Building and growing a company is no easy feat, not to mention trying to do so with a remote team. How do you ensure you’re hiring the right people? What can you do to keep everyone on the same page? Our guest today is uniquely qualified to answer these questions and more.
Jonathan Goodman is the founder of the Personal Trainer Development Center and Online Trainer Academy Certification. He’s authored 11 books and lived in ten countries. His new podcast Online Trainer Show is part comedy, part education and you can listen on iTunes, Spotify, or YouTube.
Even if you don’t run your own company, you’re sure to get something out of Jonathan’s description of Jobs to Be Done. We uncover why clarifying how your customers/clients really use your product/service can completely redefine how you approach your job. And, don’t miss Jonathan’s very unique way of screening interview candidates – you just might get a few ideas…
Connect with Jonathan:
Via his podcast: Online Trainer Show
Via his Online Trainer Academy: https://www.theptdc.com/online-trainer-academy-certification
Via Instagram: @jonathan_goodman101 AND @theptdc
Via Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theptdc
One final note… whether you’re looking for a tool to understand if a candidate will be a good fit for your company, or you just want to discover what makes your team tick, check out our new DRIVES QUIZ! This short assessment can lead to better understanding, awareness and buy-in from all parties.
TRANSCRIPT
Jonathan Goodman 0:01
I knew so little about what I was doing. And I knew so little about why I shouldn’t have been doing what I was doing early on in my career, that I just did it. I mean, It sounds funny. I mean, I started a blog when I didn’t know what the word blog meant. I was, you know, I was 24 years old, I wrote a book called Ignite the fire to educate my industry, the personal training industry. Who the heck am I at 24 years old to write a book, I knew nothing about self publishing. And as a result, I just kind of did the thing, right, and then people liked it. And that wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t ignorant the whole thing. So I do believe that a high dose of what I call optimistic ignorance is actually really important.
Brett Bartholomew 1:00
Welcome to the Art of coaching podcast, a show aimed at getting to the core of what it takes to change attitudes, behaviors and outcomes in the weight room, boardroom classroom, and everywhere in between. I’m your host, Brett Bartholomew, I’m a performance coach, keynote speaker, and the author of the book conscious coaching. But most importantly, I’m a lifelong student interested in all aspects of human behavior, and communication. I want to thank you for joining me. And now let’s dive into today’s episode.
Right, so today is a special episode of the podcast and I’m gonna elaborate why stick with me, because I don’t want you guys to think oh, he says that every time it’s always unique episode or special episode. But this one is because it marks a transition of sorts of where we’re going with art of coaching, where we’re going with our guests, where we’re going with a lot of our content. And many of you, if you’re on our newsletter, have heard about some of these changes. And your feedback has been incredible. Your encouragement has been incredible. So we’re thankful for that. So if you’re aware of my story, you know that I was hospitalized at a young age. And because of those experiences, I got into coaching, specifically training athletes. Now I was fortunate enough to work with high level athletes from over 23 Sports that’s been a big mainstay and part of my career. But in this chapter, more and more, we’re working in the leadership space. And that started with my book conscious coaching, which even though it was written as some somewhat of an open love letter to strengthing conditioning professionals about how we need to give back to the roots of communication, understand the science behind the art of connecting with others, what we found is that blew up into other industries, finance, tech, medical, all these other places started reaching out. And so we looked really hard at ourselves as a company and thought, Where do we see ourselves are in our future? And that’s really moving into the leadership and communication space. What does that have to do with today?
Well, Jonathan Goodman, who has quite the resume is actually going to be one of our last guests for quite some time guys in the fitness or performance space. And that’s not to say that we’re not going to welcome those topics or anything in the future. But we’ve got to be true to where we’re going. Now, why is he such an appropriate guest for this? Well, he started something called the personal trainer Development Center. And since 2011, he supported fitness professionals, by publishing over a million words mean, the guy has written 11 books, and lived in 10 countries, he’s going to talk about that. He’s been featured in a lot of major business and fitness publications, everything ranging from men’s health forms Muscle Fitness entrepreneur, so because you know, he’s got such great crossover. And crossover is absolutely what we’re doing with art of coaching, where we’re not a strength and conditioning company. We’re not a fitness company. We are a leadership development company that helps people communicate more clearly better analyze decisions, solve conflict, and ultimately become better leaders. And what that means if you have better interpersonal intrapersonal skills, guys aligned with your values, and you put yourself in these situations where you can train it, you’re gonna grow. So we looked at this as an opportunity for pure attunement here, Jonathan gives a wealth of information on building your audience, serving your audience, no matter what field you’re in, we talked about the fact that he will spend four to six months a year living outside of the country every year what he’s learned about remote hiring, managing remote teams. So this is a huge, huge episode. We hope you enjoy it, a truly unique mind and a candid conversation. Without further ado, Jonathan Goodman.
Welcome back to another episode of The Art of coaching Podcast. I’m here today with Jonathan Goodman, Jonathan, how are you?
Jonathan Goodman 4:43
What’s up I’m doing good Brett,
Brett Bartholomew 4:45
I’m really glad you came on. I know that you admittedly and you didn’t use this term. So I don’t want to put the words in your mouth. But, you know, when you had reached out and we connected you said, you know, I haven’t really done a lot of podcasts for a while and I’m ready to kind of give value in and come back out into the world. I’m interested because I am a bit of an introvert. And people may not know this about me, but I’m somewhat reclusive. would you classify yourself as reclusive? Or have you just been busy? Jonathan?
Jonathan Goodman 5:14
I think There’s two parts to it. Number one, there’s a lot of misconception about introverts, right? I 100% classify myself as an introvert, but introversion doesn’t mean that you can’t be around people. The best way that I’ve heard it described, and that I describe it now is like, basically, introverts start the day with five coins. And every interaction that they have, they give away a coin. And when the coins out, you’re tapped out and you need time to recharge. Extroverts start the day with zero coins, every interaction they have, they gain a coin. And so you know, I call myself an introvert, but I’m quite happy walking out on stage and speaking to 500.
Brett Bartholomew 5:47
Yeah, no, I
Jonathan Goodman 5:48
When I’m done. I gotta be by myself for a little bit of time, right?
Brett Bartholomew 5:52
Yeah.
Jonathan Goodman 5:52
So yeah, I mean, I’m fine. You know, I’ve been doing four to six podcasts a week for the last few months, mainly, as we’re trying to promote our podcast, right? The online trainers show and it’s just if you’re trying to gather an audience for anything, well, you gotta go to a place like, if you want to promote a podcast, don’t go to Instagram. Sure, you got to go to other podcasts, right, because people who like listening to podcasts or listening to other podcasts. So that’s number one. Number two, I mean, it’s just a matter of directing focus, it’s so hard these days to know where to spend your time and effort. And it’s so easy to say yes to a lot of things and feel like you’re doing work and then getting nowhere. And so I’m very passionate about thinking very, very deeply about where I invest my time and my energy. And right now appearing on podcasts is one of the best things that I can do for my company. And so I’m putting a lot of emphasis into it.
