On this week’s episode of Conversational Selling, our guest is Wendy Thomas, Founder of Wendy Thomas Coaching. Wendy is a corporate and personal coach with a positive and infectious energy that inspires people to become more engaged, productive, and successful. Her Thinking into Results program helps businesses make changes that lead to positive growth and allows individuals to become stronger, more connected, leaders for tomorrow. Her passion is contagious and her insight into mindset helps her clients realize their full potential.
Mindset impacts all aspects of our life and business, especially when times are tough. How are our conscious and subconscious minds connected to the world around us? How do our subconscious thoughts impact our body, behavior, and results? Can a pessimist become an optimist? And, can we have control over our success through the types of thoughts we invest our energy in? Wendy discusses her answers to each of these questions and shares further insights into the following:
- The ability to influence outcomes through our mindset
- The importance of having big dreams
- How to reset a negative mindset
- And more
Wendy is a real yes-you-can gal. Yes, you can control your mindset. Yes, you can dream big and achieve it. Yes, you can realize your full potential. Positivity wins every time; listen now!
Mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Voiceover: You’re listening to the Conversational Selling Podcast with Nancy Calabrese.
Nancy Calabrese: Hi everyone. It’s Nancy Calabrese, and it is time for Conversational Selling, the podcast where sales leaders and business experts share what’s going on in sales and marketing today, and it always starts with the human conversation. Joining us today is Wendy Thomas, Founder of Wendy Thomas Coaching. Wendy is an inspiring corporate and personal coach who helps individuals and teams realize their full potential through a change in mindset. Her Thinking Into Results program will help businesses grow and make permanent changes in their habits and behaviors. And it will create stronger, more connected leaders for tomorrow. Now, prior to launching Wendy Thomas Coaching, Wendy spent 18 years in financial services working at Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and FactSet. And most recently, Wendy led FactSet Canada in developing effective strategies for growth, talent acquisition, team building and operational effectiveness. Mindset impacts all facets of our life, especially in sales, and especially when times get tough. And I’m so excited to hear what Wendy has to say about the benefits and necessity of a positive mindset. Welcome to the show, Wendy.
Wendy Thomas: Oh, thank you, Nancy. It’s so lovely to be here today.
Nancy: Well, we are excited. I think mindset has played played such an important role, especially in the past year. And I know that we’re going to get into that more deeper. But what why don’t we begin by talking about your incredible corporate experience? And how that led you to open your own business?
Wendy: Sure. Thanks, Nancy. I’ll start back in year 2000. Back in the.com boom era. I was graduating from Duke University. And the reality is I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I didn’t know which industry to go into. But what I knew that I wanted at the time was to be in an organization that had amazing people and great energy about it. And as luck would have it, Bloomberg, the financial media company were recruiting on campus. I was lucky enough to get an interview on campus through Bloomberg. A couple of weeks later, they flew me to their corporate headquarters in New York. And I don’t know if anyone on the audience has been to a Bloomberg office. But it is pretty spectacular, amazing food courts, koi fish ponds, I felt like I was in an incredible like airport terminal. And I looked around and I said, sign me up. I want to be part of this amazing organization, I could just feel the energy, I wanted to be around a young and diverse group of people.
And again, as luck would have it, I got an offer from Bloomberg. And little did I know at that time, but that offer would lead me down an almost 20 year career in financial services. So I spent 11 years at Bloomberg covering some of their biggest customers in the northeast and Canada. And at the time, I met my now Canadian husband, who spoke so highly of Canada and raising a family in Toronto. So I decided with my husband to move up to Toronto 10 years ago, when I resigned from Bloomberg. And when I came to Toronto, I got a call from Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg’s biggest competitor. And they asked me to be part of their growing organization here in Toronto. So I spent four years at Thomson Reuters again, really loving sales really loving, connecting to people, you know, just thriving in that environment. And after four years there, I got a call from my old boss of Bloomberg. He’s a big mentor to me, and recruit, he recruited me to run the FactSet Canada office.
And I think I had massive imposter syndrome at the time. I think so many people on this podcast can relate to feeling like an imposter. I had two young kids at the time and felt that I couldn’t do it. But having a mentor and somebody believe in you is so critically important to succeeding in the corporate world because he inspired me and, you know, he encouraged me to join FactSet and to run their Canadian operation, and it was the best decision I’ve made in my corporate career. Because for the next three years, I felt that I was, you know, firing on all cylinders. I had an amazing career. I had executive sponsorship, and we really grew the Canadian office. And I always say how do you manage a professional high was an all time personal low.
