Episode #46 – Why You Should Focus On What You Want, Not What You Need With Joseph Drolshagen

 

How do you ignite passion in your life? By focusing on what you want, not what you need. Christine McKay’s guest in this episode is Joseph Drolshagen, Professional Development Coach, Author, and Speaker. Joseph confides in Christine about his journey from working at a job he didn’t like to a career he always wanted to have. Join in the conversation and discover the power of shifting your mindset to growth. Stop blaming others for failed expectations in your life. What you need to change are the limiting narratives you impose on yourself. Tune in and get what you want!

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Why You Should Focus On What You Want, Not What You Need With Joseph Drolshagen

We have with us Joey Drolshagen. Joey is a Personal and Professional Development Coach, Author, and Professional Speaker. He has an amazing story and had years of experience in sales. He works with business owners, executives and small businesses to help them elevate their sales and improve their overall position in the market.

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Joey, thank you for being here with me. I really appreciate it. How are you?

I’m doing great, Christine. It’s my honor. When we talked, I was like, “I cannot wait for us to have this conversation here.” I’m excited.

Tell us about your journey. I never read somebody’s full bio. Tell us how you’ve ended up here and what are some of the cool things you’re working on?

I have a 28-year career in Corporate America. I started out back on a drafting board and went all the way up with degrees, everything up to a Vice President of Sales. I didn’t plan on this, Christine, but I specialize in helping companies that were either in bankruptcy or going into bankruptcy to come out the other side and back into profitability. I learned and I grew a lot. I got to do a lot of things and everything I do is mindset. When we talk about growing that mindset, growing those abilities of what to achieve beyond what we at one point think we’re able to achieve and coming out with that has been an incredible journey.

Now, the Corporate America wasn’t my passion. From the time I was 22 years old, I heard a gentleman by the name of Jack Boland speak. I don’t know what he said but it just lit this fire right in my soul to inspire and motivate people to live better lives. The last company I worked with several years ago, once we got back into profitability, we got new ownership, and they plugged millions of dollars into the organization to upgrade everything to where it needed to be, I said, “Now I want to live my life my way. I want to live it by my design.”

I’ve been a continuous student despite of things since I was 22. I have multiple certifications, clients and successes in what I do. That time, my dad passed away, my mom passed away a year later and I found myself without either one of my parents in a very short period of time. It’s like, “I don’t want to live like that anymore. I want to take this step out.” I got three clients I started working with and I resigned. I moved to the mountains of South Carolina, bought a house where I’ve always wanted to live, and I’ve been going forward ever since. It’s just been an incredible journey.

 

I love those kinds of stories. Tell us about some of the clients that you’re working with. Of course, don’t disclose anything because we never want to do that. Tell us about some of the work that you’re doing. I want to come back to this bankruptcy thing because that is a fascinating angle and we talked a lot about that when we had our earlier conversation.

I only work with seven clients at a time. I don’t knock it at all, but I know there are coaches that herd 150 people through their programs and things like that. I don’t operate like that. I have a system that we follow, it’s scientific, and it’s been proven to help people to achieve what it is they want to achieve. For instance, one of the clients I’m working with. When we met, he had three jobs. His favorite area that sparked his life was real estate. That wasn’t the real estate buying and selling things or listing and selling. It was real estate investing. In the time we’ve been working together, he is at a point now where he’s letting go of the two of the positions that he had so he can step fuller into the real estate.

Through the processes that we’re doing is he’s having opportunities coming up. Now, all of a sudden, he went from trying to list houses and find buyers for houses was any effort he put into it. His third priority in the three jobs he had is having buyers and sellers showing up to him having opportunities to do property management, showing up for him to have opportunities for investing, flipping some houses, refurbing them, and things like that. All these things are happening, and it’s through following this process.

I have another one of my clients who I’ve been working with for a little while now. She’s 67 years old. She’s retired from teaching. When we met, she said, “I feel like I’m just waiting to die. I have no enthusiasm.” I’ve taken her through my Life Ignited program and we’ve gone through the program. As a result of that, that sparked an interest. She loves animals, so she started a company where she watches people’s pets. She’ll go to them or they’ll come to her and watch them. She travels the different places. She’s setting up hubs in five different areas of people who can operate within her business. She’s coming right out of the gate, almost with something similar to a franchise. It’s so much more than pet watching and stuff.