Brett Bartholomew 6:50
And you did it the right way. You know, I think a lot of times people, we get bombarded with requests from people that just want to promote something. And you know, I remember when you reached out, you said, I’d really like to provide value to your audience. And that goes into something we say, at art of coaching of, you know, you don’t become somebody that people look to for advice by trying to prove your value, you do it by trying to provide value. And yes, I think that’s something that even though you know, in the intro mentions that all the work you’ve done in the fitness space, personal training, beyond, you know, this is applies to every industry in the world, where you are, especially at the end of this, what value are you providing? Or are you just going into your shell thinking about me, me me promoting? Was there a time in your career where even inadvertently you found like, Man, I am way too promotional than I want to be? I’m probably not getting enough value. I’m trying too hard to prove myself? And if so what kind of self awareness kind of woke you up out of that?
Jonathan Goodman 7:49
Man that’s a good question. Was there a specific time not that I can think of, I believe very strongly that there’s a time to sell on a time not to sell. And when it’s time to sell, you sell hold, like, there is nothing wrong with selling man, everybody lives by selling some. If you have something that you believe can help people sell their crap out of that thing, just make sure that before you do, you really understand who it’s for, and how it will benefit them, and don’t sell it to people that it’s not for. That’s a big problem that we have in any kind of coaching space. Coaches have become so desperate in a lot of cases where they’re just trying to sell their thing to anybody. And and it’s not even that the thing though coaching service is bad or is not as good. They just haven’t taken the time to figure out who it’s for and who it’s not for. And so they’re selling it to the wrong person.
Has there been a time when I’ve been too promotional? I mean, probably a lot of people would probably say that of me. I think it really depends on what list you’re on. Definitely what we have done. You know, with email marketing, we’ve done a lot more work into respect, you know, list and its segments, you know, list. That’s something that I didn’t do a good enough job with. A few years ago, we basically like every promotion blasted our entire list. Now, we pretty much never email our entire list with anything, why we make sure that people are introduced to us properly. We take people based off of interests, we give people promotions, based off of interests, we, we generate wait list, you know, to the point where if we’re going to do a promotion, one week, we actually say before the week starts, hey, next week, I’m going to be talking about something I’m really excited about, right? It’s gonna be this, this, this this, and I’m going to give you a ton of value and give you a ton of information that you can use. And then at the end of it, I’m going to offer you something that I think will really help you. If you already know that you absolutely don’t want to hear about that. No problem at all. Click here, and I won’t include you. And then on every promotional email that week, we also include a link like, that basically says how to present show you don’t want to hear about this. No worries, click here. And they’ll just omitted from that. promotion. And if he used to do that, and so we kind of blew up our list quite a bit. So I guess that’s one point where I was overly promotional where I still promote, but I tried to promote to people who want to hear, or at least are interested in hearing it now.
Brett Bartholomew 10:16
Yeah, I think we’ll touch on that, you know, on Episode 105, we did a whole thing on imposter phenomenon, because and this leads to a question I want to ask you, but just pardon me for being long winded for a moment, because there’s a question before that is, yeah, it’s so the main thing is we have a lot of people that listen to that episode 105. And we’re like, Man, this is exactly how I feel. And we ended up making a resource forum. And people can identify the type of imposter phenomenon that they fell into, right? What is this archetypical? Is it man if I know it, so Well, I should be able to do it myself? Is it somebody thinking that their work just pervasively isn’t good enough? Now you’re talking about building a list and segmenting it, which was the big wake up call for me to get over imposter phenomenon was realizing there were people that even wanted me to do a newsletter. And I mean, I went from not wanting to do any social media ever, definitely not a newsletter. When I released my book, I didn’t have it. And I thought nobody’s ever going to want to hear from me. Did you ever feel like that? Or did imposter phenomenon ever hit you? And then all of a sudden, when you started building this, you know, you just become like, oh, yeah, there are people out there that think this is valuable. Let’s follow that a little bit.
Jonathan Goodman 11:22
I was so optimistically ignorant,
Brett Bartholomew 11:28
which is cool. It’s good. It’s good.
Jonathan Goodman 11:30
when I started out, I mean, I knew so little about what I was doing. And I knew so little about why I shouldn’t have been doing what I was doing early on in my career, that I just did it. I mean, It sounds funny. This is the, I guess, advantage that we had back in 2009 2010. I mean, I started a blog when I didn’t know what the word blog meant.
Brett Bartholomew 11:52
Sure.
Jonathan Goodman 11:54
I was, you know, I was 24 years old, I wrote a book called Ignite the fire to educate my industry, the personal training industry. Who the heck am I I’m 24 years old to it. But I was so ignorant, around all of the reasons why I shouldn’t do it. I knew nothing about publishing nothing about self publishing. I was just like, I’m gonna like write this book, like, why not? And, there was, like, there were resources for show, but it wasn’t just in your face of how to do this stuff. And, and as a result, I just kind of did the thing, right. And then people liked it. And it’s funny, because now 10 years later, Ignite, the fire is still the highest ranked book on Amazon for personal trainers, and it’s translated into a bunch of languages and like, it still sells more every month than it did the month before. And that wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t ignorant about the whole thing. So I do believe that a high dose of what I call optimistic ignorance is actually really important these days. And I think what often happens to people as they know too much about a thing. I actually I have a photo on my computer for a book I want to someday write called the ignorance quotient, because I am fascinated by the concept of how much do you need to know about something?
Brett Bartholomew 13:15
Yeah,
Jonathan Goodman 13:16
if you know too, if you know a little bit more than about that thing, it’s actually a detriment. And I think it all comes down to understanding catastrophic failure, like you basically don’t want to be taken out of the game, you want to know enough about the thing, so that you don’t make any catastrophic mistakes. But you also want to leave yourself open to take chances. And I think that all comes down to risk analysis. And, risk mitigation. And also understanding fear, you know, fear is an irrational response to the unknown. We feel things because we don’t understand them. Because we don’t define them. Oftentimes, if you actually define a problem would find a situation, you realize that it’s much safer than you ever then your brain ever makes up in your head before you understand it. And so I think if you actually are able to make sense of a situation and say, Okay, well, I can take this risk right now, and spend this time and invest this money or whatever it is on this thing, because the worst case scenario ain’t so bad.
Brett Bartholomew 14:20
Yeah.
Jonathan Goodman 14:22
Well, then you don’t need to know any more about the thing. Because if you start I mean, you know, this, I’m sure we haven’t spoken about it. But I’m guessing that you’ll agree with this, maybe you won’t. But this idea of, if you take action on something and you start a project, there is a 100% chance that it won’t work out in the way that you originally planned, and a close to 100% chance that it will work out in some way that you could have never anticipated.
Brett Bartholomew 14:50
Yeah. Oh 100% Now I do I agree with that. I agree with your earlier quote. And and it has to do with something Seth Godin says a lot is, you know, don’t find an audience for your products. Find Products for your audience, you know, when you don’t try to shove something down people’s throat, like, actually listen to people, whatever projects or products you work on. And like that can be anything from education to an actual physical thing. When you actually pay attention to the people you’re trying to help, it becomes so much more natural. And not only that, you end up right making a better thing. So who cares that you’re, we’re, we’re building a new online course right now. And we just started over from scratch after working on it for three months, but I think it’ll be better.
