The last 70 years of leadership research reveals one question that is the primary question in the leadership space, and it is what leaders should do to be effective. For Ryan Gottfredson, this question seems shortsighted because he believes that leadership is less about doing the right things and more about being somebody others want to follow. Ryan sits down with Elliot Begoun to talk about his focus on the specific success mindsets we need to have if we’re going to become better leaders who are more agile and more future-ready.

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Listen to the podcast here

Success Mindsets With Ryan Gottfredson

Let me introduce you to Ryan, let him share a little bit about how he started studying mindsets, why and what he’s learned along the way. Thanks for coming to board, Ryan.

I appreciate you having me on and I’m excited to connect with all the people here.

If you would give everyone a little bit of background of what you do, how you started this process and what piqued your interest initially to get you involved in this?

I’m a leadership professor at Cal State Fullerton. I’m also a leadership development consultant. I work with organizations to develop their leaders and their organizations to become more agile and future-ready. I’ve written a book called Success Mindsets. I’m fortunate to have that hit the Wall Street Journal and USA Today’s bestseller lists. It’s been fun riding the wave with that, which has been great, but the reason why I’ve come to focus on mindsets, it stems out when I did my PhD program at Indiana University. I did my dissertation on leadership, which allowed me to review the last 70 years of leadership research. What I found is that there’s one question primary question in the leadership space and it is, “What should leaders do to be effective?”

From this, we have a wide variety of good answers, but at the same time, that question seems shortsighted to me. I think that leadership is less about doing the right things and more about being a certain type of person, being somebody that others want to follow. For the last years, I’ve been focusing on, “How do we tap into this being element of leadership?” Everything’s led me to mindsets. Our mindsets, being the mental lenses that we wear that shape how we view the world. Part of my focus of what my book focuses on is what specific mindsets do we need to have if we want to become better leaders, more agile and future-ready?

As you’ve done that research, which is fascinating, and for those interested in Ryan’s website, there’s a fantastic mindset assessment. You can get a sense of where you are and where you fall. What were some of the a-has and takeaways as you have gone through this?

There are many a-has and takeaways in both on a professional level, but even more on a personal level. As I learned about these different mindsets, what I realized for myself is I didn’t have positive mindsets. I didn’t know that until I learned about mindsets, I was living life thinking how I see the world as the best way to see the world, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. Let me give you a quick example of this. I focus on four different sets and they range on a continuum from negative to positive. One of the sets of mindsets that I focus on is the difference between a prevention mindset and a promotion mindset. For most of my adult life, I had what is called the prevention mindset.

I’m primarily focused on avoiding problems and a couple of ways that this played out was I used to be deathly afraid of taking on debt. I graduated with my undergraduate degree and my PhD without taking on any debt. I saw this as a badge of honor. Another thing is that I never wanted to be an entrepreneur. I saw it as being way too risky. I’m going to stay away from that as a way to avoid problems. I thought that this was a great way to go about living life. As long as I don’t have any problems, then life is good. What I realized is I learned about these different mindsets. It’s much better to have a promotion mindset. Rather than seeking to avoid problems, I have a purpose that I’m focused on.

I have a destination that I’m shooting towards and it’s my job to make progress towards that. If that means that I need to start up my own business, that’s great. If that means I need to take on debt, I’m going to do it because that’s my destination. One of the things that I’ve had to do for myself is I’ve had to make a shift from the prevention mindset to the promotion mindset and in doing so, as I make that mental shift, then the idea of starting my own business seems fantastic. It’s my best course of action to fulfill the purpose that I have. That’s what led to me writing a book and ultimately us having this conversation. If I was stuck in a prevention mindset, this never would’ve come about.

One of the things I found interesting when I first had the opportunity to meet you and speak with you was this concept that mindsets are in flux, inflow and changing. Oftentimes, you approach situations with different mindsets. You can have a promotion mindset as it relates to professionally, but maybe a prevention mindset as it relates to you personally. Talk a little bit about that for a second, if you would.

One of the things that I find helpful is we can slice and dice who we are a thousand different ways. If we were to stack these on a range from malleable to stable, then what we’d recognize is that at this malleable and things like our moods, our emotions, our attitudes of the stable and these are things our intelligence, our personality, things that have a much stronger genetic component. Our mindsets fall right in the middle on this continuum. Are these things that we can change? They’re not the easiest things to change in the world, but once we do change them, they have a tendency to hang around a little bit.

