How To Master Your Life And The Wisdom Of The Enneagram With Leadership Coach John Marshall

Have you ever wondered what it would be like when you have gained mastery over your life? Think about it. Think about all the possibilities. Our guest for this episode defines mastery as the state where you can be fully aware and intentional about what to think, say, and do in every moment. Sounds great, right? But how do you get to that state? How do you master your life? That is what we’re going to learn today from John Marshall, an amazing leadership and mind-mastery coach best known for creating the world-famous Enneagram Personality Test. Whether you’re just starting out on your journey to find clarity and purpose, or you’re standing at a critical crossroads towards life mastery, there is a lot for you to unpack in this conversation. Join in!

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How To Master Your Life And The Wisdom Of The Enneagram With Leadership Coach John Marshall

I am super excited because I have a very special guest, John Marshall. He's an amazing leadership and mind mastery coach. He specializes in helping leaders and aspiring professionals master their minds so they can master their careers, relationships, and health. He's also a certified coach and a yoga and meditation teacher. He has many tools in his toolbox. One of those tools is the Enneagram Personality Test, which we are going to talk about also. How are you, John? Thank you so much for being here.

It's good to be with you. It's great to be in conversation with you. I feel like every time that we sit down, there's something that we could talk about for hours. I'm glad that your audience is going to be able to join us for this. I'm super excited. Thank you and your community for having me.

He says that because before the show, we were talking and we were getting into the flow of things and we’re like, “Let's take action and do this show because we can spend hours talking.” John and I met a few months back. Funny enough, we worked for one of my former employees, ExxonMobil. He worked there for a big chunk of his career. We had common connections, and they kept telling us, “You need to meet each other.” Finally, we were able to have some coffee, and we immediately connected.

One of the things that I love about you is how passionate you are to live your purpose, grow and give. Growing and giving are the two elements of a successful fulfilled life. I appreciate that for you. That's your biggest strength. We want to know about you because you also have an interesting background. Your career was as an engineer, and then you transition into coaching. It’s very similar to me. I'm interested to talk about that, but first, we want to know where you are from originally. What is your background?

I'm originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I’m born and raised there. It’s a small-ish town called New Kensington. I still love it. I still love going back. I have a lot of friends that are back there I catch up with almost daily. It's an amazing place to come from. Coming from there, I ended up getting a full academic scholarship to Penn State, which changed my life. When I was at Penn State, I knew I needed to make the most of this opportunity. Before I went to college, I wasn't sure what to do. It's more of a blue-collar town. You go to college, get a degree, come out, work, make money, and retire. That's the mentality around Pittsburgh.

I was good at Math and Science. It was like, “You can make money being an engineer.” I didn't know which engineering to do. Someone came to high school to give a talk and brought up energy engineering, which is what petroleum natural gas is to upstream. I was to downstream and power generation. When he came and was talking about it, I was like, “This is the new frontier because it wasn't just downstream. It was wind, solar, and geothermal. We did all alternative energies too.” I was immediately interested and that was the guy that ended up putting in my credentials and everything for the scholarship board that I ended up getting.

Thank God I went to that talk that day. It changed my life. I went to Penn State. I immediately am majoring in that. I was going to minor in Finance to get the finance side of that, but I ended up doing a double major. A lot of the classes somewhat overlapped, but I have a double major in Engineering and Energy Business finance. That was all in alternative energy, then I started working for ExxonMobil.

That was amazing. I look back on those years with Exxon. I’m blessed. Not only was it the amazing people that I met but global experiences that I hadn't had ever in my life. To get the experience to travel to a different continent and meet people from all around the world, even on campus, was something that I'm grateful for. I had a lot of business experience.

While I had Engineering and Finance degree, I was pretty much in sales and business development my whole career. There were some intense negotiations and interactions with customers, and moving off the ladder. It's the whole thing. While I'm grateful for a lot of those experiences and the exposure that they gave me, it also showed me some things that we could do better and that maybe I didn't want to be a part of. It got me to the point where it wasn't the work that I was meant to put out that I was brought here to do.

