's nothing about the material to distinguish you from anybody else. We're all teaching the same thing, which is how to change your belief system and create a new one to be different. You have to have a framework that tells somebody, this is how I'm going to do it. Because personal development is personal development. People are buying your model of personal development, and every model works to everybody differently, let's say. I have a question.
[00:36:50] Speaker A: So, no, I was going to say, it's like, it's funny because even Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi, they both have frameworks inside of their system. So, Right.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: You got to give somebody an anchor. You can't just say, here's the external. The. The eternal belief system of self development.
[00:37:06] Speaker A: Right.
[00:37:07] Speaker B: You have to kind of put it into a narrow.
[00:37:09] Speaker A: And.
[00:37:09] Speaker B: And so like, women are from Venus, men are from Mars is a framework, and people who are looking for relationship health help might gravitate to that one. And the five Love languages is a framework. They're both teaching the same thing. They're both teaching relationship health, but they're doing it through different frameworks. And some people are going to gravitate towards one framework and some people are going to gravitate towards another. So I'm getting all this information on frameworks, and I mean, it's like the great movie ideas. It sounds like they came up with it in a second, but it takes a year to come up with the thing that seems. I was banging my head on tables for months, and I love acronyms, and I was playing with all sorts of acronyms. And I was playing with sentences and all of sorts, this stuff.
And then one day I was.
I just kind of. I remember I was sitting in a. In a Starbucks on Venice Avenue in. In Venice Nice.
[00:38:04] Speaker A: And I.
[00:38:05] Speaker B: And I asked myself, what am I really trying to say? What is all of this trying to say? And I'm literally talking out loud to myself. I talk to myself in coffee shops. I'm like, what I'm really trying to say is that if you. People get frustrated when they do a lot of action and it doesn't change anything. And they feel like what they're isn't changing anything. But. But why is what they're doing not changing anything? And then that old adage popped into my head. Wherever you go, where the. There you are. You know that one?
[00:38:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:33] Speaker B: People kind of laugh because it sounds like a Kurt Vonnegut sillyism, like, well, of course you're. Wherever you go. I'm like, no, but that's not what it means. What it means is your personality traits, your emotions, your belief systems, your thoughts, your ideas, wherever you go, all of that comes with you.
And just because you change your location, doesn't you have to change you.
[00:38:55] Speaker A: You?
[00:38:56] Speaker B: And I'm like, so if what they're doing isn't working, what's causing what they're doing? Well, they're thinking about things and they're feeling about things. So they have feelings and they're doing things and they're talking.
And then I just started playing around with words. And then I started playing around with words. I went feelings and actions and talking and thoughts. Oh, wait, speech. Oh, my God. And the word fast popped up in front of me and I was like, that's it. This is the fast way. This is the fastest way to change your life by changing how you think and feel and speak and act. And when you change how you think and feel, and that leads to new ways of speaking, new ways of acting. You are on super drive down a new path that will lead you to a new future. And then the fast way popped. And then all.
[00:39:45] Speaker A: All of my coaching all fell into place.
[00:39:47] Speaker B: Fell into that.
[00:39:48] Speaker A: Well, you know, it's really interesting because even if you're familiar with, you know, Katie Byron and the work, right? What is her. That's all about her whole. All the work is rewriting your story.
And what happens when you rewrite your story? You're rewriting your beliefs. I gotta be honest, Katie Byron and I have to do the work or I come to Ken Goldie and I just do the fast way. Like I want the fast way.
[00:40:14] Speaker B: Thank you.
Because I do the work. But when you say the work, people don't know what it means. When I say you can change how you think, feel, speak and act and that will help you create ultimate success, people go, oh, I want to learn more. And then inside of that I've developed a system that, that, that applies it. I mean I'm, I'm, I'm going to say I've now had, I mean, I can't even count. I've had dozens of CEO clients who run anything from 10 to $500 million businesses. I mean people who make a lot more money than me and have a lot more responsibility than me are still coming to me saying, show me how this fast way works. And when I do it in 10 weeks with somebody like their whole way of being changes and the results that come out of their lives are extraordinary and delivering what the name promises fast. I've had 35 year old middle managers stuck in middle management get promoted to directors of divisions in 10 weeks. I've had people who, I'm not kidding, you literally were working so much that they hadn't had a conversation with their spouse in months.
