Gregg Swanson

what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good Wolfe thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Greg Swanson, a leading coach and expert on physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental strength. He has

authored several books on the subjects and over articles. Greg's life defining moment came in June when he survived a horrific avalanche while descending from the top of Mount Rainier. Here's the interview Hi Greg, Welcome to the show. Why thanks Eric, really glad to be here, appreciate you contacting me, and you know you're doing some great, great work with your podcast and looking forward to our conversation. Thank you.

You and I talked. I don't know, it's probably been a couple of weeks ago on your show, and now we've got a chance to have you on the show. So let's start where we always do with the parable. Um. So, there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed

and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, that's great, you know, it's really interesting. I've studied Native American traditions when I moved up here to Bend and I've always found that parable just fascinating.

And you look at it and it's basically what you focus on, you get, you know, this is that whole. If you want to take it to a metaphysical level, it's you create your own reality. And for me, what is you know, in my coaching and in my life, it's so much easier at least it was for me to feed that bad wolf than it was the good wolf. And it took a lot of discipline and focused in concentration to start to feed that good wolf. Once it started being fed, the other one kind of died off it.

It's not completely dead, but you know, it's not as strong as it used to be, right, And so you you focus a lot on I mean, your your show is called the Warrior Mind Podcast, So maybe you could tell us a little bit about what does the Warrior Mind mean to you? What what is it that's behind that name and why why is that your focus? Well? Great? Thanks. You know, I look at a warrior. Traditionally we look

at warriors. We think of them as battling and you know, perhaps vikings or spartans and going out to battle and and just killing and doing whatever. But I look at it as the warrior is one that masters themselves physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally, and really all of those have to start in the mind. And so the warrior mind is the one that uses the mind that masters their minds, so they can master their body, their emotion, and and there's

their spiritual practice. And so with that, the warrior mind basically feeds the good wolf. And what are the characteristics of the warrior mind? Wow, that's a that's a big question. There there are so many, right, there's discipline, there's focus, there is release, releasing of those things that that are not important. We tend to over exaggerate the things that are unimportant and under exaggerate the things that are important, and so there's this discernment that has to come in.

But I would probably say the biggest, biggest attribute of a warrior mind is aware, being aware, being aware of your thoughts, what yourself talk is, what you're saying to others. When you can be aware of what's going on in your head, you are then that much closer to discerning on which wolf you want to feed, and what are some of the main um you talk A lot about mental strength, and and we had a guest on a few weeks ago where we sort of touched on that subject.

And I'm interested in what you recommended some of the ways to build mental strength, some things that maybe you know people could start on in a relatively modest way, right, And before I get into that now, I will certainly answer that, I'd like to just clarify a little bit

my perception of mental strength versus mental toughness. Um mental toughness has been used quite a bit, and when I look at the word tough, it almost means tolerating, putting up with you know, when you get tough feet from walking barefoot, you get callouses on it, and it just it's just prevents the irritation. But when you look at strength, it's like going to the gym. You are getting stronger because of the adversity you're facing. You're just not tolerating it.

So if you go to the gym, you do you know squad, then you do to ten to twenty, you're actually getting stronger. And so that's where I look at the at the mindset, it's not just tolerating, but the strength is actually building from that. And and one of the things that I'd love to help people get into first is utilizing a physical process to get into their mental process. I really like working out or going for a steep hike or something that's going to challenge you

mentor like this is tough. I can't do it because that's where it shows up so so quickly. It's it's probably the easiest way to engage in a conversation is through a physical program. One of the things that I think is interesting where I think of mental strength often is exactly in that way, in some sort of physical way where my brain wants to give up way before my body really needs to, And um, how do you?

How do you continue? What are some of the things that someone can tell themselves to keep pushing through That. The reason I use the physical because everybody can do that. The challenges, and I will get that. I'll get to that question and second the challenges. People generally want to read a book on mental strength or mental toughness and think they can develop it by reading it. Mental strength is and however you define it mental strength or mental toughness,

you have to take action. You have to You can read all you want, but you have to take action. So For me, I like lifting or are doing cross fit, and there are some things that you know, I say to myself beforehand. One is, you know, I'm just going to finish what I start, because mental strength isn't coming

in first, it's finishing what you start. And so if you can go into a weight room or a run of five k or do a cross fit, or start out on some long hike, you know, twenty mile hike, and if you can finish what you start, that's a huge step in developing that mental strength. So some of the things we get through there when you feel like you can't go, take take a two second three second break, regroup,