I started doing a lot of exploration. That's where it starts. When you're talking about clarity and purpose, you don't find clarity and purpose in doing what you do. It takes self-exploration and self-discovery. In order to self-discover, you have to do something that is outside of yourself and day-to-day. For me, that was yoga teacher training. That was my space to step out of what I'm doing day-to-day and take the time to explore myself and what does resonate with me. That's the first question you ask clients or even the potential client. It is something like, “What do you want?”

You don't find clarity and purpose in doing what you do. It takes self-exploration and self-discovery. You have to do something that is outside of yourself and day-to-day.

It's the hardest question to answer. It changes. What I wanted five years ago isn't what I want now. I'm like, “That's perfect. That's not going to be what I want five years from now.” We have to make sure that we're taking the time to ask the question and sit down and figure that out. Background-wise, when I was at ExxonMobil. I took my first yoga class in January of 2017. I fell in love immediately. It was the perfect balance of mind-body type of work because I've always been interested in Eastern philosophy and different schools of thought. I'd been exposed to it early on in life, yet it didn't incorporate the physical aspect of the work. I was a football player. I lifted weights. I did cardio when I had to get ready for the season.

That was the extent of the practice. Yoga to me back then was where women go to stretch. I had no idea what it was. That first practice rocked my world. I was like, “This is a fantastic workout. I feel great physically and mentally. I need to learn more about this.” I signed up for a 40 days challenge after that. I completed that whole thing. That was the first time. They do a lot of inquiry in that process. This was that big power yoga where I teach. It gives me the time to pause and think about, “What is it that I want? Am I enjoying what I'm doing right now with my life?”

These are the questions that you have to start asking yourself if you want to start living your purpose. Purpose won't find you. You have to allow it to come through. That takes pausing and quieting your mind. After that 40 days, I'm thinking, “I want to go deeper into this.” I continue practicing and doing more research. I've always been super curious. Mind is something that is the last frontier. It's the last thing that we have yet to figure out pretty much. I've always been interested in that. What makes us tick? What is the purpose? What is the thought process behind that?

Through that work, the opportunity came up to me where I can do teacher training. I was like, “Why not? Let's do it.” This whole time I'm still working full-time, many hours and long nights, “That's fine. I'm still going to take this free time that I have and go do 200 hours of training. Why not?” That all happened from August through the end of the year.

I took my first class in January 2017. I taught my first class in January 2018. I've been teaching every week since then. Yoga teacher training gave me more personally and professionally than any professional development program I'd ever been part of. The way that you stand up in front of your room, you're able to communicate yourself confidently and show up as a leader. You are leading this experience every week. How does that translate to the way you lead a meeting and lead your teams?

You carry yourself. Get mindful about what you say, think, and do. It made such a difference for me professionally. I taught at the wellness center. My students at Exxon nominated me for that EM Talk. For readers, it’s like a TEDx forum that they do at when ExxonMobil. It's broadcasted globally to the employee base. It was 80,000 at the time. The feedback that I got from that talk was incredible. I had handwritten letters and calls. Even years later, people that have run into me said, “I am where I am now because of that talk.” That was the last straw that sent me down the path of being my purpose.

There's something here that I can offer that is not something I do in my free time. This is something that I can dedicate my time toward. How did that change into coaching? It was speaking, doing these workshops, leading engagements, teaching, meditating, leading yoga, and meditation. You then start thinking of how this translates into the way that we live and work. It shows up as behavior. How do you change behavior? Coaching. It's the science of behavior change.

Humessence was born out of that. It was all thinking about like, “How do I bring the word human into this?” That story was bringing Humessence to modern business. How do we do that? Coaching psychology has to be a foundation of that. In order to bring it in, we have to change the behaviors. Humessence needs to be present in the workplace within your and across industries. It starts one individual at a time. Behavior change starts at the personal level. It starts with your why. Why is it important to you?

I didn't know about your journey even though we spent one hour in a coffee chat. We didn't talk about this. Thank you so much for sharing and for having the courage to pursue what felt right for you. We were talking before this interview about the fear of uncertainty, which stops most people, the fear of not knowing what this is going to look like, and what's going to happen. When you were talking about the time when you found your purpose when you started gaining that clarity and you start exploring yoga it felt right.