We do carry around more of dominant mindsets. In fact, you’re wearing glasses. The glasses that you wear are shaping how you see the world. If you were to take your glasses off, it would change how you see the world. We carry around our own mental lenses, but there are certain circumstances in which we’re more open to seeing things in a different way. We can fluctuate across situations, but I do think that we carry around a dominant mindset and what most people don’t realize is our mindsets are truly foundational to everything that we do. They shape how we think, how we learn and how we behave, but we’re not necessarily conscious of the role that they’re playing in our lives. If we can become conscious of these mindsets, it’s only then can we go about in the business of shifting these mindsets to see the world and more effective way and thereby unlocking greater success for ourselves.

Readers, this is your show and an opportunity to address things that maybe we don’t talk a lot about, which is how you are approaching your entrepreneurial business and your focus from your specific mindset, but also the mindset you’re trying to instill and build within your organization. I’m going to continue on mine for a moment and ask you about the mindsets that you’ve identified as vital, the continuum that they sit on and how that works.

We talked a little bit about prevention, promotion and I’ll fill in a couple of gaps there. Another way that I like to think about it is when somebody is prevention-minded, they are much more comfort-focused. They are focus on avoiding problems. If we’re a ship captain, our focus is staying afloat. We don’t want our boat to sink. A promotion mindset is much more of this purpose focus. If we’re a ship captain, it’s not that we’re not concerned about sinking. We are, but we’re much more concerned about the destination that we’re headed towards and making progress towards that. When we’ve got this prevention mindset and a storm comes on the horizon, we’re inclined to run from that as a way to stay safe.

Somebody with a promotion mindset, when they see that storm, they’ll ask themselves, “Does that stand between me and my destination?” If the answer is, yes, they’ll prepare to take on the storm and they’ll be willing to brave the risks of waiting through the storm to get to their destination. Hopefully, that description is helpful because in my mind, what I see is ships going in completely different directions. Some of them are well-intended. One is, “I want to stay afloat and stay safe.” The other is, “I want to reach a destination.” Because of those mindsets, they’ll end up in completely different destinations.

We have a question. I’m going to jump in from Regina. “Thank you for sharing all this valuable info. I have one question. As entrepreneurs, we’re constantly being our best cheerleaders and building on resilience. You talk about shifting the mindset. Would you mind sharing 1 or 2 tools to help shift the mindset in the right direction during times of struggle?”

There are two ways to think about this. There are practices that we can engage in that can shift our mindsets globally. There are practices that we can engage in that could shift on all four of the different mindsets sets that I focus on. A couple of these global practices have been found by research is meditation and similar mindfulness practices because what that does is it loosens up some of these neuro connections in our brain that we habitually rely upon to process information. We need to break out of that habitual pattern. The second thing that is global is doing gratitude tasks or a gratitude list.

Every morning, the first thing that I do is write down three things that I’m grateful for. Gratitude has been found to have this global positive effect on our brain. In addition to that, what is important is where my mindset assessment can be helpful is because it allows us to dive into specific different mindsets and understand where we are along each of these continuums relative to about 11,000 other people who have taken my mindset assessment. By doing this, when we understand these different mindsets, it allows us to focus in on maybe one mindset that we may be struggling with. We can engage in specific interventions for that. We’ve talked a little bit about prevention to the promotion and a tool that I use and this is where my gratitude journal comes in is a tool called The Five-Minute Journal.

That was what helped me shift from a prevention mindset to a promotion mindset because every day, it invited me to ask the question, “What would make today great?” At the end of the day, “What are three amazing things that happened today and how could I have made today even better?” As I engage in that practice on a daily basis, I was exercising different neuro-connections with my brain that were more promotion oriented. As I did that, I continually made this shift. I started thinking, “How do I make today better than yesterday? How do I make this week better than last week? How do I make this month better than last month?” That’s one tool and journaling is a tool that we can use to address each of these specific mindsets. One thing that I did want to mention related to that question is to talk about resiliency.

The mindset that is at the heart of resiliency is a growth mindset. This is probably the most well-known set of mindsets, there’s a continuum between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. When we have a fixed mindset, we don’t believe that we can change our talents, abilities, and intelligence. See the world in terms of haves and have nots. If we fail at something, this means that we’re a have-not and because we don’t believe that we can improve our talents, abilities, intelligence, we believe that we can’t necessarily become a have, that we’re stuck in this have not zone. Those were the growth mindset, they believe they can change their talents, abilities, and intelligence. With that belief when they fail, they don’t label themselves as a have not because they may be a have not now, but that doesn’t preclude them from being a have in the future. If we’re wanting to become more resilient, that would be the mindset set that I would focus on and there are some specific things that we could do to develop more of that growth mindset.