Going on vacation with their spouse and having a great time before the end of the program. I had one client that, who came to me and said, everything's great except I've always wanted to record music. I've been a cover band guy for. He's a CEO of a company, he plays guitar at church. I met my wife being up on stage playing guitar at church and she fell in love with me. But I've never, I'm like terrified to record.
Like terrified. Like I freeze at the thought of it. In 10 weeks he was recording songs and serenading his wife and it re sparked his marriage. I had a client who family business. His dad passed away and he was thrust into the role of running the business and his dad created the business. So he always saw his dad as like the guy you're working with. Joel Olsteen, the business.
[00:42:14] Speaker A: Right.
[00:42:14] Speaker B: He always saw the guys who created the business, but he didn't see himself as the guy who could run the business because he grew up in the business but he didn't create the product.
And he's like, I got all these people relying on me and I don't see myself as, as the, as, as the guy. 10 weeks I'm the guy and then boom, everything falling. It, it, it works because when, when you dig into letting go of the identity that you've been holding on to so hard in your life to try and protect yourself and say, there are pieces of me that are great and producing positive results and I like those, but they're not working in another area. And as long as you hold on to that sense of being and say, I'm going to make this part of me work everywhere and it doesn't, you're just going to get frustrated and angry with yourself and feel unsatisfied. But when you take authority to say, I'm a fiction, Ken Goldie everything I can describe about myself, and the same for you and everybody, whether it's Matt Perry or Denzel Washington, heads of companies, governments, it doesn't matter. We write our own identities based on how we interpret our lives. But then we forget that and we think that our identities are absolute and we want to protect them and hold onto them and say, it's just me, and that's just the way I am. But it's not. It's just the you that you created, which means you have the right authority and God given ability to create any you that you want. And when you can create a new you in every area of your life and say, this you, me works here, that's awesome. And this me works here, that's awesome. I. They're all you. It's just being more empowered around who you want to be to create the success you want to create in every area of your life. And when you take that authority, you can create ultimate success in all areas of your life without waiting for those areas of your life to deliver to you the tangible things you think you need to feel successful.
[00:44:14] Speaker A: So isn't it interesting how much the belief is like, so what pops to mind is, is just arnold Schwarzenegger, right?
[00:44:20] Speaker B: 100.
[00:44:21] Speaker A: Most people would have said, small town, no way, I'll be a bodybuilder. And he's like, I'm gonna not only be bodybuilder, I'm gonna be a number one bodybuilder. Because by being a number one bodybuilder, I can become an actor. So everybody said, you can't be a bodybuilder. Then he did it. Can't be an actor because a weird name and accent got that. And then like, I'm gonna be governor. And he just. And most people would have been like, oh no, you got to be the mayor and then city council, and I got a senate and then I got to do it. And then I can be. And he's like, I don't, why don't I just go there, right? Because his belief system was I just.
[00:44:50] Speaker B: Want that Arnold Schwarzenegger in work and business lives the fast way.
I will say this, I've never met him, I respect him greatly. But just looking at a human being as a character, we can also say that he wasn't living the fast way in his personal life because we found out that, yeah, of course, bear and a child and like, so there was some belief system about himself and love and partnership and relationship and sex and sexuality that the Arnold Schwarzenegger that was working so well in business and acting and bodybuilding and government wasn't working in his marriage. And I would have come along and I said, what are you thinking about yourself when it comes to your relationship and what feelings are those producing and how is that causing you to act in your marriage in a way that's contributing to your own dissatisfaction and how can you change that? And again, with great respect, and I love just looking at the public story of a public.
[00:45:44] Speaker A: This is, I can say, but this is what's great about it, right? Because we can see this in action where again, the western culture is like, oh, but he was this and this and this and you're going. And Right. There's always. This is the beautiful thing about personal development work, from my perspective, is that you never arrive.
There's always just a better version that you can work to. Absolutely.
[00:46:07] Speaker B: And so not the destination.
