IAM1482 – Founder Helps CEO’s Accelerate their Performance both Personally and Professionally

Wylie McGraw is the founder of Radical Performance Acceleration and for well over a decade now he’s been behind the scenes doing life-altering work with powerful CEOs, Entrepreneurs, Leaders, and Public Figures accelerating their performance both personally and professionally.

• CEO Story: Wylie's family has been engaged in the athletic field. Where pressure and perfectionism are constantly present. Wylie pulled away and found himself seeking a radical challenging environment to be in. He got excited with the airborne, military, etc. that really challenges your full potential and self-mastery of your being. These experiences and discoveries led him to build his own company helping top executives.
• Business Service: Optimizing the performance of an individual in any aspect of their life. Looking for areas of their lives that have been ignored.
• Secret Sauce: Integration. Go deeper into their lives to see where the difficulty came from.
• CEO Hack: Constant state of self-reflection. Try not to lean on mindset heavily, because the mindset is not the actual driving force towards success, it is a tool that we use.
• CEO Nugget: Be in an environment that you chose and that challenges you.
• CEO Defined: Position of leadership and influence. Massive responsibility for those around you.

Website: wyliemcgraw.com
LinkedIn: wyliemcgraw

Twitter: WylieMcGraw

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5eB02vV_S78ryDCra7BnZw

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Transcription

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00:22 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:49 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Wiley McGraw of Wiley McGraw dot com. Wiley, it's great to have you on the show.

00:59 – Wylie McGraw

Hey, Gresh, thanks for having me on, brother. I'm looking forward to this.

01:01 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, I'm super excited to have you on as well. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Wiley so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's working on. And Wiley is the founder of Radical Performance Acceleration. And for well over a decade, Now he's been behind the scenes doing life-altering work with powerful CEOs, entrepreneurs, leaders, and public figures, accelerating their performance both professionally and personally. Wiley. Great to have you on the show again, my friend. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:27 – Wylie McGraw

Absolutely. Looking forward to speaking to all the CEOs out there brother.

01:32 – Gresham Harkless

Yes well, let's make it happen, and let's jump right into it. So to kind of kick everything off I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit here a little bit more on how you got started with a call your CEO story.

01:41 – Wylie McGraw

Oh, my CEO story wow I could take you through so much but you know what for me it's like I grew up in an athletic household and sports where it was our religion and everything that you know we were, you know, the oldest of 3 boys, but you know, being the 1 with the talent in baseball my father focused on that wanted to make me perfect that realm and as I got older and started to explore just my own, you know, growth, I found that the pressures of being an athlete from the outside were not conducive to me being the best and what it is that I want to achieve in life.

So I found myself pulling away from that hyper-focused perfectionism that my father would place on me being a pitcher, despite the fact that I had the talent, despite the fact that I could have been on the path and trajectory to be in the pros, which is where he wanted me to go, you know, being a former semi-pro ballplayer, I found myself seeking out more radical, challenging environments to be in. And that's when I started to pull away and I found that the world of bull riding is this really exciting place.

I rolled bulls for half a decade with a lot of pros and just got turned on by the extreme environments that were out of my control that shook me up inside, rattled me from within, forced me to be present, focused, intuitive, emotional, et cetera, all at once, despite the fact of serious injury or death that could come. That then turned me on to the idea that these were the environments that could ignite a fire within me, within my own type of form of leadership for myself in my life and I sought out even more challenging environments, became a combat infantryman with the 101st Airborne Division, joined the US military, got excited about that, and did 3 tours overseas.

And it was in the throes of war where I really discovered this unbelievable skill and innate gift that I had to accelerate performance with my team, expose blind spots, really put people in the right positions that actually created this more radical evolution of who they were so that everything that we focused on as a team was just exponential. It was unbelievable how our performance was so just profoundly in sync. And I took that skill set, I took that leadership development aspect and I went out into the world and I chased self-mastery. I realized that in order for me to be the best version of myself and do good things out in the world, I needed to make sure that I was in an optimal place in my own personal leadership and performance.

And then I built radical performance acceleration around all of those life experiences, all of the insane and intense moments that I broke through in my evolution as a man. And I wanted to take that skill and take it out into the world to do the same for leaders, powerful people because I realized that these are the people who have the biggest impact and influence on the masses. They're the ones that actually infect or uplift depending on how well they live their lives. And I've been doing that for the better part of almost 14 years now. Gresh, It's just been unbelievable.

04:31 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. That sounds absolutely awesome. I love that bull riding aspect because I almost think, and I'm sure you probably have heard this and probably speak a lot to this, is that it's somewhat comparable to a lot of the things that we're kind of going through now where it forces you to kind of be aware of the things that are going on. And I imagine like, you know, the sports experience that you talked about, the bull riding, just all those things you went through. I imagine it probably helps you out tremendously with your clients to be able to help them to, you know, be able to focus when things are sometimes chaotic, especially for leaders and they have to be able to kind of drill down on what's actually happening and move the needle forward.