I am a meditator. I know that’s vital for me. I candidly suck it at the gratitude side. I’m grateful for everything I’ve been given, but I don’t make it a practice. It’s something that I know personally I should do more of, especially in those moments of doubt and angst. I want to come back to each of the four mindsets specifically and go through it because I found it fascinating to learn about myself is where I fell on each of those continuums in terms of mindset. I wanted to explore each a bit. Let me jump into this next question, which is, “When you do have that growth mindset, is there a risk in being too far to that end of the spectrum where you don’t see the signals that say, ‘Slow down. You’re being unrealistic?’”

You could take anything positive to the extreme and it could become bad. That’s the case, but we have over 30 years of that suggests that the more growth-minded you are, the more positive the outcomes. There is a strong correlation between having a growth mindset and the outcomes that we’re looking to drive. I’ve been there and I’ll even give you an example here. Oftentimes, one of the reasons why we may be stuck in the negative mindset is because we have fear of something. My fear associated with having a prevention mindset was I have a fear of having problems.

When I’ve got a fear of having problems, my commitment is towards my own personal comfort and not on a bigger purpose and that’s what would having a promotion mindset be. Going back to fixed and growth mindsets. During my freshman year of college, I had a fixed mindset and I wanted to become a medical doctor. I moved away from home, signed up for the weeder chemistry class that all pre-med students need to take. At the end of that semester, I got a C. It was the worst grade I had ever received. My fixed mindset interpreted this as though I was a failure and I labeled myself as a have not. The way that I talked to myself was, “This didn’t come naturally to you. I guess you’re not cut out to be a doctor.”

Naturally, with that mindset, I changed my major. Now that I know the difference between a fixed mindset and how to have a growth mindset, had I had a growth mindset, a completely different and better alternative would have presented itself. Maybe after I got to see if I had a growth mindset, I wouldn’t have seen this as necessarily a failure. I would have seen this as feedback and the feedback would be, “Becoming a medical doctor is probably going to be more difficult than you anticipated, and you may want to reevaluate your study habits.” That would have been a much better way of talking to myself, rather than give up on my dream of becoming a medical doctor, I would have been able to persevere, push through and be resilient during a challenging time for myself. That’s not what happened to me.

That’s where I looked back and there are other instances, I look back and think, “My mindset sure did hang me up.” I’ve heard one of my friends I was talking to and he’s like, “I would call that the mindset tax.” My whole life, I’ve been paying this mindset tax. By learning about mindsets, it allows me to maybe pay less of that, that I could get to the destinations that I want to more quickly, more efficiently and in a more enjoyable way, than having to slog through some negativity associated with those negative mindsets.

I want to stop there and visit what I think are three cousins that come and visit our founders every single day that they deal with. You mentioned one and they’re all related and that’s fear, worry and doubt. For many founders who will be reading this, those are their three constant companions along this journey. Based on all of your research and all the things that you have done and worked with other entrepreneurs and successful leaders, how did they manage through that or use that?

Let’s use the COVID-19 situation for example. When we hit difficult times, our natural inclination is to be like a tortoise that pulls our head in our shells. It makes us want to self-protect, but that’s not the place to be. When we’ve got fear, doubt and worry, our natural inclination is to pull inward and to be focused on ourselves. Generally, the byproduct of this is four desires. A desire to look good, a desire to be right, a desire to avoid problems and a desire to get ahead. These are incredibly justifiable desires to have, because who wants to look bad, be wrong, have problems and get passed up? Nobody. When we have this fear, doubt and worry, we develop these desires and we’re stuck in what I call self-protection mode because that’s our focus.

If we’re focused on looking good, being right avoided problems, get ahead, our focus is on ourselves, but we’re going to end up making decisions that are best for us, but have negative effects on those around us, even our customers. Let me give you a quick example. Down the street from me, there are two pizza places. When COVID-19 first shutdown occurred, both of these pizza places scrambled a little bit, but one didn’t do much. They effectively dimmed their lights and they were open, but you didn’t hear about them. To me, they were in this self-protection mode. They were pulling their head into their shells and saying, “I’m going to hunker down and hope we survive.” The other pizza place right across the street, they became incredibly active in the community.