Jonathan Goodman 15:29
Yeah, I’m gonna read you one of my favorite pieces of it. And it’s super short. It’s about courage that I think like fits into this perfectly. Is it cool that I do that,
Brett Bartholomew 15:38
yeah, absolutely.
Jonathan Goodman 15:39
I’m going to do this, it’s a cool that I do that basically. it’s called, you’ll figure it out. In order to develop tremendous confidence in your own abilities. You must have coach, coached ideate and coached create, nobody is born with courage, it develops when things don’t go your way. Courage develops, when you fail, you cannot fail if you don’t try. So try a lot and fail a lot. So long as your failures are not catastrophic, embrace them, the punishment for failure is never as bad as we feel it will be acknowledgement of this forms coach. In most cases, failing is not absolute instead represents a new challenge one, you didn’t account for one that forces you to figure out a solution. And over time, you become pretty good at figuring it out. And it was the more time you get pretty confident that no matter what happens, you’ll figure it out. None of this happens if you don’t try stuff. So try stuff. You’ll figure it out.
Brett Bartholomew 16:30
I mean, It’s spot on, it touches base with something that I think a natural question with that, that we hear a lot is Yeah, well, I want to share and yeah, I’m confident and I’m okay. I do understand that failing is not absolute. But we get this one a lot. How do I find my leadership voice? And I don’t know your take on it. And we’re doing a standalone episode on it. So you certainly don’t have to feel like you have to like, okay, here we go. But I do want to know, and I’m gonna keep it vague. On purpose. I want to know where you take it. How do these people that are ready to share now how do they find their voice so they don’t end up plagiarizing? Like I know, you’ve dealt with in the past people have done it. I know. We see our stuff on blogs and newsletters and people actually take screenshots of this stuff. But how do people actually find their own voice so they don’t resort to that kind of stuff?
Jonathan Goodman 17:19
right, I have had my entire website lifted literally copy and pasted with links changed. Like that blatant,
Brett Bartholomew 17:28
I wish I could say I’m sorry, guys. It’s bad. I get it.
Jonathan Goodman 17:33
It’s bad. It’s bad. Ah, leadership voice. I mean, it’s funny because I’m talking to like one of the people that I went out and is one of the best leaders in leadership and leadership education. And he’s asking me about what my leadership voice . I can’t speak about leadership voice. It’s a term that I’ve never really thought about before,
Brett Bartholomew 17:55
Yeah, yeah. Either one.
Jonathan Goodman 17:57
Yeah, I can tell you, I mean, to me leadership is I have a very laissez faire leadership. I mean, a company now is 20. I think 26 As of yesterday, even people that are on the payroll of it. And so it’s like, you know, I’m in a, I guess, a leadership position. But I have a very laissez faire leadership style. And I, you know, I brought in a general manager, because I know what I’m good at, I know what I’m not. But I believe very strongly and leading by example, I think that that’s the absolute best way to lead. I think that actions speak so much louder than words. And so I try to showcase and, really act on what I believe is very, very important. And this kind of hit me, I had a conversation with one of my staff members, this was last year when I was in the middle of like, an eight month trip around the world. With my family and we were in I think we were living in Montenegro at the time with her for about three months. And, I kind of asked them, I was like, you know, they said, Oh, you’re a great leader. I was like, What are you talking about? Like, oh, like you the way that you the family values that you showcase the, you know, you exploring the world the way that you do you being able to just show that there are much more important things that business and financial success isn’t the end all, where you don’t need to say it because I feel like I just kind of believe it so deeply and I do it that other people notice. And, family values the same thing. I mean, I won’t do a podcast after 5pm I don’t care who you are, you know, that’s family time. People see that, like to me that’s kind of how I showcase what I stand for. And I think that’s the best way that I know how to lead. It is has basically nothing to do with what I say it’s it’s actions that are true sincere actions. that other people notice
Brett Bartholomew 20:07
and lens into a good concept. Because when people ask me, how do you find your leadership voice? And that that early on was just your coaching voice or what have you, they’re really talking about command presence, you know, relatability, all these things. And, you know, one of the things I say is we’ll quit trying to be what everybody else is. Now that is, okay, if you’re gonna experiment with that we’re all influenced subconsciously, unconsciously by others. So nobody’s ever really a blank slate, right? But I do like the way you took that of saying, Well, how much is a leadership voice really matter? If you’re not about what you say? You’re about? How much does leadership voice command control and presence actually matter? If you’re somebody that’s really great at all those things, but not following through? And you make a great point with never before? Have we seen so many people pick the brains of so many other people yet do so little in terms of putting action behind it? Right.
Jonathan Goodman 20:53
Yeah, there’s Do you know who Robert Fulghum
is ?
Brett Bartholomew 20:57
I do not.
Jonathan Goodman 20:59
He wrote one of my favorite little books of short stories. I think it was called everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten. And, he has this book I you know, I love quotes. And, and he will this quote, I’m trying to find the exact one. Yeah, here, he wrote this quote, he has his book on quotes. It’s called woods I wish I wrote. He was quoted in it. So he said, oratory is empty if it has not been field tested on the battlefield of experience. And I have little use for those who write beautifully and live solidly or those who withdraw from the world and issue instructions for how to live in it. But priesthoods that deny the realities of the flesh, but wish to control the appetites and activities of those who live as all human beings. I mean, if that is not, that was written before the age of social media, but like, if that is not something that we should be considering every minute, we turn on Instagram, I don’t know what it is, man, you know, a bunch of people in this world, you know, the same as I do. Every once in a while, ie, you know, translate that to multiple times a day, I see people that I know, that are putting out messages where I’m like, bro, that is not you, bro, at that is not true to you. we’re doing this for because you feel like you’re going to get some sort of positive response because you lack this, you crave this kind of self worth, that this perceived social support that you know, that you’re going to get on social media is going to give you I mean, the only things that we boast about that we brag about are things where we lack
Brett Bartholomew 22:45
Yeah, well, your dreams are magnified if insecurities, right, like if somebody wants big houses and this and that, you know, a lot of times their insecurity is that, oh, it’s never enough or financial or what have you, if they really want to be accepted and well known as an authority, you know, like, and it starts to consume them. It’s like, okay, are you really nervous of being alone and discredited or feel like you’re never good enough, right. And with that kind of self awareness to your point, it just finds you can’t really buy it, you can’t do it at a conference or a clinic. You know, we like to think our apprenticeships force people into that to a degree because they’re put in social scenarios they have to work themselves out of but what the reason that Quotes Beautiful is it fits hand in hand with what Van Gogh says, You have to experience what you want to express. So how can you develop a voice or values, right, even if you weren’t, we’re taking voice out of it, the family values that you mentioned, if you’ve never experienced some of those things that you instill, otherwise, they’re not worth the paper they’re written on.
