Vince Poscente On Building Resiliency To Overcome Adversity And Succeed
The power to overcome adversity is in your hands. All it takes is faith to step in and grab the opportunities. Joining Chad Burmeister in today’s episode is Vince Poscente, an inductee into the USA and Canadian Speaker Halls of Fame, best-selling author, and Olympian. This episode shares how he went from recreational skier at 26 to vying for an Olympic medal in just four years. He opens up about the experience that changed the way he lived his life. Anything is possible, and you can do things that might even surprise you. Vince provides transformative advice and shares personal anecdotes that hopefully spark inspiration and fuels you to action. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to gain life-changing insight and start living a better story today.
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Vince Poscente On Building Resiliency To Overcome Adversity And Succeed
I'm with a cool person. He takes after where my heart is and that scheme. My son is the boarder and I'm the skier in the family. I want to introduce Vince the right way. We live in an age of speed, no doubt about it. Learning how to get past any overwhelm while thriving at the same time, as the expertise you will take away from our next speaker with insights from his bestselling books, The Age of Speed and The Ant and the Elephant.
You will hear about a man who went from recreational skier to the Olympics in four years. I can't even imagine rocketing to an incredible 135 miles per hour on skis in the Winter Games followed by many years of helping Fortune 500 companies to go Full Speed Ahead. You will get an invigorating and entertaining perspective on gliding through the demands we each face.
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Please welcome an inductee into the speaker Hall of Fame, Olympian, New York Times Bestselling author and Second Chair clarinet player in his high school band, Vince Poscente.
Overcome Adversity: When you have a defining moment, a moment of emotional intensity, those moments are always followed by a decision.
Thanks, Chad.
Thanks for being here.
Good to see you.
I know one other Olympic skier and he did the long jump here in Colorado. This was maybe several years ago. Tom is his name. I can't remember his last name. I could tell he was an Olympian when I met him just by the air that he walks into the room.
There is a certain collegial. I know what it took to get here. I know it took for you to get here. There's this interesting thing at the Athlete's Village that you get an experience, except in Tokyo, obviously. Who knows what that was like on cardboard beds?
What I love about your story is from recreational skier to Olympian. People who are sitting in the chair and going to Olympic Village is you and me. We are here talking. It can be anybody who puts their mind to it. I'm going to enjoy digging into this. I like to go back for our audience to get to know you. What they know is you have written a lot of books. You have gone fast on skis and you made it to the Olympics, and that's outstanding. Tell us about when you were younger at 5, 6, 7, your first memories as a kid. Have you always been a competitor? What was your passion then?
I was a curious kid, like anybody else but I remember in high school, a friend had passed away. Her name was Jill Kudryk. She was seventeen years old and it was a wake-up call. You may have experienced that with a friend, some tragedy or something. In our teenage years, we think we will live forever, and then we get this sense of mortality going to a funeral for a friend. I decided at that moment to do and try everything at least once because life might be shorter than expected. That sense of urgency kicked in about the age of sixteen. Since then, that fit in as much life as you possibly can. That's what I would attribute.
The loss of Jill Kudryk was part of the reason that I would get curious about trying new things. I tried luge actually for a little bit but quit and watch my buddies march in the opening ceremonies. When I was 26 years old, I chose the sport of speed skiing, and then four years later, I was vying for the gold medal in the Olympic Games. To your point, you can set your sights on something and maybe even surprise your own expectations.
My daughter had a friend at age fourteen that died and it was pretty devastating at that time. I think sharing your story would be interesting for her. What happens to us happens to us. What we do with that is what matters. You obviously said, “The ticker started. I’ve got to go experience life.” It accelerated your journey to go do that.
Let's explore that for a second because when you have a defining moment, a moment of emotional intensity, those defining moments are always followed by a decision. Repeatedly, I saw the opening ceremonies when I was fourteen years old on TV but now, is a moment of emotional intensity. I thought that would be the coolest thing, but then I remembered I played clarinet in the band. I can scan back over my life of defining moments where there was uncertainty and I stepped back. I didn't step in and engage. I was afraid or whatever, and then pay the price later on regret. One of my tenets in life is to have no regrets.
Overcome Adversity: When we find ourselves in a chaotic devastating situation, there’s no prescriptive model that we can follow.
There was a great story, Will Smith was thinking of going on a skydiving adventure. He talks about it in a three-minute YouTube clip and how he was scared and nervous. Finally, he's there. He jumped and it was exhilarating. It was awesome. I have sixteen meetings and I have another twelve. I'm going, “Am I built for today?” That lasts for about half a second. You are like, “You love this when you get involved in these conversations.”
Now that I'm in Living A Better Story, we have had 60 to 70 people on the blog. It's awesome but I wouldn't have known that it was awesome unless I click the go button. Tell me playing the clarinet and having the loss experience that you shared, how did that get to you to where you are? What did that propel you to what you are doing?