They were posting on all these community sites trying to be supportive. They rolled out an initiative where they said, “You can buy a make at home pizza kit so that you can have a positive experience with your family and we’ll even throw in a package of toilet paper.” This is when toilet paper was hard to come by. What they were doing during this time is rather than pulling their head into their shell, they’re intentionally keeping their neck out. That surely came at a short-term cost for them. What about the benefit to the community? What about the benefit to their customers? Not only in the short-term but also in the long-term because what they were doing is building relationships that are going to last forever.

If you now create a family memory as a result of this pizza place, you’re going to go back there. What needs to happen is when we got fear, doubt and worry, one, we need to recognize it, we need to push against it and we’ve got to be intentional about keeping our neck out. Knowing about mindsets helps us because at any given moment, we could we can test our decisions. We can ask ourselves, “Why am I doing it? Is it because I want to look good, be right, avoid problems and get ahead? Which are all associated with the negative mindsets or is it to learn and grow, to find the truth and think optimally, to reach goals and to lift others?” If we have these four desires on the negative mindset side for desires and the positive mindset side, that now becomes a filter that we could use to make some big decisions that are going to set us up either hopefully, if we make the shift to the positive mindsets, what it does is it sets us up for long-term success.

I want to come back to this because there are some inherent traits and I want to ask and I don’t want to do it yet. I’m going to couch that for now and come back. There’s another question that came in regarding risk and we talk a lot about risk as it relates to entrepreneurial-ism and founders. In my anecdotal research in being in this business for many years, what I’ve personally found is that entrepreneurs don’t necessarily see risk any differently, they see risk. They’re not any less afraid of it. They’re not any less aware, but they see it from the opposite side, where many people see the risk inaction founders see the risk in inaction, but curious as to the question here is where in the four mindsets would risk fall and what have you learned in your research about that component?

This would fall with the prevention and promotion continuum. Let me give you an example of this. I used to work for an organization. It’s a large HR consulting company from the early ‘90s up until about 2010. They were like the HR consulting company. They were cutting edge. I took a job with them for a year several years ago. I came in thinking, “This organization’s going to be cutting edge. I’m excited to work here.” I came in and it was the opposite. It was not cutting edge at all. What I had learned and what I observed is that this organization had found that if they have problems with their customers, their customers leave and we put together a lot of reports, a lot of data, spreadsheets, things like that for our customers.

If there was a decimal place at the wrong position in the slide, then what we had found is our customers start to lose trust in us. What ended up happening over time, and this is like an incremental creep is that we became more focused on avoiding problems and less focused on how do we meet our customer’s needs and how do we advance them? We would have to triple all of our spreadsheets. When it came to rolling out a new product, we had to make sure it was perfect before we rolled it out, which meant we were generally 3 to 4 years late to market. Those things flopped because we were late. It’s a natural thing for us to be afraid of risks and we could have that creep come in.

What we need to recognize is that we’ve got to be focused, not on avoiding problems, but on a destination. What is our destination? As I was talking about, if a storm comes on the horizon, and if that storm stands between me and that destination, as an entrepreneur, we don’t even have the option of running away from the storm because that’s moving away from our destination. Our only option is to go forward through the storm. For me, in terms of starting up my business, I said, “I want to have this impact. This is my destination. I’m going to get there. That means I’m going to start up a business. I’m going to be an entrepreneur. I’m going to invest a lot of capital into writing a book, and I have no clue how this is going to turn out.”

That’s a scary place to be. As we do those things, what I’ve learned for myself is when I had my prevention mindset, I saw the sea out there and that it was scary. There are some big waves out there. As I mustered up the courage to get out into that open sea, what I learned is there are storms and waves, they’re not as scary as I thought they would be. In fact, the up and down motion is part of what makes the journey fun. Now I feel like I’m on an adventure. It’s a matter of making these flips in terms of how we see it, “Do we see risk as being bad or do we see it as being necessary to get where we want to go?” The key is we don’t want to take unnecessary risks, we want to take the necessary risks to fulfill whatever purpose we have.

I have a few observations. First of all, incremental creep. Not to get political, but I know a few public figures that fit that, but I don’t want to digress. One thing that came up, as you were saying that was around your journey from being more of a prevention mindset to promotion mindset has been an entrepreneur helped you move more towards a promotion mindset, which came first, the chicken or the egg? The move to the promotion mindset or being forced as an entrepreneur to lean into that.