and then continue. Just finish what you start. That's great, great advice, and I think it ties into setting goals that build slowly over time exactly. And when you look at it through the physical perspective, then you can apply it to if you're an entrepreneur, or if you're if or if your salesperson or some other part we tend to get. We tend to hit these roadblocks and we stop. And it's not necessarily that we have to push our way through that specific roadblock, but maybe there's a different

path to get to that goal. So some people will look at that as being stubborn and you know, contacting the same client or doing the same thing over and over again. Well, that might not be the mental strength. It's where is that goal? If this path isn't working, what path will get me there? What are some of the main things that keep people from developing that mental strength? Are there some common things that get in the way. Yeah,

they've fed the bad wolf all their life. Seriously, I mean when you look at it, if you look at the bad wolf as a hiking trail, you know, in our brain are are our neurons that fire together, are wired together, And so if we've been feeding the bad wolf our entire life, that's the path of least resistance in our mind, in our brain, so automatically, our thoughts are going to go to the path of least resistance, which is I can't do this. I've never done this before.

This is tough. Um too old, I'm too young too that whatever the excuses are, because we've been using those excuses our entire life. So now we want to create a new path, and it's going to hurt, like just like when you go into the woods and you want to create a new hiking path. You might have to get poked with bushes a little bit, but if you continue to walk down that path and feed that good wolf, then that will happen. But the reasons so tough is

that it is difficult to change. Change is tough. It our brain is not meant to change. And so when it's wired one way, it likes efficiency and it's going to stay that way and it's going to fight you tooth and nail to change your your current way of thinking. A couple of things I saw on your site were around um hypnosis and neuro linguistic programming, and I'm curious how how you use those tools in relation to what

we just talked about. So the brain is obviously you've got patterns in the brain, things that are wired in there, sort of the default settings that we've built over a long time. How do those two things help? Do they help accelerate that process? And how do you use those in your coaching? Oh? Absolutely, they absolutely do help. Because your conscious mind is really only about five percent of your daily activity and your unconscious mind about it's it's all.

It's been said that your conscious mind is the goal setter and your unconscious mind is the goal getter. So if you're producing results that are different than what you want, most likely your unconscious mind is directing your behavior. Your unconscious mind is also where your beliefs. Your beliefs are there, your values are there, your emotional experiences from the past,

all those reside in your unconscious mind. And hypnosis and neural linguistic programming deal a lot with that unconscious mind, so it slowly starts shifting the perspective on it. And when you can start to loosen the grasp of those beliefs, start to question them, start to reprogram them, and then use your conscious mind to take action as if they were as if the new beliefs were true, then you have a double edged sword and creating a new behavior.

I've always been alternately fascinated with and skeptical of things like hypnosis, like I can never never have a good sense, like does it really work? Is it a but it sounds like you you believe in it or see results from it? Yep. And And here's the thing. All hypnosis is self hypnosis. If a person doesn't want to be hypnotized, they will not be hypnotized. But if they want to change, and they want to be hypnotized, they can either do it themselves or have somebody facilitated, but they are still

self hypnosis. So it comes down to how bad does a person really want to change? And when they really want to change, they'll drop the barriers, they'll drop the the resistance and allow those changes to take place. It's not a miracle where you know, you go to sleep or go to hypnosis in one session and come out

of it, although that can happen. Um. The key is that using these tools in addition to acting as if you know so if you're going to change a behavior that oh, you know, I'm I'm too old to do something, and then you get hypnosis in there and says no, you're you're young enough, and then act as if you're young enough. Between those two things it works. If you just do hypnosis and don't act as if it's working,

it's not going to work. Yeah. I think that that idea about only being able, you know, being open to suggestion or hypnosis is really important. Although I have consistently been able to hypnotize my co host Chris here with a bucket of fried chicken. It's really all it takes. What is n LP how is it different than hypnosis? I don't know much about it. I see it a lot of places, but I honestly don't really know what

it is. You know, depending on who you which NLP school you go to, and how it's how they talk about it. It's basically excellence in communication, communication within yourself and communication with other people. Because we have these filters through which we delete, distort, or generalize information. You know, you think about it, We're all exposed to the same amount of information externally. How is it somebody can see

one thing and the other person not see it. Well, it's through those filters, and neurolinguistic programming works with those filters, So it's you know, the neural the mind or the brain, linguistic the words, and then programming it. So it's basically excellence, at least the school I went to, is excellence in

communication within yourself and with others. And when you can communicate clearly to yourself and understand that communication, you'll then be able to take action in accordance to what you want. See most people communicate with what they don't want. I don't want to be sick anymore. I don't want to be alone anymore. I don't want to be broken anymore. I don't, and they keep getting what they don't want because the mind cannot think of it. Not you can.

