IAM2103 – Leadership Coach Helps Sales Leaders Achieve Pro Level Performance by Harnessing their Mental Toughness

In this episode, we have Matt Phillips, leadership coach and host of the Matt Phillips Podcast. He shares his experience as a professional baseball player and how it translates to helping sales leaders develop mental toughness.

Matt Phillips discusses his experience in a mastermind group with successful business owners, highlighting that everyone in the room, regardless of their level of success, faces challenges in running their business.

The conversation highlights on the importance of not waiting for perfection before launching new products or initiatives and the opportunity to build a team focused on a mission and being the voice of that mission with energy and passion.

Website: Matt Phillips Coaching
Website: High-Performance Leadership
LinkedIn: Matt Phillips

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Full Interview:

Transcription:

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Matt Phillips Teaser 00:00

The biggest takeaway every time is that everyone in the room is dealing with something when they're running a business. Every and it could be something personal. It could be something very tactical and business-related. And I think that's the power of, like, when you start listening to your podcast and getting tips and tricks from other people or sitting in a room with them in a mastermind, is you start to get this perspective that, hey, other people have gone through or are currently going through something. Probably pretty similar to what I've what I'm going through or what I might be going through soon. And then just to have that counsel and that wisdom and perspective, it just changes everything. It settles you down. It just makes at least me more calm.

Intro 00:44

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 01:11

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Matt Phillips. Matt, excited to have you on the show.

Matt Phillips 01:19

Oh, fired up to be here. Can't wait to dive into this chat we get to have. So, so excited. Thanks for having me.

Gresham Harkless 01:25

Yeah. I'm super excited as well too because Matt's done so many awesome things. And, of course, before we jump into that great conversation, I want to read a little bit more about Matt so you can hear about some of those awesome things. And as a leadership coach and host of the Matt Phillips Podcast, Matt Phillips helps sales leaders achieve pro level performance by developing and harnessing their mental toughness. Having worked with companies, including the Western Union, Marsh and Robert Half, Matt knows the status quo of promoting rockstar salespeople to sales leaders often leads the new leader with significant gaps in their own leadership philosophy, confidence, and even resilience.

By combining his background as a professional baseball player with his global experience in sales operation and accounting, Matt supports business leaders and teams as they break through the mental roadblocks that arise in their daily grind to help them realize their potential in their personal and professional lives. And I always, always, always appreciate having fellow podcasters on the show and makes more phenomenal episodes, so super excited to have Matt on. And he’s also a former baseball player in the Austria's Bundesliga, if I said that correctly.

Matt Phillips 02:29

That's good. That's good.

Gresham Harkless 02:30

And is Division-1 college baseball player as well too. And one of the things that really stuck with me is I read that he said peak performance requires a dominant inner game and how your mental plays such a big part in the success that you have. So, Matt, excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO Community?

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Matt Phillips 02:48

Let's roll.

Gresham Harkless 02:50

Let's get it started then. So I had a little bit resilience and inner game when I was trying to pronounce that German word, but what I wanted to do is rewind the clock, hear a little bit more about your story. We'll let you get started with all awesome work you're doing.

Matt Phillips 03:02

Yeah, absolutely. Kinda long story short, as you heard what you read is the mental side is super important, right? So I believe one of the components, if you're running your own business as a CEO, as a founder, as you continue to grow, develop, and go through these just different stages that we all experience as business leaders and business owners, the one thing I found that is the true differentiator is what we call mental toughness. It's the mindset piece. It's resiliency. It's what's going on in between your ears that literally, I believe, determines the level of success you achieve or not.

And that really comes from my athletic background. So I grew up in Colorado. Baseball was my main sport. Played lots of different sports growing up, but just baseball was the one I actually excelled at and had the opportunity to go play in college at Creighton University in Omaha. So shout out to the Omaha people listening. And then had a professional opportunity overseas that opened up for me. And as I look back at when you start studying athletes and watching them and start just asking questions of, like, why do certain people get to that whatever that level is where others don't? Of course, there's absolutely a physical component to this, right?

So some people just cannot hit a baseball. They cannot throw a baseball. That is physically, there's a giftedness that you are born with. But what I found in studying those and just having those opportunities was when you get to, like, the collegiate level, for example, the physical ability of most of the players is it's pretty similar. It's on par or at least it's close. And but you see some guys, and this is true of women's sports as well, just excel and say, why? And what I found is that it's everything up here, right? Am I confident in my ability as an athlete? Am I being consistent in how I train and take care of myself? Am I maintaining focus and not allowing distractions to derail me from being successful there? Do I have the emotional control that I need to handle the ups and downs that come with it? And as you look at those components as I got into business and my corporate career and then ultimately started this business, Matt Phillips Coaching, almost 12 years ago now.