Jonathan Goodman 23:41
And it’s the kind of people you want to be around. I mean, the kind of company that I want to grow as kind of company with family values are very important. And I hire people. One of the main things that I look for when I hire people with strong family values, it doesn’t mean they necessarily have a family. Some of them don’t yet, you know, they might want to, they might not want to, but they value family very strongly. And I look for that I look for cues of that in the interview process. Because that’s just the type of company that I want to build. Those are the type of people that I want to be around. And as a result, I mean, those types of people I feel are people that you can trust that you can rely on that care about the hole more and there are also people who I think are going to I don’t know what the right way to say this is this probably isn’t the best way to say it, but follow my lead. You know, there are people that are going to resonate with my way of doing things. Because my way of leading is to lead by example, and obviously my you know, my family is so important to me and travel and exploration and having a time is so important to me. But then as company we got to live by it. Like we build in multiple redundancies at each role of a company even with a small staff because our staff Know that if something comes up in their family life or somebody that they need to take care of, they can take off in a moment’s notice and be there for their people. And we’ll good.
Brett Bartholomew 25:08
Yeah, that’s a good.
Jonathan Goodman 25:09
That’s not an easy thing to do in a small company. when you’ve got one key customer service person, like, to train two extra people to backup that role to jump in when needed, because your customer service persons step parents end up in the hospital for two weeks, and they need to be there for them. That’s not an easy thing to do. It’s an easier thing to do in a bigger company.
Brett Bartholomew 25:31
Yeah, and we talked about, you know, one commonality, Another commonality we share is we’re both owners of remote companies. I mean, I’m correct, right? You guys are largely if not entirely remote.
Jonathan Goodman 25:43
Yeah, we grew up remote. We’re becoming less remote. We have an office here in Toronto, but our team is open North American and one in Europe, okay. All major hires and stuff like that are are Toronto based. And people don’t have to work every day in the office, couple of our staff are here, like one or two days a week. But I see a lot of value in being in the office with a core team, especially like the strategic team, I see a lot of value. And that’s only because we spent seven years not being an entirely remote. And we actually started to become much more remote than than COVID hit. But yeah, anyway, I mean, we’re predominantly remote. And we still operate as a remote business. But we do get to high five every once in a while.
Brett Bartholomew 26:27
Right. So where I was going with that, and you met you break some good points about the value of, you know, you said you were remote for seven years, now you’re getting a little bit more of a centralized location. So we have people in Iowa, we have people in Phoenix, we have people in Illinois, I’m in Atlanta, and then we have some other contractors. But you know, anybody that manages remotely knows that this is tricky, right? And you can hire for values, you can do all these things. But there’s a lot that can sneak through. So I am interested, you know, what were some of the and I want to stay away from kind of cliches that you and I could easily spout off of what are challenges of managing a remote team where we’re like, first, you got to build rapport? Can you give me some uncommon solutions, things that maybe involve lateral thinking that you were like, Oh, my God, how did I miss this? For better managing that remote team and bringing that level of cohesion and unity and vision? Anything that you consider, you know, uncommon, even if it’s simple.
Jonathan Goodman 27:22
The first thing is just the hiring process. I think it’s very important. I think a lot of people are just really, really bad at hiring. And, I mean, one of the best books to read about this as a reasonably new one. It’s Malcolm Gladwell is talking to strangers. And if you haven’t read it, I mean, I don’t know if I recommend reading the book. I mean, Malcolm Gladwell is going to read because he’s such a great storyteller. But like, you could listen to one podcast with him for an hour and get the idea everything you’d even need to get into the book. But I mean, I enjoy reading his writing. And I saw him speak a few times live on this topic, too. But he basically talks about just just how unbelievably bad we are at analyzing what other humans are saying and thinking. And, I mean, it’s everybody who is like, down to give them an orchestra was might have been New York Symphony Orchestra had, you know, they never had a female lead for any of their positions. And they just said, you know, it’s not that we don’t want a female lead is that we just haven’t been able to find a female who’s like, basically better, like, we’re a meritocracy. And then they did blind auditions. And all of a sudden, now something like 70% of the leads are female.
Brett Bartholomew 28:33
Yeah, unconscious bias.
Jonathan Goodman 28:34
Women are generally better than men at everything. Just kind of accepted that. Yeah. So I mean, and there’s lots of that. So I mean, it depends on what role you’re hiring for. But I believe very strongly in having good hiring processes that include personality assessments, and actually collecting a whole bunch of basically doing a whole bunch of tests that you don’t look at individually, you’re looking at us data points, and bringing them together. For example, when I was hiring an assistant, they sent a new resume, I didn’t even look at it. Right. Then I immediately emailed back, I copy and pasted the exact same response to every single person. So it was as if I never looked at anything that they had ever done before. And immediately when they respond to the email response, I copy and paste it back. And I asked them to take a typing test, What’s up?
Brett Bartholomew 29:26
Do you have one that you prefer?
Jonathan Goodman 29:28
I don’t know like typing test.com or something. Like whatever like but but the reason for that is I’m looking for two things. One, s typing speed is actually
Brett Bartholomew 29:39
Oh, my gosh, I thought you when you were talking about personality assessments, I thought you’re talking about going into like MBTI and disc and what have you your title
Jonathan Goodman 29:47
that comes after? Yeah, that comes after I’ll talk about that in a second. Think typing. So basic typing test, literally, where because typing speed is actually reasonably correlated with intelligence. And if all else fails, I mean, if you have a more intelligent person, right, they’re probably going to do a better job. So that’s number one. And number two is depending on the task. I mean, for this task, we needed somebody who was like helpful. If you have more than two mistakes on your typing test, like, you can just do it again, like if you send me a typing test with five mistakes. So you should have just done that again, it takes 30 seconds. Yeah. But it was a sorry, a 60 second. typing test. Immediately, then, so they kicked back to me, I say, thank you so much. Here’s another your next assignment is to fill me a quick video. And the quick video was, you know, a couple of questions. And then basically, like, how would you deal with this order of consequences? And it’s actually like a pretty interesting like psych assessment, but your taps overflowing, your baby’s crying in the next room, it’s starting to rain outside and your laundry is hanging on the outside on the on the laundry line, and somebody’s ringing the doorbell. What do you do? And it’s not about like, what they do. It’s about that judge?
Brett Bartholomew 31:05
Sure, right. Yeah, we do the same mastermind group, we make people fill out a lot of things that seem like irrelevant questions that tell us a lot about locus of attention and control and all that keep going.
Jonathan Goodman 31:14
That’s beautiful, beautiful. And then the next thing that they do is I just send them a one page Enneagram assessment. Do you know the Enneagram?
Brett Bartholomew 31:22
Yep.
Jonathan Goodman 31:22
So that’s, yeah, so I love this one page assessment, it was actually a very small, like, I think it was like a six person group, it was the CEO of Blue Bottle coffee in San Francisco. I had the opportunity to be mentored by him a little bit. And he brought this to my attention. So Enneagram is like a reasonably in depth personality assessment, but they have a one page. So it’s a three page assessment, where all that you do is you just you read 10 statements, and you rank where you are in them, you know, 1 2 3? And so I had everybody go through that quick assessment, because I don’t want somebody to do like a 300 question assessment.
Brett Bartholomew 32:04
Yeah, it’s always a nightmare. And they give you just the answers you want to hear anyway, right? Like, they’re always choosing the most socially desirable answer for impression management purposes.