You cannot not communicate to yourself. So if you're saying I don't want to be alone, you have to think of yourself of being alone. One of the things I noticed is I was looking through your stuff, is that you survived in avalanche. Is that a story you could you could tell the listeners in a relatively brief time. Well, I've done it in a minute, and I've done it in an hour and a half, So let me see if I can. Yeah, I'm looking for somewhere on the you know, not it doesn't need to be a minute,

but you know right, Um, I was. I was with my brother. We were doing a mountaineer course on Mount Rainier, and the grand finale was to climb Mount Rainier, And so we got up beautiful day, beautiful morning, two o'clock in the morning. It was it was a June a couple of years ago, and we got up to the top and it was just gorgeous and it was such a beautiful day. We stayed up there a little bit too long. The guide said, come on, let's get back down.

So we started coming back down and there's a place on Mount Rainier that's called Disappointment Cleaver, and if you go up it, you'll understand why it's called that. But when you come down it, there's a kind of a small little path that's right against a very steep part of the mountain. And it was in that part where um I was the last person on the rope team. I heard somebody about me say avalanche and try and it's not the big powdery avalanche because this is June.

The snow is melted, so it's like, you know, a cement mixer of slushies coming down on you. It's just heavy, heavy, heavy snow. It's not gonna fluffy. So I kind of hit. I try to push myself up against the mountain as tight tight as I could, but because it's just so slushy, it took me and the five people attached to my rope down the mountain and we ended up hanging basically off the mountain because we did have a rope that was attached to the mountain higher up. So this this

rope helped us. But we stayed there for almost eight hours before we were rescued, and the rescue was another long story because we had it basically, had a hike a mile to where the helicopter landed to be able to get out of that, and we were all I had a uh my pcl was torn, which prevents your nie from going from hyper extending, so every time I

stepped on it, it would hyper extend. My hand was broken, my brother had a crack in his tibia, and unfortunately there was one person who did who did die from UM from exposure on the mountain. But it was quite a Up until that point, it was, you know, just a beautiful, beautiful experience, and and after that there's you know, there was a lot of shifts that happened to me personally.

You know, I don't know if it was post un extress syndrome or whatever it was, but there was quite a euphoric feeling once I got back home, like really nothing matters. And it's not that that didn't care, but really I saw the really nothing did matter that much? And so were you doing kind of what you're doing now then or was this part of what helped UM catapult you into sort of doing your own um your

own thing. Yeah, I was working in corporate sales at that time, and and I was also starting to develop or understood the power of mental strength at that point when I was training for the mountain um and we my brother and I climbed Mount Hood and Mount Shasta, and and so I realized the mind is important. I saw how the mind worked with me and sales, saw how definitely it worked with mountaineering. And so that was

kind of the beginning part of it. And then um, obviously surviving that, I took a different look at that from a you know, a mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual perspective on how really all of that came together when I was hanging off the mountain. So another thing that you have done and talked about is um shamanistic journeys. Can you share a little bit about what that entails for you and what some of your experiences have been.

That's a wonderful uh spiritual practice. It is not a religion. Um Shaman basically means one who sees in the dark, and it's not necessarily the dark of a cave, but the dark inside a soul. And so when the premise, I mean, when shaman's were very prevalent, they would do the journey work for a sick individual, they would find out why they were sick, they would find their power animals,

they would journey for the other people. And as um Shamanism became more and more known throughout the you know, at least the United States through Michael Harner and Alberto v. A Vialdo, more and more people were able to do it for themselves. And I've trained with them, and and it's basically tapping into your soul or your unconscious because

the unconscious mind is the seed of the soul. And it's going into your own soul unconscious mind and getting aunts there's and direction on big questions in your life. And so it's it's a really great, great practice. Um, I enjoy it. The thing is, the soul or your unconscious mind speaks in symbols, so it doesn't speak in

to us in words or language. So when you go on these journeys, you know, many people have probably heard about finding their power animal and and then it comes to them with different things or a rock or a heart or whatever it might be. So these are all ways that we can communicate with our with our soul to get some direction in life. We all we all have answers to our big questions, Why am I here? What's my purpose? What am I supposed to be? How