I had another client of mine a couple of years ago who came to me and she was totally burned out on teaching and such. She just couldn’t do it for another year and things like that. She ended up purchasing a short bus, converting it to a hair salon, retired from teaching, and went out. She goes to industrial parks and pulls in. People walk out of their office, get their hair cut and walk right back into their office. She bought a larger bus within a year and put a boutique in the front so women could go out there, shop, get their hair cut and then walk right back into work. We are capable of such incredible things in our life. This is where it fits right in with negotiations. What happens is we let the fears, doubts, and things like that step up and we negotiate a loss before we ever take a step into it.

I talk a lot about how the hardest part of any negotiation is the negotiation we have between our ears. As soon as we want something, emotion engages before logic always. When we get emotionally involved in what we want an outcome to look like, we start regulating ourselves in our own head, and we start saying, “If I ask for that, that customer is going to walk out the door. If I do this, I’m not going to get treated as well. If I ask for this much from the investor, they’re going to say no.” We tell ourselves these stories that are not true.

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It’s that negotiation we have with ourselves. I don’t know if you had a chance to read my episode with Nicole Kalil or with Jillian Michaels because we talk about that. In those two episodes, we talk about how negotiation with ourselves is what prevents us from asking for more of what we want. We do that one because we’re afraid of being rejected and being judged. In negotiation, we also have this dual issue where we don’t trust our counterpart.

God forbid we asked for too much, right?

Absolutely.

We minimize what we’re doing. From a private standpoint, I have an adult son. I absolutely adore him and stuff. A few years ago, I bought him a car. I’m in South Carolina and he’s in Michigan going to school. I brought the car to him and the whole thing was he had to sell the car he had. Everything I do is surrounding visions and what’s possible because you build exactly that mindset. You start building what that is. I’m driving up there and he calls me up, and he goes, “Dad, I can’t believe it. Somebody is coming to look at the car tomorrow and I haven’t even advertised it.” I go, “That’s awesome,” and he goes, “Yeah.” The next thing he said was, “He’s a mechanic. He’s going to find everything wrong with it and only offer me a couple of hundred dollars for the car.” That’s what you’re talking about right there. That’s exactly what happened.

At that point, even what we want fades to scraps of what’s possible for us in that emotional process of that happening. Thank God I do the work I do because I could digest that, and I go, “Joey, let’s walk through this. What facts do you have? The only fact you have is that somebody has come and he’s a mechanic. That’s all you know, but you’ve driven your story right into the ground-based on those two items.” He goes, “Wow.” We walk back through and get him pumped, back into the vision of it and everything. What do you want to get for the car? What do you want that to go? He goes, “I want to go to somebody who’s really going to use it and it’ll be perfect for them.” He got back into it. The guy came the next day, looked at the car, it was a $1,500 car, and he gave him $200 less than he was asking, and Joey was just a static.

That’s what happens right there. Having that power of somebody like what I do is the other side coming in and helping people that have visions way up here to live way up there. Early on in my sales, whenever I delivered an offer to somebody on a program or something, I would always be nervous and thinking, “I should go down.” I would drive myself down to where I’m selling things where I shouldn’t be at the 25% margin. I’d be at 16%, 18%, maybe 20% to do it. Sure they give me the job because everybody else is a 25% to 35% margin on it. Taking companies through bankruptcy teaches you to do things. It really does force you. For instance, to the best of my knowledge, I am the only person in the history of General Electric to have them write me a check for $1 million to keep producing them parts. That’s never happened before in the history of GE, and maybe it has not that I know of, though, not that we knew of as a corporation.

 

The only reason I had the guts to do that is it was because we were at that point of either something or nothing. You’re either going to close the door or you got to do something. All of a sudden, that desire to see those 300 families that work at this corporation be able to feed their family, housing, all that stuff and everything, it had a higher mark. It taught me a lot when I’m coming into conversations and up against things to look at them and what’s best for everybody that’s involved. In negotiations, it’s not just you and I. It’s everybody in your area and my area. It’s looking at that. When they say a win-win in negotiations, it isn’t one-on-one, though. It’s across that corporation or organization that whatever it is even in real estate. A house is a whole family that’s involved with it from both sides, not those people sitting at the table signing the papers.