[00:46:09] Speaker A: So if somebody's listening to this and they want to get involved in the fast way, like how do they find you? How do they find your work?
[00:46:16] Speaker B: Yeah. So the websites live the fastway.com and one of the reasons I wanted to come on today, I'm really excited because I've built my business over the last few years providing services to corporations and CEOs. Mainly because when you get into coaching, you got to go to the people who can pay you for coaching. Right. So.
[00:46:33] Speaker A: Right.
[00:46:34] Speaker B: Companies can pay 30, 50, $100,000 for their team to go through coaching. So CEOs can pay 7, 10, $15,000 for one to one coaching. The average person I meet out there isn't in that position.
And I realized. So both. One, I can't reach everybody I want to reach at that financial level. And two, I can't reach everybody I want to reach by providing one to one or small cohort coaching to everybody. I want to have a massive impact on the world with this material. And the only way I could do that was to build some scalable model of what I do.
So I've created a video course and hybrid. It's like a Hybrid video and live coaching course of the Fast Way. The it, the videos, I mean it.
I'm a filmmaker, so I think they came out great. It's me on camera delivering all of the material that I delivered to my one to one clients personally, but delivering to you over the videos, There's I think 20 something modules and each module has seven or eight videos. The videos are short, they're five, seven minutes long. You don't have to sit down and watch 20 hours of a video course. Oh my God. You watch five minutes and every video, almost every video comes with a worksheet where you, you, you take in the material and then you go do it and then you come back to the next video and it says, how did that work for you? And you actually do the Fast Way. I read a lot of books. We've talked about a lot of books today. Whether it's Tony or Dean or Stephen Covey or Dan Collins, I read a lot of books. And this is a common experience I have. I take in the information as I'm reading and I'm like, this is great. These people are all brilliant. I love what they have to say. And I get to the end of the book and I turn the last page and I go, but how do you do it? Like, what do I do now that you told me all this information and so rarely do they tell you how to do it. I intentionally created the Fast Way as a method. When you watch the video and you do the worksheet, you are engaging in the method. And the promise I have is that when you watch the videos and do the worksheets, that the same transformation that my one to one clients get with me, you get going through the process when you do the process. And then to add to that, I have a once a month group coaching call. So you get the videos and then once a month you get online with other people. It's a larger scale format and sometimes it's me, oftentimes it's other coaches on those calls. But instead of that coach being on that call, delivering the material the way I do with one to one client, where everybody has to be at the same pace because you're watching the videos, the calls are more about Q and A and successes and you hear other people's questions and they share their successes and, and they ask their questions and you hear their answers and it becomes a conversation, a community conversation about the Fast Way. Which means you don't need me on there teaching it every time because you learned it in the video, which means Anybody at any stage in the videos can be on the call at the same time. And if you've just started, there's somebody on there who's eight months in telling you how it's working. And if they're eight months in and so all that's there and it's super, super, super, super affordable. It's a hundred dollars a month. You get the videos, you get the once a month online coaching. I just finished the Fast Way book, so that's going to be in there too.
[00:49:54] Speaker A: Just by the time this airs, it might be ready to go.
[00:49:57] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. And then other courses, I create other courses. So it's something that I'm making available to everyone.
Anyone can afford it.
And believe me, the investment will pay off a hundredfold when you start creating the you in the world that isn't relying on external factors to bring you success, but that you feel authoritative in your own success. And all that'
[email protected] the fast way.
[00:50:22] Speaker A: I love it. Ken, this has been an amazing conversation.
Thank you so much. It's great to reminisce about Hollywood stuff but also talk about what are the barriers that are keeping all of us personally from reaching the success. And I think not even success. Right. I think nowadays it's interesting when you think about why does people want to be success. It almost always comes down to then I'll be happy, right? And then I will. Right? You're just teaching like, well, why don't we just get the happiness first and then everything else just will be there anyway. So I love it. This has been a fantastic conversation. Thanks so much for taking time out of your day.
[00:50:57] Speaker B: It's really been my pleasure. I wish you the best with your book. I'm so pleased to be a part of it and more collaboration to come.