I call it Mathematics of Opportunity and it's very simple. You open a door and look for what other doors there are to open. Keep opening doors and then something will show up. I actually call them soul taps where you get a little tap on the shoulder, metaphorical tap of the shoulders like, “Pay attention to this.” Do we know what it means? I remember back when I was about fourteen years old, I watched the speech of a politician named Peter Lougheed. I'm from Canada. He spoke to 5,000 people, he captivated this audience and I thought, “That's it. I want to be a politician.”
For years, I knew that was my destiny. I’ve got a soul tap to pay attention, I opened the door, I started to give speeches at conferences and after the Olympics, I started to realize, “I don't want to be a politician. I want to be a speaker. I want to speak to rooms full of people, motivate them and inspire them.” I have taken this Olympic story, which was originally I thought, of course, if somebody is in front of a room, they are a politician. We get a little bit locked in. We’ve got those blinders and we think, “This is the way.” If we take the blinders off, sometimes an opportunity floats by and goes, “Wait a minute.”
That utilizes all my skillsets and it's like, “That one lets me travel.” I enjoy doing that aspect of the job. You open doors, open the next door and the next door after that. That's outstanding. A lot of people experience a challenge in life and I'm finding that there's a similar bounce-back evolution if you will. The first part of the question is, is there something tough for you in life? Obviously, you lost a friend at a young age. That's a big one. I'm sure there are other speed bumps along the way that feel like mountains at the time. What did you go through and what advice would you give to someone going through the devastation of their own?
That's the keyword devastation and I have had setbacks or loss of friends. When dad was my age, that's when he passed away. I look at those life experiences as setbacks but the devastation has a whole set of circumstances that result from that. I experienced it personally in 2008 when the financial crisis happened. You’ve got to back story this a little bit. I went from recreational skier to the Olympics in four years and I thought, “I've got this.” I will start parachuting. My parachute didn't open. It was a solo jump and it was my second jump.
One of those static lines, the main chute, didn't open. I had to go back into free fall, and then have the wherewithal to make the reserve chute come out, then scanning from the Olympics, being inducted into the Hall of Fame for Speakers with Zig Ziglar, Og Mandino and Jim Rohn, these icons. I'm starting to think, “I've got this down,” and then New York Times Bestselling list. It's like, “I can do anything,” and then 2008 hits and I could not figure out how to recover from that financial setback.
I had done a couple of maybe ego-driven initiatives that were at the same time that had a couple of commas in them. It was a very expensive lesson and it took me years to try and get out of this financial devastation. I compromise my family experiences. My wife and I stayed together. We just stuck it out but I realized that when we go through a massive setback like divorce, bankruptcy or pandemic, then we experience a version of being stuck that has us doubt ourselves and realized that we feel like, “Maybe I lost it.” The next book I wrote was called The Earthquake. It’s about personal earthquakes.
The opening line is, “There's no linear way out of chaos.” When we find ourselves in a chaotic devastating situation, there's no prescriptive model that we can follow. There's no step 1, step 2, step 3 or step 4. If there is, I could not find it and that was my sandbox. This is what I do for a living. I established something called The Solution Loop and effectively is, does this work? The persistence in unknowing, faith, being able to be curious, creative, and testing out things is critical to that journey, which is tough when you feel stuck, alone or it's hopeless.
That bug hit me in March 2019 so I know exactly what you are talking about. We are doing $200,000 a month, we went down to $20,000 and payroll was up at $100 or $150. It was chaotic. It was a month I was doing puzzles and hanging out with my wife more. There were positives of the setback like that but there are also negatives.
I met a guy named John Guydon who played for CU football. He's a Buff. I'm a CSU guy so I won't hold that against him. He gave me this phrase and it's called yabba-dabba-doo from the Flintstone. It’s, “Yeah but, it's 2008, you don't understand. I'm upside down $250,000.” It's all these, “Yeah buts,” and then it's, “Yeah but, yeah but do.” He has a whole audience go, “Yeah but. Yeah but.”
It's put one foot in front of the other, try again. It also helps to have some third-party people like yourself in their corner. I had about 10 or 12 people on my Board of Advisors that are like, “Do this and try this.” Before you know it, two months later, the best month ever, it was rebounded like you would not believe.
I wasn't that lucky. It took me years to establish because the self-doubt starts to insidious. I'm driving down the road, looking at the gas tank on empty, getting pounded by debt collectors and lawsuits. People are saying, “We want our money.” “There's no money.” The bankruptcy guy said, “You can't afford to go bankrupt.” However, that worked. In the drawer where the ashtray is where it is where quarters. I scooped out all those quarters, went into the gas station, and put down $7.25 in quarters to pay for my gas. Standing to my left were two moms. There were moms of my daughter's friends. They are the talky talk friends, the ones that talk to each other and everybody else, “Did you hear?”