Jonathan Goodman 32:13
A lot of that, yeah, a lot of that. And so I’m looking here, the nice thing about this Enneagram One is there’s no wrong answer, it just kind of tells me again, about you. And if you know the role, and you know, the people that they’re going to be working with, well, you can kind of it’s pretty easy to look, it’s like, okay, I approach things in an all or nothing way, especially issues that matter to me, I have high internal standards for correctness. And I expect myself to live up to those standards, I seem to be able to see all points of view pretty easily. I am insensitive to other people’s feelings, like it’s those types of things, right. And then based off of all of those, so the first test is, does everybody make it through the interview, because anybody can fire off an email, and we put job applications on like Craigslist, in addition to put it out to audience and stuff. So you’re gonna get a whack of resumes, and it’s not even worth going through them. Right, but you can easily just copy and paste these answers. And like 70% of people can drop off before the even need to look at that. But of the people that finish, then now you’ve got four pretty good data points, to go into interviews. And then at that point, I’ll try to pick three to five people to bring into an interview. And I’ll choose two other members of our team. And we’ll all interview them independently. And we’ll all have a spreadsheet to fill in about that person. And nobody sees the other person’s spreadsheet. And we rank people want the five on what we think are kind of the key departments. And then based off of those, then us three get together. And basically look at what everybody else thought about those people and make the decision. We’ve had a lot of success with that hiring, right. So when you do that, first of all, like, some of the key people in the team, I’ve already met and spoken to this person, but when you follow that process, you could still make mistakes of hiring, and you still probably will, but your odds are pretty good that you’re gonna get a pretty good person. And then it’s just a matter of having a good onboarding. And, you know, that’s just a matter of having good SOPs for your business and documentation for your business about your company values and stuff like that. But if that’s in place, get good people on board and good people who are genuinely intelligent. Your odds are pretty good.
Brett Bartholomew 34:34
Hey, guys, we’re gonna be back with Jonathan in a moment. And you’ve likely already heard him talk about how Malcolm Gladwell in some of his works, as we are so awful at analyzing how we come across and ourselves, but we couldn’t agree more. It’s something that we’ve been saying for a long time at art of coaching. And whether you’re somebody looking to get better from a leadership standpoint at hiring or leading your team, or just trying to get more out of those around you have programs for those and we go deep The Art of coaching Apprenticeships are not any kind of kumbaya leadership, trust, fall experience. These are things where you’re going to have clear cut evaluation, feedback on how you communicate how you deal with pressure under unique social circumstances. And they’re made for leaders of all types. So whether you have a sales team that needs their communication skills upgraded, whether you have people in management that are a little bit socially averse and have trouble and they stumble over their words and, and aren’t always able to relate to people, no matter what people related issue, you have our Apprenticeship workshops, and our other services are for you. So make sure to check it out at artofcoaching.com/apprenticeship. All right, back to Jonathan Goodman.
Now, here’s a question for you within that good people on board, because we have talked a lot about on previous episodes, setting boundaries for us as leaders, but we haven’t talked a lot and I think it’s because some people would be scared to admit it, setting filters, you know, for whether it’s bringing people onto our team or you know, our programs or what have you. Because a lot of times that can be looked at as exclusionary. And it’s not the reality is you gotta go through some process because just one person that’s not a fit. That’s, dangerous. But you talk about intelligence, and I’m interested, do you look at just general, you know, general intelligence, deductive reasoning, cognitive, you know, aspects of that? Or are you talking about the absolutely need to be subject matter experts in terms of intelligence in that space?
Jonathan Goodman 36:22
Well, it depends. It depends on the world. Yep. It really depends on the world, I mean, somebody who’s going to like, be a key editorial person obviously needs to have, you know, a good background in journalism and content. So there’s, some space for subject matter, I believe very strongly in creating rules that don’t require high levels of subject matter expertise. Because here’s the thing. You can subject matter expertise, I mean, very, very, very, very, very high level is an exception. But most subject matter expertise, you can actually find it in the hire it really, really cheaply, really easily, what you can’t do is find somebody who understands enough for that thing. And he was a good at managing, and so on, our team, basically, we have heads of departments. And in a few cases, we have somebody like, you know, we have a staff writer writing underneath editorial. But for the most part, we actually outsource a lot of the contract work, because the skilled labor is actually really cheap and easy fact. And what is very difficult, though, is the management of that labor. So when we brought on, for example, a creative director, we went looking for somebody, you know, we do a lot of print, we do a lot of digital media, across all social media blog, paid advertising, I mean, to try to find somebody for a small team, who understands direct mail, because we still send direct mail, like physical mail. Email marketing, social media marketing, paid digital advertising blog, in social media, like to try to find one designer who knows how to do all that stuff. Good luck, man. So what we did is we went and actually looked for somebody who had a little bit of experience in those things, ie could speak the language of all of those things. But had a history and had an interest in managing design projects. Because we know that if we want to do a quick project, it’s really easy to find somebody who knows how to lay out a book, what’s really hard is communicating them and keeping them on timeline. And then having redundancies I other contractors in those rules, because creatives are inherently it’s just very difficult to rely on them. And so, you know, making sure that there’s a few other people and those rules and keep into the timeline. So what we actually look for our managers in each department, basically, knowing that the subject matter expertise is actually reasonably expendable, and reasonably cheap and easy to find at any time. That’s, what we do. But I mean, it’s difficult as a small company, right? Because you need one person to do multiple roles.
Brett Bartholomew 39:21
Yeah, and I think, you know, when you’re talking about it’s easy to find hard to manage. That’s so often overlooked, because we have people that will say, you know, oh, where can I go to find this and that and they get the outsourcing advice. Oh, you know, Fiverr or Upwork, or this or like you said, you’ll do Craigslist ads. And I know that’s how we found you know, our assistant. You know, they happen to be viewing Craigslist and what have you, but not very many people understand how tough that is to manage it. I mean, there are people that have created tons of stuff for us in the past and then we spent more time it was interesting because, you know, talking about imposter phenomenon. We’re a communication based company and leadership. So we’d give them every resource, every tool, you know, a little bit of QA Pay and strategy as simple rules, right? Nothing overwhelming, nothing micromanaging, just clear kind of boundaries, they could improvise within those boundaries, or sometimes we’d be really specific. And no matter what we found whether we were really specific, or we allowed them to improvise within boundaries, you’d spend so much time on the back end. And eventually, what what you would have to get to, because you would spend 10 hours or however long, you know, going back and forth back and I’d say, listen, here’s our end user, here’s the problem they’re dealing with, here’s the job to be done. We want somebody to feel really good about this thing, and how it helped them. And we just always had to break it back down to like, think like a human, so much of intelligence is just, you know, and I know you can be careful with where you go with that. What kind of human you know, in terms of, is it the people that just want to watch Fox News and CNN and get spun all the time or, you know, think like a discerning human being who has some compassion and ask yourself, Is this going to be helpful, but managing people like that, it can be that no matter how competent you are, any of us are, it can be frustrating, because it’s everything just moves fast. And some people don’t really care about their work as much as they say they do. They care more about getting paid in the affiliation. And I know you’re against that anti hustle culture, which I’m glad like, because if you don’t find the right people, it’s really hard to overdeliver at scale, is it not?