That’s a great point because one of the things that I love talking about is the invisible negotiator at the table. There is always an invisible negotiator at the table. I have a client who is a small business, and he has a partnership with somebody and it’s really funky, weird thing. It’s very convoluted with these guys created. My client’s wife found out about it. She freaked out about it. She’s not a business person so she didn’t understand it. He couldn’t explain the rationale of it very well so she freaked out and she got super emotional about it.

She went in and fractured the relationship. Lawyers were about to get involved. It was about to get super ugly. Her husband didn’t realize that she was always at the table with him, even though she wasn’t actually at the table. Until the situation had a point where she got uncomfortable and then she inserted herself in the process, which mucked everything up. Understanding who’s that invisible negotiator at the table. You have employees and boards of directors. If you’re a smaller organization negotiating with a larger company, the decision-makers are rarely at the table. Decision-makers escalated up.

There’s that side of it. I can’t think of the name of the movie, as you were saying, that I can picture at this, two lovers are lying in bed next to each other and they’re having this conversation but all of a sudden, his mom pops up with her input and everything else, his dad, her mom and her dad pop up. A lot of the things we do and a lot of the things I work with people on is that conditioning. Our conditioning is not our fault. We weren’t born and got to check a box, I want the conditioning we want. Whether you grew up like I did, outside of Detroit, Michigan and in a low-income blue-collar family or whether you grew up as a child of the Clintons, you received that conditioning based on how you grew up. We carry that forward into everything. That’s one of the things that because of like, “Don’t be selfish. Don’t ask for too much.” That’s what causes people to have the fears.

The same things happened that I had in sales where it’s like, “I got to bring this down.” Rather than getting to that other side that says, “This is a win-win at the 25% margin because it’s allowing us to grow and expand, which means we’ll be doing better for you as we go forward, it allows you to pay a reasonable price on this and get the value or whatever else is tied to that package with that.” There is that side of things, too, the invisible conditioning that carries with us and such. People that don’t recognize that continue to go forward. The People that want this but they feel like they are always settling down in here someplace. They’ll blame the people they’re negotiating and they’re talking to. Their employers, their family, their spouses, and all this but it’s within here and the mindset. When that shifts, all of a sudden, they can literally start and quickly, if done right, start seeing that rise up to that expectation level.

I was one of the guests that I’ve had on the show before LV Randolph. He has a hedge fund, he’s out of Boston, and he’s the head of a company called Cambridge Argillite. He was talking about one of the challenges that he has. He works primarily with people of color. People of color and women often don’t ask for what they need even. If somebody is seeking funding, they go in, and they ask for something. He’ll go, “I don’t think that’s what you need,” but they’re afraid to ask for what they even need. Whereas others will come in and ask for not just what they need, but what they want, and it’ll be more than that because they need more to sustain the business.

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He’s more likely to invest in those people because if you can’t ask for what you need, your probability of being successful over the long term is actually lower. He talks about that in that episode and it was a great conversation because that we do. I love what you’re saying around conditioning. As you’re saying it and you’re describing that movie scene, I could hear my mom in my head and I can hear my dad, and those are not pretty sounds a lot of times. I have to shut those off. How do you shut them off?

That’s part of the whole thing like I talk about corporate. I learned a lot there and I was good at what I did, but it wasn’t my passion. From the time I was 22, I wanted to follow this other route. It was before there were life coaches or things like that and stuff. I didn’t know what it was at time. I thought maybe it was a pastor of a church, and I looked down that avenue, I didn’t know what it was, but my conditioning was from very early on, “A man gets a job, supports a family and hopefully lives long enough to enjoy some years in retirement.” That’s what my conditioning was. The reason I stayed in Corporate America for 28 years is because I had such a battle over that conditioning.