Because two days before my 40th birthday on Friday, January 26, 2018, to be exact, I remember the day, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. And I sat in front of the radiologist, who told me that I had an angel that was looking out for me, because I thought that I’d found something on my right hand side, she came in and said, you found something on your right hand side, but there’s nothing there. There’s something on your left hand side. And I know in that moment that my late father had, you know, inspired me and I had this intuition that something wasn’t right. And my late father had always said, with adversity, there’s an opportunity. And I just had his words in the back of my mind. And I thought, what is this message? What is this meaning? So it was a frightening couple of days, weeks and months ahead. Three surgeries later, and happy to say that I’m cancer free. But I will never forget how lucky I was to have gotten ahead of a cancer monster.
Because if I hadn’t followed my intuition, things would have been very different. What the cancer diagnosis really allowed me to do was to think about my life and to dig deep and understand like what I been good at. So I took some time off of the summer for my surgery. And I started to study myself and really think, what have I been good at, in the last 20 years? I’ve loved being in the corporate world, I’ve loved working with three amazing companies. But what I’ve been really good at is my ability to connect to people and inspire them with my positive and infectious energy. And what I noticed that when I inspired people with my positive energy, they felt good about themselves. And when people feel good about themselves, they feel inspired, if all excited, if engaged and ultimately product productive.
So with productivity that drives revenue, and then, you know, think further, and that ultimately led me down the road of, you know, starting my own coaching business, I realized that nothing would ever be as scary as what I’ve been through in the last year. And I’d always wanted to do my own business. And I thought now is the time. So at the end of 2018, I resigned from FactSet, which was a very hard decision, because I absolutely loved my time there. And I started my own coaching business in 2019. So a bit of a long story, Nancy, but here I am I’m incredibly passionate about what I do. And I love helping people realize their true potential through a change in mindset.
Nancy: Yeah, what your passion comes through for sure. And passion, to me is contagious. When the audience goes to your website, you got some wonderful quotes on it. And one in particular, I really love: think of your thoughts like veggies at a mind market, you get to pick what you take home. Tell us more about that. How did you come up with that?
Wendy: Well, you know, it’s so true. Because, you know, we our thoughts are dictated by the world around us. And it’s so easy, you know, to be consumed by the thoughts that we have in our mind every single day, because we become what we think about most, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed that sometimes a simple email can really trigger you to have a bad day or something that somebody said to you, you internalize it. And through my mindset work, I’ve learned very quickly that we become what we think about most, and then our mind is connected to the world around us. So our conscious mind is connected to our five senses. And our subconscious mind has no ability to reject thoughts, it just accepts thoughts. So whether they’re negative or positive, our subconscious mind takes in all that energy, and then that energy impacts our body, our body impacts our behavior, and our behavior impacts our results.
So sometimes you can actually track your results back to, you know, various things that you were thinking, if you look at it conversely, if you having, you know, a positive day, it’s because things are going well, you got a great email, it was a wonderful conversation. You know, you can really have the ability to influence your outcome by the thoughts that you actually choose to invest in. Your subconscious mind, again, has no ability to reject thoughts. So you have to select the thoughts that you want to become invested in, like the veggie markets, you know, you choose which ones you want the rotten vegetables or the good fruit.
Nancy: Right. I’ve always found that some people just seem to be born optimists, while others are born pessimists. I mean, is it? Is it possible to be too optimistic? I mean, and can pessimists learn to become optimists?
Wendy: Yeah, that’s a good point. I am. You know, I don’t think you can be optimistic all the time. I think you have to be, you know, realistic, but I think that you should also be able to, you know, turn pessimistic thoughts into optimism as well. Because the reality is the world is just how we perceive things, everything can be turned back to how you actually see a situation. So for example, you know, like this pandemic, it’s been a year, it’s draining, it’s scary. There’s so many pessimistic things and scary things about it.
But at the same time, if you look at it through a different lens, that’s using your higher mental faculties, which we call perception, you can think about all the good things that have come out of it, that, you know, it’s really brought out the human elements in people, it’s allowed us to connect with people all over the world through virtual technology, there’s, you know, good things about it, people have had to innovate and, and pivot. So again, there’s a negative and we’re stuck in this pandemic, but at the same time, you can look for the optimism there. I don’t know if I answered your question. Or if I went on to much of a tangent, nancy. Sorry.
Nancy: Do you have any tips? So you know, in a typical day, we all like to think it’s all good, always gonna go our way. And the reality is, we’re going to be thrown some punches from time to time were some hurdles. So if you go into your day, knowing, okay, I’m going to be positive. What are some tricks, so that if you do get a wedge in your day, you can quickly get out of it? Do you have any recommendations?