Jonathan Goodman 41:22
It is, but I think that a lot of the time people say that they don’t find the right people, when in reality, the people they find a good enough, they’re just not good at telling them what to do, and helping them and growing them. You know, we get asked this all the time in our community of personal trainers. So okay, you know, how will you guys I’m looking for virtual assistants, I found one before and they didn’t work out. They weren’t very good. Where do I find good virtual assistants. I don’t know the situation. So I can’t say for certain. But my guess is that the problem was not that the virtual assistant that you found wasn’t good enough. It’s that you did a pretty shit job in bringing them on. And, so that, to me is the biggest problem. It’s laying out the work. I mean, you mentioned jobs to be done. We just completed a very intensive six month jobs to be done study. And for anybody who understands the protocol understands that it’s one of those things that to do in practice is unbelievably difficult and expensive. But perhaps as powerful as any customer insight research you’re ever going to do. And so the general theory for anybody listening who hasn’t heard about it, I mean, you can Google jobs to be done and read a couple good articles about it. But the general idea is, your customer hires you to to achieve a certain job right like and that’s often has very little to do with your exact product. It’s what your product helps them achieve. So in the case of like a skateboard, the job isn’t the specs of the skateboard. The job is like looking cool doing wheelies, like feeling like you’re counterculture, like that kind of thing. And there are some really interesting examples of that, like, you look at the difference between like a KitKat. And a Snickers bar. They’re both chocolate bows, right? They both sit on the shelf, but they actually serve two very different functions. Right, a KitKat bar is a candy snack. I think it was a Snickers is like a healthy snack, right? Like you pick it up on the go when you need like a healthy snack. I mean, it’s not actually healthy. You get the idea, right.
And so they actually compete in totally different markets and achieve totally different jobs. And to actively do the study. I mean, we did a lot of surveys. And then I mean, I didn’t do this, a couple members of our team did it. And then worked with a bunch of experts in that world to put it all together. But you know, a whole bunch of studies, you identify based off of those studies. 10 or so people, we ended up doing 12 People that are representative of your entire audience, and then you do super in depth interviews with them. And then you do massive amounts of data analysis based off of that, I mean, we hired statisticians. And, from there, you kind of figure out it’s like, what jobs are people actually hiring your product to do? And what categories do they fit into? And from there, you can identify very clearly okay, what language do they use? Who are your competitors because, our competitors for online training, Academy certification, which is a certification for online fitness professionals, nutrition professionals, is depending on the three jobs that people fit into that buy that certification, right, that hire us for that certification, and depending on what job they’re in, their pushes and pulls are different, the reasons why they hire us, their situation in their life is different. And the call Competition is very different. For example, one of the jobs are people who might come from another industry and just need to escape. Right, and they’ve kind of been interested in fitness their whole life. But regardless, they’re just like the pharmacist or noticed or whatever, they’re just unhappy, they got to get out of whatever they’re doing. And they think online fitness as maybe a way to achieve that. Well, at that point, it actually doesn’t really matter that it’s online fitness, they just need an escape. So we’re actually not competing against other online fitness mentorships and courses and programs and stuff like that, we’re actually competing against make money opportunities,
as opposed to people who are looking to optimize basically personal trainers who are embarrassed to call themselves personal trainers, because they feel like that doesn’t appropriately represent what they do. Well, those are people who are already doing well, but feel like they can achieve more. At that point, we’re not competing against make money opportunities, right? At that point, we’re competing against higher level institutions, these are people who are looking at doing physiotherapy degrees, master’s degrees, that type of thing. So you entire communication to each different group changes. And, so at the end of this all, you’re basically left with a report you’re left with, internal dialogues of what people say, you’re left with what they compete. And then we go when we find people in our audience who are success stories that are representative of each job, the testimonials, the words that people say that they achieved, where they were, where they are now, what they overcame, align perfectly with each job. And then we feed this to our entire team. Right. And so then we do meetings for their entire team, we report findings to our team, we produce documents for our editorial team for advertisers, and anybody who we bring on now we can hand them that document, right? And basically say, This is who you’re talking to, before you produce a piece of content, identify which job this is, where in their journey it’s going to connect with them on and how it’s going to move them one step further. And then write the piece of content around that.
Brett Bartholomew 47:14
Yeah, I think that’s, when we talk about fit. When we talk about and you did a tremendous job diving into the jobs to be done framework. we didn’t know about it, we kind of looked at I remember when somebody had told me about it a while back, I was like, okay, you know, I see kind of what the point is here. And we did the same thing, which I think you found highly valuable. We had a third party research firm dive into our audience. This was a while back, we did it two years ago, and another time a year ago. And we were surprised. I mean, I thought a lot of my audience was still going to be strength and conditioning coaches, performance directors, because a lot of the job to be done for that group was around building buy in and communication and confidence with these folks, because they really wanted to be able to you know, some of them thought they wanted communication. But really what they wanted is more confidence or the ability to get people on the same page because that decrease the level of inadequacy they felt and or they didn’t try to super overcompensate with, you know, typical kind of meet head strength coach behavior, but the data spit back No, like you have a lot of leaders of different organizations, because we found that our our book, just like many of your 11 books have spilled over into other industries, we found tattered
Jonathan Goodman 48:19
Isn’t that cool when that happens, how that happens? Well, like you would have never expected it.
Brett Bartholomew 48:23
It made me evolve. And I know I make a lot of people probably angry because there’s still people it’s like music, right? There’s a lot of people that just want me to be the old me. And they’d love if I did nothing but podcasts on training and this but the reality is, is now we have leaders and educators in tech and finance. So we talk about these things. And then I’m like, Oh, we’re not doing the job at that point in time that we need to, we need to start speaking to leaders, because when they say they want communication help, you know, they’re really saying a lot of it, we want better decision making conflict resolution, I want to feel more confident on the fly improvising, what have you. And so I thought you laid that out extremely well did most of your staff. I mean, I’d have to imagine that’s enlightening to them. But some of them they get overwhelmed by the information at all.