I think it can go both ways. For me, it was shifting my mindset first. The idea of taking on debt starting a business is not anything that would have ever occurred to me as even being an option with my prevention mindset. I shifted to a promotion mindset. Now, that becomes a viable option.

Which came first? Has been an entrepreneur aided you in accelerating that move towards a promotion mindset?

It has helped the more that I take steps into it. I love Brené Brown and I’m not much of a foul mouth, but she’s got a term it’s called FFT and it is Effing First Time and she’ll say it’s slightly different. What she says is we’ve got a muscle and that’s our FFT muscle, our effing first time. When we don’t exercise that for a while, it becomes hard to try new things, but if we exercise it and we become willing to try new things, we become more comfortable with trying new things in the future. For me, that’s what has happened. I first saw this shift from prevention to promotion, which led me to try some new things. To me, these were big steps, but then the more I’ve done that, the more open I am now to trying and exploring new things that I maybe wouldn’t have done previously. Hopefully, the FFT makes that connection there.

It’s interesting to me because that speaks to my journey as well. I definitely was more of a prevention mindset earlier in my life and was very much avoidant of doing anything that made me feel exposed, vulnerable, worried, and concern. Now, I look at it the opposite way. If I feel uncomfortable, I know I’m doing something right because it means I’m at the tip of my skis and that’s where the cool stuff happens. We’ve talked about 2 of the 4. We haven’t talked about closed and open. As it relates to being an entrepreneur, being a founder. They’re all four, but this is an important mindset to explore. Can we do that for a few minutes?

As you mentioned, the continuous between closed and open. When we have a closed mindset, we’re close to the ideas and suggestions of others. When we have an open mindset, we’re open to other’s ideas and suggestions. Let me ask you, what would lead somebody to be close to somebody else’s ideas and perspectives?

It comes back to the prevention mindset. First of all, feeling exposed and the need to be right. I think it’s fear and ego.

Generally, if I was to summarize that all into one thing, it’s founded in the idea that, “I believe that what I know is best.” You see the ego in there. When we believe that what we know is best, if we compare our minds to our bucket, our bucket is full. What happens if we pour something into a full bucket? It runs off the side, nothing gets absorbed. That’s the epitome of a closed mindset. An open mindset, on the other hand, we may know a lot, but we’re leaving some room in our bucket for the idea that we can be wrong and something happens. There’s a huge shift that happens. When we see our bucket as being full, when we think that what we know is best or when there is some room in our bucket and the shift is when we believe that what we know is best, our primary focus is on being right and being seen as right.

We want to be the one answering all the questions, we don’t want to take any ideas, we don’t want feedback, we don’t want new perspectives, but when we believe that we could be wrong, we’re no longer focused on being right. We’re focused on finding truth and thinking optimally. We’re much more inclined to ask questions, to seek feedback, to seek new perspectives, and we’ll see disagreement as an opportunity to learn. When it comes to entrepreneurship, I think any entrepreneur would say, “This is as much a personal journey as it is a business journey, because we’re learning as we go. We’re heading into places where we have never been before in many instances.”

In order for us to navigate those waters, it is helpful to take in the ideas and suggestions of others. In fact, we’re going to get to our destinations more quickly, the more readily we take in these ideas and suggestions of others. I’m not saying we need to take in everybody’s ideas and suggestions. To me, an analogy that is helpful is we can always have a stiff back. We can always take a stand and we can always say no to something, but the key to having an open mindset is that we have a soft front. We’re at least willing to take in the ideas and suggestions of others and take those ideas and suggestions seriously.

I’ve talked about this a lot with founders. I’ve written about it quite a bit. There are two elements of this that speak to me. One is this concept of I’m a big believer in having a strong opinion as a founder, as an entrepreneur, as a human being. That’s fine. Hold it loosely. Give yourself room to be wrong and welcome be. We talk a lot about founder traits and what is necessary to succeed in this business, but as an entrepreneur in general. I always think of it as a fulcrum where you’re balancing between rigidity and malleability.

You have to walk that tight rope in that balance. There are times where you’ll need to tip the scale towards malleability and there are times where you’ll need to tip that scale towards rigidity because if you’re pushing past what is the norms, if you’re doing things that are disruptive, sometimes you can be open to it but you may not always be able to react to it in your best interest. How does being open but discounting it as something that doesn’t work? How does that fit into that mindset?