I've seen the same thing in with CEOs. I've seen the same thing with founders of companies, the same thing of a sales leader. It doesn't matter, right? But even parents and things like that, it's everything going on in between your ears that determines the success you achieve, that the happiness that you have, that just you look at your life, you're not, man, I'm doing it. Things that energize me, that excite me, that just I I actually waking up every day and going to attack the day. And so it's just been this kind of evolution over time. I had a great corporate career, great corporate run. I've lived in Switzerland for three years and worked for great companies and all these things.

And, Gresh, long story short, the reason I started this business and the reason I imagine that your listeners got into their business and do what they do every day is it was for me, it was that mission, that kind of calling, if you will. And I was always questioning, is this really what I'm meant to do when I was in the corporate world? And there's nothing wrong with it. I loved it. But I knew there was something bigger, greater, grander for me personally. And that's when I decided to jump off and start this business and jump into the leadership space. And, boy, go over the last 12 years how it started versus where it's at now. I mean, like, oh oh, like, up down up down up down.

And luckily, like, upward trajectory of that. Thank goodness. But it's been just that higher calling of how do I help people get out of their own way? How do I help people optimize what's going on in their heads, to build that confidence, focus, that emotional control that we all need. And fortunate to do one-on-one coaching at workshops and online programs and all sorts of different ways we deliver, but with this just mission to build mentally tough leaders and CEOs around the world. That's the mission.

Gresham Harkless 06:48

Nice. I absolutely love that, and I appreciate you sharing your journey. But I think once you start to hear a little bit more about the behind the scenes on, like, how people haven't even reached success and achieved success, you start to realize that is part of the journey and goes hand in hand.

Matt Phillips 07:01

It totally is. Like, we I'm part of this mastermind group, and there's about thirty business owners in it. And we meet three times a year live in person. And it's really interesting sitting in that room because there's the people in the room are way more successful than me. If you depending how you look at, like, revenue, things like that, what you're measuring. But the biggest takeaway every time is that everyone in the room is dealing with something when they're running a business. Every and it could be something personal. It could be something very tactical and business related.

And I think that's the power of, like, when you start listening to your podcast and getting tips and tricks from other people or sitting in a room with them in a mastermind, you should start to get this perspective that hey, other people have gone through or are currently going through something. Probably pretty similar to what I've what I'm going through or what I might be going through soon. And then just to have that counsel and that wisdom and perspective, it just changes everything. It settles you down. It just makes, at least, me more calm. And I even we had our virtual mastermind two days ago. And I asked we have this other program we're doing actually for student athletes, and I had this one question that was popping in my head. And it was a fear, and it was something that was holding me back. And it was really around where at this point with the student athlete program, we're starting to go after sponsors, right, and say, hey, we need your help to help fund this for these high schools.

And I won't get don't wanna spend too much time talking about it, but this thought popped in my head. And the thought is really it was, like, do I have to have a certain number of coaches or student athletes involved in this thing before I go at make the ask? Right? It's almost like I phrase it on the call of, do I need to legitimize this thing further before I go ask the question? And we had this great discussion as a group where my thought was reasonable, but not really applicable to what I was doing. And so I just needed to say it and have this group tell me, like, in a very nice way, no. I don't think this is that should hold you back from going to do these things.

Gresham Harkless 09:14

Yeah. I appreciate you diving in a little bit more into that. I almost feel like that's maybe your CEO hack, the thing that have book or habit that makes you more effective and efficient is to be able to expend time there and be able to think through whatever questions that you might have. Is that your CEO hack?

Matt Phillips 09:28

It is. And I think it says CEOs because a lot of CEOs, like, we're controlling, right? We're type a personalities, and that's not a bad thing. It's a very good thing, actually. But to allow ourselves the freedom to think without any barriers of what the question should be. That's where we're really tapping into the creativity. And I should say, allowing our brain to show us where we need to go. And we have to let go of some of those, I don't know, just like standard questions that we think we should be asking and just say, hey, where are things at? And our brain will tell us exactly where we need to go. And then we write it and we put stuff down on paper. And the more time you can carve out I'm not talking hours a week. I'm talking, like, an hour a week to start or 30 minutes a week to start. Just starting to capture some of that stuff. Paper, whiteboard on your iPad somehow or a Vibe board. I don't care what it is, but get stuff down on paper and start that practice.

It's pretty incredible what opens up. I was also sharing earlier that this high performance leadership program I have, which is the online program, that was born out of a four hour whiteboard session with me, myself, and I. But I just want you to get in front of a whiteboard and start asking, what really do I wanna build on? What's next and what do they need. And literally, this whole brand new program, I walked out of there. I'm like, oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. And now we've launched it at, like, multiple companies, and it's extremely impactful, all these things, but it was because I created the space. That's the best CEO hack I can give, really.