Jonathan Goodman 49:06
Our general manager who led the charge, and actually were he’s writing the blog post for HBO right now for Harvard Business Review right now based off of it has done a really, really good job in educating us all. You know, we spent a lot of time as a team going over the results start to finish in a lot of detail. And so yeah, I mean, at the beginning it was but you know, we had assignments for team members to not just look at our results but look up the protocol and the theory and why it’s important and stuff before we started getting into results and then part of the result is actually like almost like character coaching panels of each job that youthat you’re complaining and what you find, I mean to your point, and I didn’t mention this in my little spiel about it about what we kind of discovered but what you find is that demographics is like, kinda useless. And even, I mean, psychographics is good, but it doesn’t come close to telling the whole story. Because what you find when you do this is that two people who hire your product for the same reason could be an entirely different, I mean, you could have a 20 year old and a 60 year old, who live in I mean, these are real examples of ours, one of them lives in Nambia. The other one lives in the United States
Brett Bartholomew 50:24
incredible,
Jonathan Goodman 50:25
and they actually hire a product and buy our product for the same reason. Yeah. And one’s in the fitness industry, and one is not. Right, and they hire the product for fundamentally the same reason. Right? And so, you know, it really matters very little, what your audience looks like, what matters is where they are in life. And, and what you find is there will be a few very distinct patterns, like, likely no more than three reasons why people hire your thing, like everybody fits into these categories. And so then you’re like, Okay, well, I, you know, I’m not going to, you want to showcase diversity and thinking your materials and, you know, we have checklists to make sure that everything that we produce is, is accurately representative of a diverse audience, you know, from a design standpoint, and an editorial standpoint, but like, we don’t do that, because we feel like having a picture of a black woman and an Indian man, and a white teenager is gonna, like sell better. You know, I always love the Toronto Transit Commission here in Toronto, the TTC, like, basically a subway, every single advertisement has some combination of an older Indian man, a black woman, and a white, gray haired guy. Like literally every single one. Just like in every ad, right? You know, we don’t, that doesn’t actually matter. If you understand why people buy that much. From a marketing standpoint, I think it’s very important from a representative standpoint,
Brett Bartholomew 52:04
Sure. Yeah, that’s a whole nother thing. So within that, you’ve gotten yourself into it. Now, everybody listening knows that we don’t pre script these shows. And but I am going to, I got two more semi difficult questions. One’s more fun, difficult. And then one kind of laid back one that I just think is fascinating about you and your life. And I really admire and then we’ll get you on your way. But given that, that you’ve talked about jobs to be done, you’ve talked about what people are really wanting? And here’s your Hot Seat question. You’re on the podcast, right? And I know you’re very selective, and you’re very cautious and, you’re very pointed about how you choose your time. So what was the job to be done of getting on this podcast? What are three reasons why this podcast?
Jonathan Goodman 52:48
i selfishly wanted to hang out with you a little bit.
Brett Bartholomew 52:53
I appreciate that. Likewise
Jonathan Goodman 52:55
you and I met on a group call about how to say no to things in the fitness industry a while back, and then we had a couple conversations now that had a chance to go deep. So that’s been super fun for me. And to be honest, like that’s like, I mean, I say that a bit in jest, but like it’s kind of true. You know, like, if they’re really good people who do something that you find interesting, it is always a net positive to go deeper and build
Brett Bartholomew 53:23
Agreed wholeheartedly.
Jonathan Goodman 53:24
I mean, it’s just unquestionably the best use of your time. That’s number one. Number two is, I mean, look, one of the main things I’m trying to promote as our podcast called The online trainer show. And so I mean, that’s, you know, if you’re into online fitness, you’re interested at all in online fitness. Yeah, so I mean, that’s, you know, getting on podcasts that have good listenership for sure. And, and not just high numbers, I’m not as interested in high numbers, I’m looking for podcasts, with people that just, they have audiences that they’ve built a lot of rapor that they’ve built a lot of trust. You know, I always say like, I’ll give away books to any conference with 100 to 150 people that attended, I’m not interested at all in conferences with 10,000 attendees, right? Because the people who go to seminars and conferences that are 150 people, pre selected to be the types of people that go and seek out that type of information that way more serious about what they do, they’re going to invest in a continuing education more, and they’re probably going to be more successful and in the career for a lot longer in the fitness industry, you know, obviously, trainer burnout and turnovers is way too high. And so, that’s another one. And then the third is just I mean, your audience, you know that many like fitness business podcasts, like most of them are pretty crappy to be honest. And they’re just tiny and whatever. So looking for podcasts that have been doing it for a little bit of time. You mentioned Seth Golden, like I remember seen somewhere. I don’t know if this is true or not, but Seth Godin would appear on any podcast that asked him to be a guest. As long as they’ve done over 100 episodes.
Brett Bartholomew 55:08
Yeah, that was true. I mean, there’s one thing we want, I want to acknowledge, and I appreciate the clarity and honesty and all those three points. I love those answers. And it’s ironic, because, you know, you called it a fitness business podcast, which I would have never attributed that. But then looking at our demographic knowing that, you know, almost half of it really is business tech, other things not even to do with performance or fitness. And then, you know, we still do have that base. That is, ironically, that is a super accurate description. But another thing that I appreciated about, you know, having you on is we try to ask thoughtful questions, and I’m not able to do that all the time. You know, we try to make sure that these discussions are very free and open. We don’t script them. But man, talk about, have you ever I mean, I’m sure you’ve been on podcasts where it’s like, they did no research, and they don’t seem to care about you as a person. So you know, it just question after question after question. Did you hear anything I said there about, you know, segmenting our audience and all these things, or did you just have a list you want to go to. have you, imagine you have those plenty of those experiences?
Jonathan Goodman 56:10
Well, I did one podcast two weeks ago, we actually wrote about it in a newsletter that’s going on on Sunday, because it was such a negative experience. It’s like a reasonably well known podcast, this guy has been around for a long time. And he canceled on me the first time, which is fine, like stuff comes up. I get that. The second time he showed up 20 minutes late. Hey, go and I just told him, you know, let’s say that the podcast was for noon, whatever, I just, and he shows up at like 20 12:20. And, I just said to him like alright bro like I’m more than happy to go but just say no, I’ve got a hard stop at one. I’m recording another podcast. He’s like, Oh, we want a very much time then. Like, you were the one who was late.
Brett Bartholomew 56:48
That’s my like, one of our jobs to be done for you guys is we want people to you to get off and be like, that was actually a thoughtfully oriented interview where somebody what wasn’t even an interview, it was a discussion, the discussion. Right.
Jonathan Goodman 57:00
And so the final part of this, that’s the kicker with this guy is and then the next thing you said before we recorded, it’s a cool, man. So you know, my buddy? Column, Jim, you know, recommended you for the podcast. You know, he said that you were good guests with them. That’s awesome. And I trust him. I’m sure this is gonna be awesome. So like, what do you do? What? Yeah, you didn’t you were 20 minutes late, you could have been 22 minutes late to google. You know?
Brett Bartholomew 57:31
Well, I’ll tell you what, on the other end, and here’s behind the scenes, when we have guests on, you know, sometimes we’ll listen to interviews, they’ve done other places. And sometimes it gets painful. And again, I’m well aware, our podcast is imperfect, you know, but it’s just sometimes just care more like care about the person. And you’re gonna have off days as a interviewer and things like that. But, you know, giving you a soft toss one to end on and then you know, we’ll share your links and everywhere that people can reach out to you. But one thing I admire and I respect about you is how you travel and how you’ve designed your life around your family. Now, it’s very easy to get on and talk about the business as we build the books we’ve written, the money you’ve made, and God knows you’ve done a lot of those things. And it’s been phenomenal. But you’ve talked a lot about values here. You’ve talked a lot about clarity here. You’ve talked a lot about relationships here, and you even talked about risk, what I want to know as your attitude towards risk, and of course values. I think that’s an obvious one, or even failure in any way influence your attitude towards travel and exploring the world with Calvin and Allison.