I’ve started multiple construction companies while I worked full time, I was a builder, I tried all these other things, and I build them up to the point of stepping off where it’s like, “I’m getting income.” I would just hit that wall. It was that wall of that conditioning. I’ve tried multiple coaching programs. I worked with multiple coaches. A lot of what I found back then was I ran into people that they wanted to help me their way, not how I needed it, so I walk away. Coaching program is going, “This must not be for me,” then I continued that process. As I said, my dad passed away. My mom and him were married 56 years, she didn’t want to be alive without him, and within a year, she passed away of natural causes, no illnesses.

I found myself alone and I was just like, “I can’t stand living this way anymore.” I can’t stand going to a job that it’s not fulfilling for me living this life the way I am. I don’t want to keep living this way. I had one of those moments in time where I was driving down the expressway, I pulled over, and I said, “God, give me any other passion. Help me be passionate about what I’m doing here in corporate.” I can’t stand living this way. It was at that begging prayer with that. I broke down and I said, “Show me a way.” After that, an opportunity showed up, I couldn’t say yes or no, and I leaned into it, then another opportunity from there showed up and I leaned into it.

Within six months of that day, I had three clients I was working with, and I resigned from Corporate America. It was scary and I still face those patterns a lot that conditioning going forward. When I moved down to South Carolina, that trip was exciting and everything, but once I was down here and settled, then it was like, “What the heck did I do?” They made it even harder because the new owners kept coming at me, and they’re going, “You can work from down there. You can do however you want to work everything else, your schedule. We don’t want you to leave the company.” I had that pull back into it that makes you question yourself even more but I knew because I’d done it for so long what serving two masters is like and it’s not a fun life for me, I just took that step and moved forward through it.

There’s a lot more to it than that with the fears and things like that but ultimately, if I’m working with somebody, the first thing I do is start with a vision, as I said. You said this and it hit his. If I’m talking to somebody and they tell me about what they need, then they’re a client. I go stop, “I don’t care about your needs. Your needs are so far below your wants. If all you do is live on your needs, you’re going to be living in struggle and want your entire life.” Let’s forget that, leave that down low, and let’s launch into what you truly desire. What would you love in your life and then move into that? If somebody is in sales and they’re working with purchasing people, I’ll tell them the same thing. Forget about what the guy needs. You’re going to get those covered in the conversation. Go after what this guy wants and go after what you’re doing is going to impact his life, family’s life, and employee’s life. Look for that because when you start filling that, the needs will automatically fill in.

 

They’re going to need the parts they need when they need them at whatever, and stuff but when you focus only on that, you cut it short. That’s was the big twist I learned. When I quit focusing on filling people’s needs, even in Corporate America, and I started looking at, “How do I make this guy have a good day?” Through this process, I would have to go to customers and double their price, get 25% to 50% down. Instead of a six-month lead time, I’d have to move it out to a year or more before they would ever see parts. Now, when you think about that, that doesn’t even fit their needs, let alone their wants but I would work with them in a way of helping, being able to supply that and such to them. Through that process, I’ve had multiple people say, “Joe, we love working with you. We hate your company because of what’s going on.” That’s what it is. When we build that with people, whatever we’re doing, we’re negotiating.

It doesn’t matter if you’re somebody is a stay-at-home mom or even my son. When my son was young, he’d get in trouble for something. He’d come up to me and he goes, “Dad, I got a deal for you,” and then his mom would go, “No, we’re not doing it.” I go, “Hold on. Let’s hear what he’s got.” If he came up with something reasonable, I go, “That makes sense. Let’s do that.” Even at any age, when we start training that part of ourselves, our life will get better. Our mindset will shift as a result of just doing that using things like that. It’s not labor, work, or effort. It doesn’t have to be. It can be fun, enjoyable, experimenting with things. I know I said a lot there, let me hone in. If anybody you’re dealing with, if you look for identifying what their wants are, you understand what their needs are and go from there. You’re automatically at a higher level. It will increase the internals of what you’re comfortable asking for then shifting that conditioning. Part of that is noticing that conditioning within you.