Wendy: Yeah, absolutely. So I think the biggest thing is to realize you can actually just stop what you’re doing. Move aside, grab a cup of coffee, have a cup of tea, and just pause for a moment when you want to close your eyes and realize that you can stop what you’re doing for a minute. The next thing is to write out what you’re grateful for. We hear a lot of talk about gratitude these days. But the importance of gratitude is so big, especially in the pandemic, because when you start to write out the small things that you’re grateful for, whether they’re, you know, simple things that you take for granted every day, like a hot cup of coffee, or mindful moments, just writing those things out it immediately lifts your vibration, and you start to feel like a lot more at ease. That’s one of the tips.
And the other tip I would suggest is you having a big goal. So many people don’t actually have you know, goals. And when you waking up every day, you need to be inspired by something. And when things don’t go right, they’re not always going to go right, if you can just stop and take a minute, close your eyes. Think about your goal and how good it would feel to actually achieve that goal. You’ll notice that your energy and your vibration, your body just lifts and you feel overall like way better about the situation, I think that it’s just about being cognizant to, you know, stop and pull your weight yourself away from that potential negative situation. And to also know that things don’t go away a lot of the times and we have to rely on our mindset to sort of push us into how we really want to feel that day.
Nancy: Yeah. So another quote you have on your website that caught my attention. Is people come here with dreams so big, they don’t always know how to achieve them. So that made me think, is it better to have smaller dreams, say one dream at a time? Or can you really have that huge dream? And how do you achieve it then?
Wendy: So I mean, I think it’s important to have multiple goals. But to have a big dream is you know, using your imagination to think about what you really, really want to do. You know, we use our, our imagination as kids so often to dream about, like the professions that we want. But as adults, we very rarely tap into our imagination. And this is what I’m talking about is is dreaming and dreaming is setting up big goals like what do you want to do in the next five years? What do you want to do in the next 10 years, you don’t have to really have to know how to get there.
But you just really have to want something so badly. And the energy of wanting something so badly can drive your momentum forward so that you do small things every single day to help you get to where you want to go. And that’s what I’m talking about with big dreams, big goals. Because if we don’t have direction, we don’t have goals. We just become a hamster on the wheel. You know, we become a play thing to what other people want us to do. And before you know it, a couple of years have gone by and you’re like oh my gosh, what was I doing two years ago, I don’t even remember I’ve just been this hamster on a wheel. And suddenly, you know, you’re at the 10 year point where you don’t even you haven’t set a goal but without making that conscious decision. It’s very easy just to get caught up in that wheel.
Nancy: Yeah, you are definitely the yes, you can gal. I love it.
Wendy: I’m glad that my infectious enthusiasm is able to shine through on this podcast because I, I believe there’s just an opportunity in so many different situations. And, you know, again, with the pandemic is hard as it’s been, there have been many opportunities. And it’s about how you pivot and how you innovate and what you do with fear, right? Fear drives us so often.
Nancy: Yeah, you know, when we spoke before the podcast about how some just froze deer in headlights and others just forged forward. And here we are, a year later. And I really, really believe that those that continue to focus on the positive and do the activities that were necessary, have come out of it stronger, right? Whenever we’re faced with adversity, we usually come out the other side stronger. So I think I’m sticking with the yes, you can gal, for sure. You know, we’re we’re at the end of our program. And you know, I just want you to share one takeaway that you’d like to leave the listeners with?
Wendy: Yeah, sure. I think, you know, my biggest takeaway is that we should really be conscious of the impact of thoughts have on our results, and to choose our thoughts wisely. Because if we don’t make a conscious decision to choose our thoughts, before we know it, they’ve impacted our productivity. We’ve invested at a subconscious level with thoughts that don’t feel good, and it’s very easy to be stuck in a negative vibration. So that’s the takeaway, I would say, you know, we become what we think about most. And another takeaway I want to add is the importance of goals, setting, you know, short term goals, long term goals, so that you’re driving your own bus. Otherwise, you’re giving control to the outside world to drive your overall happiness and circumstance.
Nancy: Yeah, a most important how can my audience find you?
Wendy: Sure, Nancy. So, I have a website. It’s www.wendythomascoaching.com. I’m on LinkedIn. And I’m also on Instagram. So follow me at Wendy Thomas Coaching.
Nancy: Yeah, well, I you know, for all of my listeners, when you do need a dose, or an uplift, I really recommend that you reach out to Wendy. I want to thank Wendy you especially for being on the show and everyone for listening and have a fantastic sales day and remember, positive wins every time.
Voiceover: The Conversational Selling Podcast is sponsored by One of a Kind Sales. If you’re frustrated that you don’t have enough leads or your sales team complains that they just don’t have enough time to prospect, we can help. To work with Nancy and her team one on one to help you manage your sales team, install her proven outbound sales process and create more bottom line results, email her now at Nancy@oneofakindsales.com. To learn more about Nancy and her outbound sales secrets, grab your free copy of her book, The Inside Sales Solution at oneofakindsales.com/book.