05:07 – Wylie McGraw

Absolutely. And what I realized too is, again, just so your audience can hear this as well, is like, my work, I'm not a coach. I don't do typical coaching protocols. I'm not into the systematic ideas of strategies. And despite the fact they all have their place, in human performance, looking at human beings requires so much more than just outside in strategies to solve problems. And integrating into the lives of the people that I've worked with from Hollywood to Wall Street, professional sports, you know, even with certain types of political campaigns, et cetera, it really required me to get into the lives of each person I worked with, truly integrated within so that I can resolve their problems from the inside out.

And that's where I found that my special sauce is really what's missing out in the world today is leaders, public figures, celebrities, it doesn't matter what their titles are, They don't have the right resources that know how to be in it with them, in the trenches with them, that actually exposing what's really harboring the stress within them and hindering their performance. Ultimately, what happens is we leave people limited, we leave leaders stuck, and they're constantly on this quest for more grinding to try to figure out what's next, instead of just living their life from a place of optimized performance personally, and professionally, where the relationships are thriving, their health is optimal, their focus is clear, they're in the midst of chaos, their ability to make decisions is even sounder than it has before.

The way in which the results they create from those decisions only uplift those around them. That's the key that I found that had been missing. That is the flaw that I discovered on my own self-mastery path in the personal development space, which is why the work I do, is not a program or process, it's truly integration into someone's life and truly holistically, radically taking them to the complete next level through that, it like bull riding, that real-world challenge out of their control and exposes every ounce of who they really are in the most vulnerable states so I can get the best out of them.

And for CEOs that are listening to this understanding of when they want to hire any kind of advisor resource, et cetera, you need the right outside force that does not show up trying to look at your problems as the problems themselves. Sometimes the difficulties that people face, especially leadership, people at the top, like CEOs, the difficulties they're experiencing don't reside within the problems themselves, which is why you need these resources that can integrate at least to some degree into your life to kind of really see where is that difficulty actually being birthed from.

Because the problem you're experiencing may in fact just be a byproduct of what's really going on within you personally. There might be relationship troubles, there might be things in your health, there might be internal turmoil, or I like to call them demons that you have not battled head-on, that you need to look at first because that is what's causing these external experiences as we call problems. And most of these people like to solve them from their own education, their own coaching school strategies, et cetera, instead of understanding what is this individual still battling that I need to go after first so that we can experience the actual right resolution or solution for those problems.

08:18 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely, which is why I truly appreciate the work that you do, because just as you said, you were able to treat and serve and work with yourself, and it is allowing you that opportunity to make that impact in so many different ways. I wanted to just make sure that we touched on everything as far as how you work with clients and how you serve them. And then I wanted to switch gears a little bit and get more into what I call the CEO hack, which is the thing that you feel makes you more effective and efficient. But is there anything additional that you can kind of touch on that we didn't mention on how you work with your clients?

08:49 – Wylie McGraw

No, I think we kind of really covered it, Gresh. It's, the work is so uniquely different. This is the biggest thing that I've experienced working with and being around billionaires, multimillionaires, these public figures, athletes, et cetera, are They have approached life and success on the back of the idea that, again, this is a diametric that I wanna emphasize. Money and notoriety mean you've succeeded. And we've got to look at life itself. And can you go to bed at night saying that your soul is at ease? Are you at peace? Do you have real freedom in your life? Are you experiencing these healthy relationships, meaningful health, clear-minded focus, etc?

So that whatever you do is only exponentially grown instead of the dysfunction that might come along with it. And what we have in the work that I do is all about looking at where these people of power and influence have basically ignored every area of their life so they can accomplish what they set out to accomplish, but they're miserable, they're burned out, they're at the wits ends, their relationships are suffering, their health, but behind the curtain, they shut it out to the world and on the surface everybody thinks, wow, I want to do what they've done.

And I tell people, to stop trying to copy and emulate the money and notoriety metric because that does not define success anymore. And that's why the work is so important to go after these leaders so they can actually live what they say they're all about and other people can feel and connect to that. And then they get motivated to do the same.

10:07 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And again, it kind of speaks to, you know, going to the actual route and a lot of times how you define success and what you're striving for. If you don't really look at that differently, redefine that, then you're gonna continue to do those activities that are going to put you in that same kind of frame of reference and same kind of perspective. So I absolutely appreciate that. So what would you consider to be what I talked about in the CEO hack? What things do you feel make you more effective and efficient?

10:31 – Wylie McGraw

CEO hack. Well, you know what? A constant state of, I would say, self-reflection. Of course, and I have my business partner. She's constantly making sure that I'm always staying on top of my game because there's so much going on, juggling, going on when you run a business, et cetera, and working with different types of personalities constantly as I have. But really at the end of the day, there's this constant state of self-reflection, being fully aware of how my energy is impacting my environment, being completely clear on when I experience flow around me, then I'm in a good place. When things start to feel a little off around me, I go right back to who I am, and what's going on in that moment.