It's not that I was even worried about that because by then, you get pounded. It's like, “I'm doing my best.” It's these low moments that it almost seems trivial to go, “Don't give up, keep trying.” It's like, “This is hard.” It can be hard but you brought it up. You are not alone. You reached out wisely to your Board of Advisors and you were able to bounce back. For some of us, it takes longer.
What advice would you give other than reaching out to colleagues? That always surprises me. If someone reached out to me and said, “I'm at the bottom and I need help.” I would be like, “When are we going to meet and what time? How many days in a row?” It doesn't matter. People will help but what else can they do if they are stuck after a personal earthquake?
There is a book coming out, The Earthquake. At the very beginning of the book, I talk about grasp the contradiction. The reason I bring that up is we have a conscious and subconscious mind. In a second of time, the conscious mind is using 2,000 neurons to communicate thoughts. In the same second, the subconscious mind is processing with 4 billion neurons.
The whole concept behind the activity of the conscious and subconscious mind is the exact same ratio between an ant and an elephant. If you can picture an ant on the back of an elephant making decisions on the direction, the ant says, “I want to go West.” What if the elephant is headed East? The ant thinks he's going West because he doesn't see the elephant. He sees a gray landscape.
If it's on the back of the elephant and you can end up East going, “How did I end up here?” I intended to be here and I ended up here financially, physically, in relationships or whatever this dysfunction is. It's different when you are on a path, let's say, to get to the Olympics to build a business or something because it's a very linear path to align your ant and elephant to go in the same direction. That's what a book I wrote in 2003, The Ant and the Elephant.
The Earthquake: Your Journey from Setback to Breakthrough
I realized that in this state of devastation that what got you here isn't necessarily going to get you there. Applying principles that I thought would work from the Olympics to get back out of this devastation wasn't working. That's a long way of saying grasp the contradiction is about the conscious intention of letting go of any history and what you think is the solution. The subconscious mind at the same time, and this is subconscious below consciousness. Forcing, asking or implying that the subconscious mind will let go of something needs to be grasped from an emotional standpoint that we need to let go of what we feel is the answer and allow a third solution to appear.
It's like two people in a relationship, the conscious and subconscious mind for that matter, driving a vehicle, holding the steering wheel, trying to say, “No.” Both have to let go of the steering wheel to have this vehicle called our body, our mind and our spirit to be able to be aligned and go in the same direction. That's not a linear notion.
That's not a simple concept to go, “I let go.” If you had a knife in your leg and I said to you, “Chad, don't focus on the knife. Focus on where you want to go.” You are going to go, “No, I’ve got a knife in my leg and all I can focus on is this knife.” That life experience of being able to grasp that contradiction of the consciousness, subconscious mind, trying to force something into play. Once that happens, then you can seek that alignment between the ant and the elephant.
The interesting thing, Robert White is a friend of our family. He now works with me on Living A Better Story. He's graduated 1.3 million people from Human Potential Movement stuff, mindset things. He talks about the third thing, which is similar to what you are talking about but in an organization and with couples. I'm thinking about the country nowadays and the world, with all the strife going on, left and right, this and that, and everything. It is almost like if you think of the world as consciousness, we as people have a consciousness but we are all part of this human world consciousness, and there's the ant and elephant, and that. What third thing is going to come along that's going to go, “I didn't think of that?” I feel like that's coming in a bigger sense.
We have a collective realization that we have to let go of our steering wheel. This whole concept of how bias is created like confirmation bias and repetition bias.
Recency bias means if I tell you something now about anything, you go, “I heard it from Chad,” and then someone else comes and goes, “This is what it is.” You are 75% more likely to believe whoever told you last.
Any kind of bias. The source of that bias is worth paying attention to because if there is a repetition bias to something that doesn't make sense or something that is, “Why did I believe that?” To have this ability to be able to let go of bias is an absolutely crucial step. In society, what we are trying to do is culture the word compromise. We will do a bit of my driving, we will do a bit of your driving, and then we will get there together. Somehow this word compromised isn't working. It is letting go of your bias. It is them, letting go of their bias and at the same time, it allows this alignment to occur for the first time. Fingers crossed, we can start to be the solution.
I think that's what's coming out of this. With Living A Better Story, if you asked me several years ago, “Would you ever start a nonprofit, have this blog to talk to amazing people and tell them to share their stories? I will be like, “What are you talking about? No,” but here I am. I have let go of the steering wheel. The last question, and which is one of my favorites, usually is about faith. We talked a little bit about it earlier. What role does faith play in your journey as you open up all these different doors and go through the solution wheel? Where's faith plays in that?