I tell stories like money doesn’t grow on trees. Have you heard that? That was such a huge one in my family. This is how I use it here as an example, but anybody can use these any ways to power up. I took that limiting story, money doesn’t grow on trees, and I’ve created a story, then I would practice putting that story on and expanding that story too. There’s so much financial abundance in this world that every living, breathing person could have more than they could ever use. There’d still be an unlimited supply. That money literally grows on trees because it’s paper. That started making a shift me, and each time, somebody starts making a shift within them, they’re more powerful negotiator from all sides and for everyone that’s involved with that situation, whether it’s seeing her on something.

Everybody who’s reading, I’m sitting here really having this great conversation with Joey Drolshagen. I love what you’re talking about because you hit on two big things for me. One is this discussion around wants and you’re not ignoring needs but you are putting a high value on the wants in life. In order to move forward, we have to move forward based on what we want. The other thing you’ve talked about is about understanding what your counterpart wants. That’s something that people are not effective at, especially in Western cultures.

We get so myopically focused and we are trained in conditioned that negotiation is win-lose. Even people who use the term win-win, I was taught by the professors who wrote the book Getting to Yes. I used to get into debates with them because win-win become this nudge-nudge, wink-wink, I’m going to screw you anyway. It has lost its meaning. I don’t like to use it because it also gamifies the negotiation process, which for me is negotiation is a conversation about a relationship. You can’t win a relationship, but you can get more value out of it. I love what you’re talking about. It’s not just about what your counterpart needs. It’s about what they want and that negotiating from a position of abundance. What are all the things that are possible that could get all of us more?

I just met this gentleman and I’m hoping to get him on the show named, Jason Campbell. Jason is a musician and he does meditation music. He’s been playing the piano since he was six or so. He said his first music teacher told him that, “Good musicians play and listen to the notes. Masters of music listen for what’s in between the notes.” He takes it a step further to say, “To be effective, listen for the silence between the notes.” If anybody is reading and you have a piano at home, hit one note real fast. Hit the note and take your finger off, listen to that note, linger in the air, then hit another note fast, hear how those notes combine with each other, then listen for the moment when they drop off. Negotiation is about that melding of music, finding the abundance, and how those notes combined in the middle. When you’re not hitting the note, what happens in the middle of it?

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That’s beautiful. I love to put that way. I could see it happening in conversations with relationships, customers, bankers, potential owners, and across the board. I love whenever I’m having those conversations. I’ve never liked doing it over the phone. You’re talking about there as postures are so much communicated outside of the word somebody’s speaking. That all fits into exactly what you just said. It brings that whole area to life there.

That is huge. What you’re talking about is exactly that. It’s just so powerful.

When we had the conversation, everything we’re talking about it begins negotiations. All of it begins with the mindset. I’ll work with clients and the masses way of thinking is the needs. How am I going to get to the end of this month and pay the rest of my bills? Many people live like that, maybe it’s not that area, but in some area of their life, they’re living like that based on their needs. How can I get this need met versus how can I go to the South of France and make $20,000 doing so? Before all the virus and everything, I was giving a talk someplace, and I was like, “I really want to go to Barbados, but I don’t want to pay to go there. I want to get paid to go there.” I had that thought, and I was like, “That’d be so exciting. I do what I do with the vision and things like that. I rolled it around.” That’s something your audience can take away, too, is get something you want and put it on. What it looks and feel like?

Within a month, I was doing a talk in Michigan and I was doing a workshop. Afterward, somebody came up to me and said, “Would you ever half-hour grab? I’d like to buy you lunch and talk to you about something.” I go, “Yeah.” I didn’t mention this Barbados, bless you at all to anybody ever. It was just mine. We’re talking and she wanted it to start putting together. She used to do it years ago and stopped for whatever reasons then she wanted to start doing it. She wanted to go to Barbados for a month due to fifteen-day retreats and have me as a spiritual retreat master throughout the whole thing. I would get all my flights and everything paid for. I would get paid to be there and do what I love doing, which is speaking to workshops, things like that, and everything, it came. Now, if I were leaving on, how am I going to get clients in order to pay my rent next month?

One of the things I’m loving about this episode is I always love edifying some of my past guests too, and I’m getting to talk about a lot of them. One of my guests, Andrew Kaplan. He wrote the book, The Last Law of Attraction Book You’ll Ever Need to Read. It’s really good and he has great programs because he talks about how gratitude comes into play and how a practice of gratitude. He has a thing wherein a meditation is you’re being grateful for how your body works. I remember the first time I did it, I was grateful for my spleen.