The key is that analogy of having a stiff back, but a soft front. The key idea is if you were to give me some advice and some information, I’m doing something different and cutting edge and you’re saying something that’s putting a little water on my fire. One of the things you said is valuable. We can’t rigidly hold on and identify with our rightness or our beliefs. We’ve got to be able to explore them. If you’re giving me suggestions that I quickly shut you down and say, “No. You’re wrong,” or I take another approach of, “That’s interesting. Let me explore that with you a little bit further so I can make sure I understand.”

Depending on what approach I take, you’re going to have a very different experience because the difference is one, with this hard or a stiff front that I don’t let you penetrate. The other is I let you penetrate a little bit and in doing so, what I do is validate your ideas. Not that I have to run with them. When we validate other’s ideas, then they feel a value. If we shut down their ideas, they don’t feel a value. This is critical as an entrepreneur and particularly as a leader. This is foundational to what Google found to be the number one factor that drives their top-performing teams. That is psychological safety. The belief that one could speak up and take risks without fear of negative repercussions. The only way we could create an environment and a culture that is psychologically safe as if we ourselves have this open mindset.

I want to make sure that we cover other questions, but I also want to make sure we covered the inward outward mindset and talk about that. Let’s do that and then we’ll come back to questions if we can.

This one is all about how we see ourselves relative to others. When we have an inward mindset, we see ourselves as more important than others, therefore we’re inclined to see others as objects. When we have an outward mindset, we see others as being as important as ourselves and when that’s the case, we’re able to see them as people and to value them as such. A quick example is I don’t know about you up in Northern California, but here in Southern California, there’s generally a lot of traffic. What this means is it’s not uncommon for a car to be alongside me, put their blinker on and want to merge into my lane in front of me.

There are times where I have not let them into the lane, even though they had their blinker on. It’s not a big deal. It’s not the end of the world, but in reality, it’s a jerk thing to do. At that moment, what I’m saying is my position in this lane is more important for me than it is for you. We don’t let them in. How do we justify that? I don’t say, “I didn’t let that person in.” I say, “I didn’t let that car in.” We’re objectifying that individual at that moment. We’re going to be much more effective as a leader in terms of leading our own employees, but also in also connecting with our customers if we take this outward mindset where we see them as people and value them as such.

I’m going to switch gears a little bit. My question is this, I took your mindset assessment and I look at the four traits where I fall. I’ll out myself on any of them. I took it from a professional perspective. How I show up in the world in my professional setting, in what I do. I sat with it for a while and asked myself the question if I were to take it from a personal perspective as a husband, father, grandfather, that type of thing, would some of my answers be different? To me at least, different. I’ve been struggling to make peace of it, “Why would I have such more of a growth mindset, promotion mindset or an outward mindset in my professional life, which I definitely do?” I’m 6 plus on all 4, but yet, if I were to go back and do it as a husband, dad and friend, I think that on a few, I would score differently. I was curious as to what you think and what you see in that and is that something that many people face?

I don’t think you’re alone. It’s helpful for us to understand what exactly our mindsets are. We’ve described them as mental lenses, but in reality, what they are is neural connections in our brain that connect our three major brain regions, our reptilian brain, our mammalian brain and our human brain. What they do is they span across all three of these regions, which effectively makes them our circuit board for our brain. They become the primary way in which we process information. They’ve got three main jobs.

The first job of our mindsets is to filter in specific information. We send way more information to our brain than it can process. The second job is we’ve got to interpret that information. The third job is depending upon the information that we take in and how it’s interpreted, we use that to activate different elements about ourselves to navigate those situations. How we come to the mindsets that we have and how our circuit boards operate is largely based on two things. One is our life experience up until that point and two, our current culture in which we’re operating. In both your professional and your personal life, it seems clear that you’re bringing the same life experience.

One of the key differences in terms of why you may have different mindsets and different contexts is there is a different culture in each of those different contexts. When you step into a new culture, you revert back to certain modes of processing the world there. Oftentimes, whether it’s work or profession, if there’s a big difference, were negative for one and were positive for another, what that means is we need to shake things up in the place where it’s more negative. We need to get out of our routines, habits, scripts, tendencies because we developed and accustom way of approaching that part of our life.