Gresham Harkless 11:02

Yeah. I love that. So what would you consider to be a little bit more of what I call a CEO nugget? You might have already touched on this, but this could be like a word of wisdom or piece of advice, something you might tell your younger business self if you were to hop into a time machine or potentially your favorite client.

Matt Phillips 11:15

I think the biggest thing for me is sometimes we feel like the whole thing needs to be built and perfected before we launch certain things or we put it into practice. And what I've learned over the years is I'll talk like a product launch specifically. If I'm launching a new product, it's okay to beta it, to pilot it, to test it out. It doesn't have to be perfect and learn from the internal folks, learn from your customers to make it even better, but not being afraid to feel like it has to be perfect before launch. And I think the same thing applies internally is when I think about we talked a little bit before about being in the business or working in the business or working on the business. And I've struggled with that too of, okay, do I let go? When do I let go? And who do I let go to to? And can I trust them? And are they gonna do as good a work as me?

And these sorts of things, but not being afraid to, like, figure out, like, we I gotta have the perfect training program put in place to perfectly transition this to and perfectly documented so that person's most successful. But understanding that, yes, I'm gonna prepare for that person, but I'm also going to evolve with that person and figure out what works and what doesn't, but having that kind of pivoting mentality along the way. And at least for me, I've gotten stuck sometimes where in both those areas, I think it has to be perfect before doing it and instead of just doing it and then seeing from there.

 Gresham Harkless 12:39

Yeah. I love that nugget. And I almost wonder, this is probably part of your secret sauce, the thing that you set you apart makes you unique? I wonder having that background. I believe strongly that there's a parallel between business and sports especially, because I love sports and those things. But I almost wondered, like, related to that nugget especially, like, the first time that you played baseball, you probably didn't have all the things together, but you continue to work on those things.

You hear about all the athletes that continue to train on those things. It's like, why don't we do that same thing or have that same mentality when we're launching something new or testing something out and realizing that it's not having it all in place on day one. It's actually getting to day one hundred, one thousand, and continue to from there or pivot or change or realize, hey. Maybe this isn't my sport. Maybe let me try something. All those things are part of the journey in the process.

Matt Phillips 13:30

It really is. And I used to be so afraid to ask for help. And when I look back at my sports career, I was talking to my Alma mater's high school baseball team actually about this the other day. And I said, I used to view asking for help as a sign of weakness. And I think as we mature, we learn, obviously, different things. But it's still I still fight it to this day, to be honest. I still fight asking for help. And even though I the two days ago, that virtual mastermind, right? I was like, I need to ask this. Matt, what are you doing? I need to ask this in front of these really smart people, and they helped me tremendously.

Otherwise, I would have stood on it for another probably, four days until I asked someone. I was talking to these young athletes about, you have to we have to shift our perspective that asking for help is a sign of strength, not of weakness. And asking for help is about learning. It's about developing. It's about that different perspective of what we talked about. And you can accelerate your growth if you're willing to do that.

Gresham Harkless 14:27

Awesome. So I wanna ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And our goal is to have different quote unquote CEOs on the show. So, Matt, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Matt Phillips 14:37

It means that I have an opportunity to build a team focused on a mission and to be the orchestrator of that and make sure we're doing the right things as a team to make that happen. And it also means that I get to, along with my team, be the voice of the mission. And to be the one out there just with that energy and passion for what we're doing and explaining why we're doing it. And then being able to turn back and look who I have with me to help make this happen, right? They're not behind me, but, like, they're with me to make this happen. And to be able to orchestrate that or be the conductor of that and the conductor of almost, like, energy or electricity within it, that to me is the my favorite part and I think the most important thing for me of being a CEO. You're that energy creator.

Gresham Harkless 15:24

Yeah. I love that conductor, orchestrator. Matt, truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, so we can hear a little bit more on how people can get a hold of you, subscribe to your podcast, find out about all the awesome services that you're providing and everything you're doing from there.

Matt Phillips 15:41

As far as connecting with me, a couple different ways. One, head over to the Matt Phillips Podcast. You can search it up. Visit our website if you go to mattphillipscoaching.com. So you can go over to mattphillipscoaching.com/membership to check out more there. And last place, honestly, I'm a big LinkedIn guy, but head over and please connect with me. It's Matt Phillips 15, Matt Phillips 15, on LinkedIn. And, yeah, shoot me a connection request.

Gresham Harkless 16:05

I appreciate you so much, Matt. Obviously, we're gonna have the links and information in the show notes as well too so that everybody can reach out to you in LinkedIn, website, podcast, all the awesome things that you're doing. So thank you so much for doing that, my friend, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Matt Phillips 16:17

Thank you.

Outro 16:18

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by CBNation and Blue16 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 Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, and everywhere you listen to podcasts. Subscribe and leave us a five-star rating. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless, Jr. Thank you for listening.

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