am I supposed to be? And we can all find those questions those answers ourselves if we take the time to go inward. Some people will meditate, uh, some people will pray. Journey work is very much sound sounds similar to that where you go deep inside, setting an attention, asking the questions and and consciously being aware of what's

happening around you without controlling what's happening. And this is the interesting thing is you have you set the intention to go on a journey, you put on some music and if you practiced it enough, or you can have a drum there and you go, so you know what you're doing, you know where you're going, but then you're not controlling the scenery, and it just unfolds. And it's been a great help to me as far as UH working with with with what where I should be going

in my life. And I recommend a lot to clients and even on my my my workshops, I take my clients on journeys. You've got a spot on your website where you talk about situation where people have high mental resistance but low mental support. Can you walk us through that? Yes, the complacen zone. This is something that I I it came to me in kind of a journey, if you will. I was a meditation, and it's a combination stion of you know, neurallquistic programming and you know we've all heard

of the comfort zone. Well, when we look at it, when I look at clients and I look at myself and look at people, we have this mental line of support. If it's weight, we'll never get any heavier than this weight, If it's money, will never get any broker than this. If it's being alone, will never be alone for more than six months, whatever it is, it's almost like hitting bottom, right rock bottom. So we had this mental line of support,

and that's when we start to take action. So we start taking action and we start to improve our life, whether it's physically, mentally, financially, and then we start to get to this what I call this line of mental resistance. And this is where our limiting beliefs are, our past experiences, our motions come into play. And that's you know, you're not worth a hundred thousand a year. You've never made

it before. What what makes you think you can? These are all conversations that go on, maybe not in the conscious awareness us, but there's the beliefs that are there. And so as we start to approach this mental line of resistance, we tend to take less and less actions. We tend to make more excuses, we tend to put off things, we tend to procrastinate. For example, if it was if it was a person who was on a nutrition program and they wanted to lose some weight. Let's

say they wanted to lose a hundred pounds. Well, right about the ninety pound mark, they may say, you know what, I've done really good. Let me just have this one piece of cheesecake. You know what, I'm gonna sleep in tomorrow. I'm not going to go to the gym tomorrow. And then all of a sudden, that ninety pounds now it starts losing. Now their only eighty pounds lighter, sting, and they start getting down. They go, oh, what's happened? And

they go right back up again. And you can see it financially with people uh A, relationship wise, they just go up and down, up and down, up and down. And part of it is because when we're not aware of it. And if you track out your behavior in life, you'll see that it's kind of like a saw tooth that goes up and down, up and down between this mental line of support and this mental line of resistance. Then what people do is, I'm going to set this

big goal. So they set this big goal that is so far above their mental line of resistance that they think it's going to motivate them. But again when they get there, it just it stops them. So these big, big, big, big, I mean, I love big goals, but if you haven't achieved you know, smaller goals than these big goals are just not going to do it for for you. So what I recommend is within this complacence zone is get three goals that you know you can achieve, and then

put the fourth one just above that mental resistance. And is that the third to the fourth one is where a coach comes in handy, somebody comes in handy to keep the person focused because up until that time, they've done it all. I mean, you look at it. If you go back and forth, back and forth, everything within the complacence zone, you already have created at one time or another in your life so achieving those goals aren't

really any big deal. But what you want to do is get momentum to get really close to that mental resistance and then have that goal just above it. So let's just say it was income. You've made ninety thousand, but you've never made a hundred. You get to thousand at that time, you hire a coach, you get somebody and say, you know, keep going, keep going, what else

can you do? What else can you do? Until you get to that hundred thousand, and then you keep making it because what you want to do is convert that mental resistance to your new mental support, and then you start the process all over again. That's a really interesting

way to think through the goal setting process. Yes, because because people, I mean, here we are, we're coming on to the first of the year, and people will make these big goals which they've never accomplished before in their life, and they're going to use that as motivation, but they don't track where you know, I've set this goal before, I said this school before, Well, then don't set it again.