It helps to get conscious about these mindsets because once we do then allow us to be intentional about it. I don’t know about you, but it is much easier for me to be outward minded towards my clients than it is towards my family. That’s not something that I’m proud of, but it’s part of the habit. I think I’d take my wife and my kids for granted sometimes and which at times may lead me to see them as objects, not like I’m rude or abusive by any means. When my kids knock on my door, I see them as somebody that’s bothering me from what I need to get done. What I see is, “I’m more important, my needs are more important right now than your needs.” This leads me to at times see them as objects and not connect with them the way that I need to. Partly, the cultures that we create and the habitual mental wiring that we fall back on within those cultures.

I lobbed it up to Jewish guilt on the side. I’m culturally raised that way. Here’s a question that was sent in from a friend of mine. The question is, “I spent all my time focused on trying to differentiate our brand, product or packaging. How should I be focused on differentiating my mindset so that I positioned myself to win?”

I mentioned I’ve had about 11,000 people take my mindset assessment. Of these 11,000, only about 5% are in the top core tile for all four of these sets of mindsets. The norm is for people to have multiple mindsets on the negative side. Not that it makes us a terrible person, part of our life experience is led us to believe that the mindsets that we currently have are the best mindsets to have. I think if we want to set ourselves apart, in terms of our mindsets is we develop a positive mindset. We literally have to do the work of rewiring our brain to see the world in a different way. If we can get there with all four of the sets of mindsets, then we’re surely going to operate in a much different way than typical because we’re seeing the world in a much different way than most people do.

Let’s talk a little bit about that. If that’s the case, if the objective of these founders that are working, blood, sweat, and tears every day. They’re trying to find, “What is that competitive advantage? When that next round of investment? How do I succeed in building an organizational culture as my business grows that’s going to propel me forward? How do I become nimble, resilient and all of those things?” Given those four and given the fact that you have ten minutes to espouse all of your wisdom and knowledge, other than encouraging everybody to read the book, what would some concrete takeaways, things that can be done as people reading this showing that they can undertake to begin to make that a competitive advantage for them?

I’m going to answer it in two ways. One is I’m a little bit more simple and to your point, I think my book has a bunch of resources. If you take my mindset assessment, you’re going to get a link to a whole host of resources to develop each of these different mindsets. I say, take the assessment, identify the one that you want to work on, dive into those resources and that will help. Another approach is I think that oftentimes what is limiting us in terms of our effectiveness as an entrepreneur, as a leader, is we’ve got fears and insecurities or mental blocks that are holding us back, that we don’t maybe realize that we have. We don’t realize why we have them. I’m going to share with you essentially four questions that I use with leaders to help them get at their blocks and get at the solution to their blocks.

I’ll give you these four questions and then people could hopefully run with them and do some thinking and some journaling on their own. The first question is, “What is a goal that you have?” This needs to be a goal that is something they are in control of. It’s not winning the lottery, but it’s also something that they’re passionate about. What this does is this will serve as the anchor for the other questions. Once we identify our goal, then the next question is, ask ourselves, what are we currently doing or not doing that is preventing us from reaching our goal?

To give you an example, my daughter wanted to learn how to ice skate. That was her goal. I took her to the ice-skating rink and she’d never been before. For the next 1.5 hours, she hugged the wall and shuffled around the outside of the rink. I couldn’t get her away from the wall. If I were to ask her what she was doing that was preventing her from reaching a goal, she would have said, “I’m hugging the wall.” If I asked her, “What are you not doing?” I’m not taking any risks. Most personal development and leadership development, coaches and programs essentially stop here. They say, “Stop doing what you’re doing and start doing what you’re not doing.” There’s a reason why we’re doing that in the first place. We’ve got to dig deeper. The third question becomes, “Why are you doing or not doing those things?”

Usually what pops up is fear. Immediately for my daughter, her fear is, “I’m afraid of falling and getting hurt.” If that’s her fears, what are the commitments that she has? She is then committed to safety. It’s this fear of getting hurt and this commitment of safety that is driving the behaviors that are preventing her from reaching your goal. As we get into that third question, why is it that we’re doing or not doing these things that are preventing us? Is usually, where people and the people that I coach and work with have a huge breakthrough because now they’re uncovering how they are self-sabotaging themselves. We bring up the problem there with that third question, the solution comes in the fourth question. That is, what mindset is driving these fears and commitments? In the case of my daughter, if she’s got a fear of falling and a commitment towards safety, then it seems clear that the mindset that is fueling that is a prevention mindset.