I’m like, “Whoever thinks about being grateful for your spleen?” I am. I’m very grateful for it. It does a great job. It works just fine. He talks about how gratitude can reinforce the Law of Attraction. In the conversation that we had, you’re full of gratitude for everything and you lose it. That book just came to my mind and Andrew. There are so many nuggets that Joey is talking about that literally drip into some of these other conversations, which is super cool for me, having listened to all of them and having been in them.

I want to see Wallace Wattles but I don’t think it was. There’s a quote I love and it says, “To be as grateful for it now, as you’re going to be when it arrives.” When we talk about moving from that need plateau up into that wanting, it’s to get in that place when I say about putting on the vision of what that is, what it looks like? What it feels like? Get into that place of living in the gratitude for it, even before it’s here. How grateful are you going to be when it gets here? That is the Law of Attraction. One of the areas, I bring a specialty to it is, there is so much around the Law of Attraction and what it is but a lot of times, it set up to a one-size-fit-all, and the application of it.

That’s where things like to secret fell short for me. A lot of other people that I talked to is really clear on what it is and how it works everything else. Your conditioning is different than mine. It’s different than each one of your audience members. Your patterns and paradigms are unique to you. How would you apply those? How I would work with you applying those is different than I would work with somebody else applying those. That’s where I love what I do because I get to bring in that personal unique application of those laws into people’s lives.

I’m going to introduce you to Andrew because you two will have a great conversation. His stuff is very customizable. He’s had the same reaction to the Law of Attraction that you did. It wasn’t working. He was like, “I believe it but it just isn’t working.” Everybody was trying to have you do it the same way. He’s been super creative so I think you two will have an amazing conversation.

I do too. That’s the reason I only work with seven people at a time so that I can commit into that person’s life. If somebody works with me coaching-wise, if they don’t get beyond what the major goal or changes they want to make in their life, I can give them their money back when we get done. That’s how sure I am because I qualify people upfront, so I know that it’s somebody that wants to put in, they desire that change like I did and such. If that’s the case, I know what I bring to the table with it. I know what my program brings to the table and everything I do and such. I only want to work with several people at a time so that I can dedicate that time into that person. They have my support, not just doing a once-a-week coaching session but throughout the entire program. I am so blessed that I get to have a mark in people’s lives that I get to have, and these conversations like this, right here with you made my whole day. I woke up so excited that we get to talk.

This has been awesome. How do people find you, Joey?

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The best way for people to get ahold of me is they can go to CoachWithJoseph.com, and they can schedule a block of time where that person and I’ll get on the phone. We’ll talk about what it is. I don’t charge for that call and talk about what’s going on. Help them start getting that vision sparked for what’s possible for them, what their wants are above their needs, and get some tools to start bridging that gap from that call.

I hope you guys will take advantage of that amazing offer to have that conversation with Joey. I have to say, we’ve spent a couple of hours on the phone now together. I just have enjoyed meeting you. This has been a great conversation. A lot of reinforcing things. I hope everybody reading has found this valuable. I love your energy, Joey. It’s amazing.

To everyone who has been reading, thank you so much for joining us in this episode, where we are so excited to help you elevate your negotiation skills. We look forward to seeing you next time on another episode of In The Venn Zone, and in the meantime, happy negotiation. Thank you, Joey, so much.

Thank you, Chris. It’s such an honor. With the mark you’re having on this world doing what you love doing and getting to be a part of that is a huge honor.

Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

Important Links:

• Joey Drolshagen
• Nicole Kalil – Previous episode
• Jillian Michaels – Previous episode
• LV Randolph – Previous episode
• Getting to Yes
• Jason Campbell
• Andrew Kaplan – Previous episode
• The Last Law of Attraction Book You’ll Ever Need to Read
• CoachWithJoseph.com
• https://www.Facebook.com/JADrolshagen
• https://www.YouTube.com/josephadrolshagen
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/lifes-lessons/
• https://Twitter.com/LifesLessons00

About Joseph Drolshagen