It is huge and I treat faith as not a religious faith but also faith is the concept of trust. In some ways, I feel that the subconscious mind is like a conduit to that greater purpose or the being. It's like comprehending the incomprehensible. I have a dog around here somewhere, and you and I know there's Math. We know 2 plus 2 is 4. Very simple Math concept. We said this to Cosmo, our dog. He would go, “What?” His awareness of something that is actually real is incomprehensible. For me personally, there's something that is so incomprehensible but there's faith that there is this synergy alignment with God.
If we play a role in life, it doesn't matter. The world defines as a certain amount of money, house and all of that stuff. Gary Vee talks about it he's like, “I would rather make $40,000 a year than make a lot of money and be happy making $40,000 a year.” Align your habits and your patterns to whatever it is you are happy at. It’s pretty neat.
I don't know if that answers the question but I certainly would be comical if I said, “I’ve got it.” It would be comical if Cosmo came up and said, “I get it. I get the Math thing.” It's like, “Really?”
Here's one thing I will leave you with. I talked to a gentleman who does home pastoring and he didn't start that way. He only has 3 to 8 people come every weekend. He was in prison several years ago in Kansas City. He said that he was on meth. He has 4 or 5 teeth and called it broke. He was like, “I could take a razor blade, go in the back and end it or I could hand it over and say, ‘This is above my pay grade. Help, I can't do it on my own.’ I made that decision.” From then on, it was like, “Now that you have made that decision.”
He was being told, “Now you’ve got to go amend this thing, go do this and that.” For years, he's like, “I figured it.” He did figure it out but it took being broken. It sounds like you’ve got to be pretty close to that level of the state in 2008 and beyond. It almost seems like people who are broken in a way that's more broken than you and I have ever experienced, have an easier way of going, “Let the universe take me on my journey and hand over the faith.”
It says you are in the moment. It's not past or future. It's, be happy now.
People want to get ahold of the events. You've got an amazing story to tell all of the books that you have written, The Ant and the Elephant, your story of becoming an Olympian and your transparency of the stuff that happens in the middle. That's the power of everything that you are doing. How can people get ahold of you if they want to invite you to talk at their event or any other way?
I am the easiest guy to find. There's this thing called the internet. Go for it. You will find Vince Poscente in one way or another, social media, my website, VincePoscente.com.
Vince Poscente, I appreciate you joining the show, telling us your story. Thank you so much for coming on.
You are welcome, Chad. Take care.
Everybody, we will catch you on the next episode. Thank you.
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About Vince Poscente
Vince Poscente is a powerfully engaging keynote speaker and author on the topic of peak performance, overcoming adversity, and sustaining resiliency in a competitive landscape. Within consulting and speaking, his clients include, FedEx, IBM, HP, Cisco, Hyatt Hotels, American Airlines, US Bank, Merrill Lynch, John Hancock, National Association of Realtors, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Enterprise Rent a Car, McDonalds, Century 21, Bell And Howell, Canon, Intel, Oracle and State Farm. He has lectured at MIT, SMU, Texas A&M and University of Texas. Prior to this he was the VP of Marketing at International Investment Properties after an award winning sales career.
Vince’s greatest strengths are in the areas of communication, focus and leadership. He thrives on challenges, particularly those that help clients overcome adversity and sustain resiliency. His most recent project involved a 29 day, virtual coaching intensive designed to help athletes, entrepreneurs and/or sales people clarify their vision, commit to that vision, execute a winning consistent strategy, perform with confidence and control peak performance with specific routines.
Of note, after his B.A. at University of Alberta (with a passion for sports marketing), Vince went onto being the Executive Director of the Alberta Luge Association and liaison with the host broadcaster for the 1988 Olympic Winter Games. Then he decided he wanted to be an Olympian. Vince went from recreational skier to the Olympics in four years. He became a five time Canadian record holder, ranked 10th in the world and into the Speed Skiing gold medal round of the Olympic Winter Games in Albertville, France. Vince placed 15th skiing at national record of 135 mph. After his sales and executive leadership experience, he went onto speaking, consulting and writing.
In his most recent career Vince has become a New York Times bestselling author (writing seven books to date), inductee into the Speaker Halls of Fame (in Canada and the USA), a Masters of Arts in Organizational Management and adventurer leading and climbing in the Himalayas. He is the founder of the Heroes Climb initiative (climbing and naming mountains after every day heroes).
Vince has been married for over 20 years to a wonderful woman/serial entrepreneur, lives in Dallas and is father to three amazingly talented kids. His musician son, entrepreneurial/actress daughter and youngest, who is a dancer extraordinaire all attended leading arts magnet schools. In Vince’s spare time he plays recreation league hockey on two teams.