If I’m a leader and I go through this process, I see my prevention mindset is fueling these fears and commitments that are causing me to self-sabotage myself, that’s where I would say, “Focus there. Now you know exactly what you need to focus on.” You need to focus on shifting to a promotion mindset. As you make that shift, you’re going to develop much more healthy fears and commitments that will allow you to get through this personal block that you have. Hopefully, that’s an exercise that can help people awaken to themselves more and how they may be self-sabotaging the goals that they’re seeking.

Before we wrap up, anything that you’d want to make sure to share or cover that we have not as it relates to a virtual room and an audience of entrepreneurs of early-stage businesses?

I work with a wide variety of leaders. When I was presenting more live, I would up into the front of the room with leaders, and I would ask them, “Are you trying the best that you can?” Generally, I would get every hand in the audience and every hand would be up. I believe that all leaders are trying their best. At the same time, I’m aware of statistics associated with the follower’s perspective, such as 75% of employees say that their manager is the worst part of their job. Sixty percent of employees say that their direct manager damages their self-esteem.

While I know that most leaders and people are trying their best, it’s not uncommon for them to have negative effects on those around them. The reason why is because everybody has good intentions, but low awareness. What we’ve done in our conversation is we’ve been inviting people to deepen their self-awareness, shift their mindsets so that their actions can align more with their intentions, so that they can be more of that positive influence that they want to be in all aspects of the device so that they can be more of their ideal selves.

This is a question I’ve been dying to ask myself and you mentioned it. It was the perfect segue around awareness. You have all this awareness now. Awareness as to how you are interacting within your own mindsets, is that been both a blessing and a curse? There’s got to be times where you go, “Crap.”

I think my wife maybe likes it less because she’s like, “You’re always reading my mind.” I’m like, “No. I am an observer.” I would say I could see how it could be seen as somewhat of a curse. To me, it has been incredibly empowering because I look back on my life when I had some of these negative mindsets. I look back when I was entrenched in a much stronger inward mindset. I see some of the pain that I caused some of the people around me because, in those moments, I was putting myself first and then I wasn’t valuing them. I didn’t do anything egregious, but I know that I hurt some people’s feelings. Once I awoken to this difference between an inward mindset and an outward mindset, now I could do something about it.

I could develop a better premise on which to operate so that I could operate more effectively. I have tools that can help me. In any given moment, I can ask myself, “Am I seeing them as an object or a person? Am I being inward or outward?” A question that I’ve come to love is particularly when things aren’t going well, “Who am I being that their eyes are not shining?” As I have these questions, then at that moment, it allows me to be more mindful and to make a shift in terms of who I am bringing to that situation.

The quick question here, “Is there 1 of the 4 mindsets you think for entrepreneurs is the most important or are they all equal and need to be in balance?”

What I found is that they are all important. I’ve got some research to back that up. If I’m talking to an individual person, I will say the one that is most important is probably the one that is the most negative, because that’s probably wreaking the most havoc on where you’re trying to go. For you, that’s going to be the most important. I will say in a research study that I did while I found that they were all important, that inward to outward mindset had much stronger effects on a workplace climate than the others. There’s some indication that that might be the most important, but I think it depends on the individual. If you’ve got that down, then you may have other things that are wreaking havoc.

First of all, thank you very much for doing this. This is fascinating. How do people learn more about you, about what you’re doing? Take the mindset assessment and find your book?

The best place is my website. It’s RyanGottfredson.com. There you’ll find the mindset assessment. It’s free. It’s only twenty questions and you get a comprehensive report. If you go through my website to get the book, there’s a whole bunch of freebies associated with that. There are other tools to shift your mindset. I’ve got a digital mindset coach, an online course, and other things like that that you can check out.

When I first met Ryan before we had the conversation, he joined a mastermind group that I’m a part of and he gave us a fascinating chat. That’s why I reached out to him. I did take the mindset assessment, but not only did I find it fascinating, I appreciate all the resources that came with it. It’s been a lot of fun to dig into some of those resources and learn a bit more about me. I would recommend everybody take the time to do it. It does not take a lot of time and you’re going to find some things out about yourself. I challenged anyone, I’m a full kimono. If anyone wants to compare, talk and have a conversation around it, let me know. I’ll happily share how I stacked up. Thank you, Ryan, for being part of this, for jumping. I appreciate it.

It’s been great. Thank you for having me on. It means a lot that this has added value to your life. Thanks for letting me know.

Take care.

Important Links

• Ryan Gottfredson

• Success Mindsets

• The Five-Minute Journal

• RyanGottfredson.com

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