And I want CEOs to hear that as well as everything outside of us is depicted based on where we're at personally. And if we give ourselves that moment to step back, and self-reflect on why things are starting to fall apart in this specific situation, you might be surprised what we can actually discover, just little shifts in your own energy. The other thing is, to try not to lean too heavily on mindset only because mindset is not the actual driving force to our success. It's a tool that we use, but our capacity is what actually drives our success. We all have different levels of it. You have leaders that can acknowledge where their capacity might be hitting the wall and then they do something radical to challenge that capacity, stretch it in that self-reflection, then you can actually breeze through problems much more efficiently and actually create more growth for your company and yourself.

12:01 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I appreciate you adding that in. And I almost wonder if that's part of like the CEO Nega, which is kind of like that word of wisdom, a piece of advice. And I usually say it's something you might tell your favorite client or your younger business self is that ability to really recognize. I think similarly to sports and, you know, everything we talked about that you had in your background where in order for you to grow that muscle, you can't continue to do the same thing over and over. You have to challenge it. You have to get outside of your comfort zone, so to speak. Do you feel like that's part of it?

12:28 – Wylie McGraw

I have absolutely. Well, baseball was great. I love the game. But again, I had again, I have family, the family pressures of stress within the family, and then coupled with the fact that being a star athlete, that's huge for a young kid. So when you grow up, and what I realized, I started to fracture mentally, I was like, this is not, not really, I don't think this is really what I actually wanted to do at the end of the day. I was brought into this world at a young age and started playing tee ball when I was 4. So for me, it was discovering at that moment in these experiences that I'm too hyper-focused on 1 side, I don't know who Wiley is.

Therefore, I'm going to start looking for, manifesting, if you will, environments that can then be something I chose, that can challenge me, and that's why bowl writing was such a radical shift from baseball. And in bowl writing, It forced me to meet a side of me I've been dying to meet. It forced me to connect to my intuition, and my emotions better. It forced me to be present with my thoughts, and be focused at the moment. And that's where I found that I became more of a man that I wanted to be versus what I was experiencing in baseball.

So yes, absolutely. If you're not in the right environments that challenge you in a way you've never been pushed, then you're never really gonna know what you're capable of. You've got to find not the proverbial, outside the proverbial comfort zone, but truly know what being outside a comfort zone actually feels like. And when you are scared, it rattles you from within, that's when you actually know you're outside of it. Not when it feels a little uncomfortable, you have some anxiety. You've got to be scared. It's got to shake you up. If it doesn't shock you, it will not change you.

14:00 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely appreciate that. So now I wanted to ask you a question, What is the de it means to be a CEO? We quote-unquote ceos on what being a CEO means we give someone who is in who's in a position of a massive responsibility.

14:10 – Wylie McGraw

That's why it is important ability to live their lives will influence their lead position of influence, someone who has massive responsibility for those around them. That's why it's important for their ability to live their life optimally, will influence their leadership performance, ultimately affecting the outcomes for the organization team, company, and whatever they lead and run. And for anybody that takes on a role as a CEO, that chief executive position means you're the helm. You're like George Washington standing on the boat crossing the Delaware. It's all about commanding yourself to influence and uplift those around you without coming across as the know-it-all boss that most people in those positions end up being. So that's what it means for me.

14:57 – Gresham Harkless

Truly appreciate that definition. Appreciate obviously your time and all the awesome things that you're doing. So what I wanted to do now was pass you the mic, so to speak, just see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best they can get a hold of you, find out about all the awesome things that you and your team are working on.

15:11 – Wylie McGraw

At this point, I can leave them with this, again, going back to that aspect of fear when it rises, that means you're in the right place. The only way you're going to know when you're outside, truly outside that proverbial comfort zone is if it scares the crap out of you and you got to step towards that embrace the suck and keep going despite this overwhelmingly human reaction to want to quit when it gets tough. Want to find alternative paths around it because it feels uncomfortable. Embrace the discomfort of those emotions that show up because there's power in that. And when you can utilize that as a fuel source, I'm telling you that sports car that is you is going to take off and it's going to do things that you didn't think you were capable of.

So that's what I want to leave your audience with. And then they can find me at wileymcgras.com forward slash vault. We've created a place for podcast listeners to go kind of consume more of my insights, philosophies, and papers I've written on peak performance on why people need to face their demons, et cetera, so they can start actually shifting in their mindset and growing their capacity right now.

16:05 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. To make it even easier, Wiley, we will have the links and information the show knows as well too so that everybody can follow up with you about all the awesome things that you're doing. And I hope you have a great rest of the day.

16:16 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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