And so if you look at really some of the things that you accomplished before, set those as small objectives and then perhaps at the end of the year, have that one goal that's just outside that mental resistance or maybe six months from now, and then when you hit it, maintain it for three months so that now that mental resistance is now your mental support and you get to start it all over again. It's that idea of basically start small and connect the dots right things that you

can do and build from there. Right. And the key though, is being aware of when you're getting close to that mental resistance because although I draw it on a nice diagram, yeah, and again this gets back to your question about a warrior mind. You need to be aware. So when you start hearing the self talk of I'll take a day off, or let me go on vacation now, or let me

have that cheesecake. None of those things are bad. However, if they're creeping up all you know, if they come back on a regular basis as you're getting close to accomplish and your goal, that would be a tell tale sign that you're getting very close to that mental resistance. We are getting near the end of time, but I'd like to talk through one last thing with you before we wrap up, and it's the idea of um being

a victim or being a leader. Yes, yeah, um, you know, there's there's a lot of great people out there who talk about leadership, and I admire all of them. Just the list is too long to go into. But a leader in the purest sense, takes responsibility for all their results, in my opinion, in my in my world, that is, whatever result they get, they take responsive ability for it, or the responsibility to change it, or the responsibility on how to react to it. They're not pointing the fingers.

So the victim, you know, when they blame, complaint if you find if not you personally eric, but if someone finds themselves blaming, complaining or justifying why they can't get something, that's usually victim talk. And when you can shift from and this is and and and I'll pay and a lot of others parts. They call it the cause and effect.

You can either be on the effects side of the equation, meaning that the world is doing this to me, my partner is doing this to me, the government is doing this to me, and you give up all control of your life, you give up all your power, or you can say, yes, this is happening, but I can change. I can do this instead, I can react this way

I can change. I can so you can be causing an effect, as Joe Despenser says, or you can be at the you can be the effect and the leaders on the cause side, the victim is on the effects side. There's certainly a uh spectrum there, right. There seems to be some things at least I've noticed that it's easy for me to be clear on like, Okay, I'm a leader, I'm responsible for this, and then other areas where I think I'm more likely to continue to play the victim.

And so it seems like that's an an ongoing process to sort of drive that mentality through every aspect of your life, right, which brings us back to that warrior mind being aware. If you're not aware of playing the victim role in that area of your life, you're going to continue to do it. And and what you just have to look at not you personally are, but if what a person has to look at is is the life? Is the situations in this area of my life financial relationship?

Is this what I want? And if it's not what I want? Then how am I contributing to this creation of I have I released everything to? You know? If I'm not happy in a relationship with my putting all my happiness on my partner. Where in work you may say, listen, I need to go out and make sales. I'm responsible for all my money, and you may be a go getter at sales, But in relationship, you give all your how are away. If you know that that's happening, then

being aware of it is the first step. And that's what we talked about in the beginning. Right of having a warrior mind is being aware exactly. I think you and I talked about that when I was on your show last week, about that awareness being so important, and I think it's I think it's really interesting how subtle some of those things can be in in tricking us into thinking that we're not in charge, which effectively, when we say we're not in charge, we're feeding the bad

wolf exactly. And when we when we are in charge, when we're taking responsibility for how we were, how we respond or the or the change of it. Because there's something when we talk about responsibility, it doesn't mean fault, and many people get confused with responsibility and fault. And I'm not to blame. Nobody's saying to blame, but at some level, if you get into car a car accident, You decided to get in your car at that time and take that route and somebody hits you. So it's

just that's the responsibility part of it. And now you can be responded stable for how you respond to that accident, and you can be responsible on how to get the car fixed. Yeah, I think that, like you said there, that difference between being responsible and at fault is such

a such a critical distinction. You know. I find a lot of people, a lot of people go through things in their life where something really terrible happened to them when they were younger, and you know, they're certainly not at fault for that in any way, but they are responsible at this point. We're all responsible at a certain point for what we do with those things that happened to us. Absolutely absolutely, and and you know, not to

diminish any you know, experiences. At some point, you either can play the victim for the rest of your life or you can play the leader or the warrior and go, this happened to me, and now this is what I'm gonna do with right. The ability to draw strength or draw some sort of meaning out of these experiences we have is so critical I think to to building a good life. Right, and that goes in perfect with with the name of your podcast, right, the one you've feed.

You know, we can either feed that bad wolf and relive that bad experience over and over and over and people are this and this happens and people can't be trusted, etcetera. So we just keep feeding that bad wolfere we can go. You know what I've learned from this, this is what I can do now, and you feed the good wolf then instead. Well, I think that is a great point to wrap up on, A good way to end. So Greg, thanks so much for taking the time to be on

the show. It's been a pleasure talking with you. Eric, thank you so much. Or keep up the good work, okay, take care bite all right, take care body. You can learn more about this podcast and Gregg Swanson at one you Feed dot net slash Swanson