Jonathan Goodman 58:33
Yeah, that’s not a softball question, man. I played co Ed Bo league softball, okay, it’s a lot easier than this question. because I played I played high school ball like baseball was like the sport that I was good at. So like, co Ed, self team, pitch softball was pretty easy for me, right? This is harder than
it hasn’t changed. I mean, look, the yoed stick changes, right? I mean, I think risk profiles are fascinating. You know, when I started my business spending $5,000 on a website was, you know, a big decision. Well, now, like, we can invest half a million dollars in an idea. And like, if it doesn’t work at all, and it goes horribly wrong, like that would suck. But we’d live to fight another day. And I think that’s the most important thing about risk is 100%, you should take risks, you should, I believe very strongly in making every decision in a way that maximizes potential gain and minimizes potential risk. And so if you can understand that you’re going to lose more times and you win, but your losses should be relatively small and your win should be big. So if you’re going to make a bet, make sure that the potential win from that bet is going to outweigh all of the losses that you could make. Right? And that’s just a good way to kind of look at it and then the second A piece of that is, and that’s kind of the anti fragile approach. And then the second piece of it is, make sure no matter what, whatever you do isn’t going to take you out of the game if it doesn’t work, because the worst thing you can ever do is get taken out of the game. Yeah.
How does that affect to travel and stuff like that? I think I mean, you know, for anybody listening like my family, and I, my wife and I, you know, we have a two year old son so he’s been with us for the last couple years have spent four to six months out of the country every year for the last seven years. This past year, we spent eight months abroad where we lived in Mexico for three months squeeze for two months, we lived in Montenegro for three months, we made stops in Serbia, Albania, like I spent my two year wedding anniversary hiking in the Alps in Albania with my wife. And so you know, running a business doing that, which is pretty cool. And, then we came back, and we moved into the first house that I’ve ever owned. And to give you an idea, I mean, we moved into a house with a walk in closet, and I hung up my three T shirts and put my backpack in the corner, and I said, shit, I guess we gotta buy a spoon. And so, but here’s the thing, like, you know, we spent seven years traveling the world, I mean, we’ve, I define living as being in a single place in a single house for at least a month or more. We’ve lived in 10 countries. And, and so all of those experiences, has shown me iniquity unequivocally like, where we want to be, and what’s really important for us, and what kind of stuff matters and what kind of stuff doesn’t matter to us, because I’ve packed up my life into a backpack, two to three times a year, every year for the last seven years, that forced assessment of what you want to own and what you doesn’t, what you don’t want to own has, has really helped us shape how we live. And then when we went to buy a house, you know, we realized that financial, I mean, I believe kind of that it’s actually a bad financial decision to own your own house. But I still own my own house, because I weighed the financial consequences against just how much it means to us personally, to have a home to raise a family. And, we decided to buy a house. And so the type of house we bought the area, we bought it and we could live anywhere in the world. I mean, we’ve lived, I’ve lived on two islands in Hawaii, I’ve lived on islands. And in in Thailand, I’ve lived in Mexico, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, you know, to Montenegro. Right. And, where we ended up buying a house is less than a 10 minute walk from my sister and my parents. And I’ll tell you, man, it’s plus, it’s perfect. It’s the best decision I’ve ever made in my life. hands down.
Brett Bartholomew 1:02:49
I think that takes everything you’ve talked about, you know, you can have all these experiences, all these resources, all these things go all these directions, but ultimately, it’s where the values are, that will take you back to where you want to be. So you can provide the most value to other people and in turn, feed your soul as well. Right?
Jonathan Goodman 1:03:05
And not make decisions early on that lock you into constraints that are potentially damaging this idea that you should buy a house fairly young, because it’s a good financial decision. Maybe it is, I would have more wealth today, if I bought a condo, like many of my friends when I was 21 or 22 years old, because the Toronto market is just insane. But I would probably be much less happy. Because I had no idea I had no context in which to put my decision to have where I should live. Even if I pick the right spot, which would have been lucky, it would have been, I would have always had that grass is greener,I’m feeling. And so this idea that we have to make all these decisions that lock us into life positions very early before we know very much about life, I think is really, really damaging ourselves like university the same way, right? 17 years old, you’re telling me that I should go to university for four years, without having any idea about you know, and then you go through that. And then you go through maybe a post grad or whatever it is, and you get a professional degree. And you come out of school in that debt. With all of that sunk cost of all of that time, man, it’s hard to get away from that if that’s not the right thing for you.
Brett Bartholomew 1:04:23
Yeah, one a lot of you fall into the norms of an industry. I mean, I remember I got way with my career as a strength coach, I had gotten chided because I did experience at in the team side at the University of Nebraska and then private sector. And I just remember whenever I go, I want to experience in all of them. And because I’m like they have something to teach you and it’s helped me later in life because even though I didn’t have one experience for 5 10, you know, 15 years one place, I had diverse experiences and they all taught me something else about myself and what have you but we have a field where a lot of the base I mean a lot of young coaches listening and and I’m sure there’s other industries that do it too. We have a lot of lawyers that was into the show, they get into one kind of thingnow my buddy who’s in contract law, right? That’s not as easy to flip. But when I hear coaches say, when I hear coaches say, Oh, I just want to work for a pro team, I’m like, for how long? 75? You know, till you’re 65? Like, what’s really the goal here? And how do you know that you’re gonna feel the same way. But we’re all guilty of it, we all get our sights set on some form of early specialization. And that’s why I asked the travel question. Travel does just what you said it makes you look at constraints and horizons, and experiences and yourself in a different way.
Jonathan Goodman 1:05:28
And you see all of these, I mean, we lived in the Nicoya Peninsula in Uppsala, which for anybody who knows anything about the blue zones is one of the famous Blue Zones, like one of the places in the world where people live longer. And you see how people live, you see how people do their thing out there. And it’s not that they have more money, it’s not that they have better food, cleaner food, that their diets are different, that they exercise more, it’s that they maintain a sense of purpose. That’s it. That’s literally it.
Brett Bartholomew 1:05:56
I love it.
Jonathan Goodman 1:05:57
you lose your sense of purpose. That’s, you’re done,
Brett Bartholomew 1:06:00
and you’re lost. And I need to keep my sense of purpose of getting you out on time. So talk to us about where we can find everything. Everything’s gonna be linked in the show notes. The whole crowd knows about we have a very action oriented audience, so it’s not wasted breath. Where would you want them to go? And how can they continue to be a part of your journey and everything going forward?
Jonathan Goodman 1:06:20
Yeah, I mean, Online trainers show if you interested in online fitness, it’s kind of like a half comedy podcast, half business podcast, because I think learning should be fun. So you want to have some fun and learn some stuff about online fitness with us there. That’s called the online trainer show. You go to onlinetrainer.com/podcast. And then online trainer Academy, the instant no certification, where we were the first people to teach online fitness training, where we’ve helped more people than everybody else put together I’ve written the only textbook on the subject. And and we’d love to help you too, if there’s anything you interested in. So that’s onlinetrainer.com/academy
Brett Bartholomew 1:06:52
simple and guys, you know, definitely support we talked about it all the time support our guests, but, you know, I highly relate to a lot of things Jonathan’s doing. We’re one of the only people in the communication leaders leadership space, trying to revamp this so support people doing unique things and trying to provide value to your life. Jonathan, thank you so much for coming on.
Jonathan Goodman 1:07:10
It’s fun, buddy. Thank you.
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