It was a feeling of, “This is it.” I wrote in my sticky note, “Having faith,” because faith is such an important part of the equation when you are exploring yourself and trying to understand what your purpose is because there is no guarantee of when you are going to find that thing that feels right. There is no certainty of a lot of things outside. One of the purposes of coaching is the self-mastery of finding that certainty within yourself. That comes with faith that things will unfold when the time is right. In this process of finding yourself, how is the process of keeping that faith and also following that courage to go from corporate to full-time entrepreneurship, which is a huge change?

We stopped right after the formation of the Humessence idea. That was after the TED Talk and everything. That was in 2019 when I did the talk. Even before that, I thought of the idea of Humessence and what that would be. It's interesting how they all intertwined. I went full-time with Humessence at the beginning of 2021. To take the leap, I formed the LLC in 2018. I had been stewing on the idea, all these different opportunities coming up. The universe was showing me reinforcing my faith by doing these opportunities on the side and all of the feedback that I was getting from pursuing that work.

To answer your question the courage in taking the leap. I love that you brought up faith. I want to add one thing to faith, which is patience. God, the universe, your plan, and your purpose do not operate on your timeline. I went to my first class in 2017 and think that was going to change the way I directed my professional career for the rest of my life. It is not. I’m going into that class, teacher training, or any other professional development courses that I chose for myself. That was going to change my path immediately. Maybe it doesn't, and it might. Being open to receiving the direction and the messages that the universe, God, or whatever you want to believe in, sends and guides you toward your purpose and helps reinstall that faith.

God, the universe, your plan and your purpose do not operate on your timeline. Faith and patience are key to discovering your purpose and clarity.

Faith and patience are key to discovering your purpose and clarity because without patience, when we have this constant, “I want to figure it out. I'm digging,” that’s a wild space for you to hear and see the subtle messages of the guidance toward your purpose, the subtle hints of the reinforcement of your faith. That takes peace of mind and some period of stillness. That's why in all of my programs, I want to have a self-awareness component towards them because there is no change, purpose discovery, or career discovery without stillness of mind and being able to see small things that come up to show you that.

The courage to take the leap, stillness and patience were a big part of that. Ultimately, when it comes down to it, it's when the fear of never having tried it at all becomes greater than the fear of failing. As soon as that happens, it goes all the way. If you can sit there and look at the ghost of the opportunity cast that's sitting by your bedside when you're dying and be happy with it, then you've explored the opportunity. If you'd be staring at that ghost and wondering, “What that would've been? Why I never did it and never took the step into there?” let the fear of that ghost sitting at your bedside send you over the edge and do it because you're going to be okay, especially if you've already gotten to the point in your career when you've done what everyone told you to do.

You've got the degree, working, and finding the ladder. Maybe you're a little upset and feel a little unaligned or misaligned with what you're doing. Great. You can always get another job. You will find something to do. You will get paid. As time goes on, will you be able to prioritize doing your vision? That's the thing. Time is the most precious resource. We can make more money with the time that we have. In many different ways, it's expanding more these days.

The ways to make money are getting more creative, but that's secondary. It's, “What are we here for?” I have three things that I live by in my coaching. You'll find it on the framework of my website in The Consciousness Development Continuum. There are three things they're worth living for. It's your contribution, connection, and creation. Some are a combination of those three things.

There are many gems and pieces of gold. You talked about faith and patience. Faith and patience, like everything else, are something that people can practice because it's not natural for most people. What is your routine to clean that connection between you and the source or you and the universe to strengthen that connection while practicing faith? What worked for you that is actionable? Maybe from the audience and saying, “I want to try doing that and see if I can be more patient and faithful.”

There are many things that you can do. I'm going to give you a couple of things that have been very cornerstones of my practice and development. Meditation is non-negotiable for me. I know we share the Vipassana experience, which is very challenging. It was eye-opening. You don't need to go away for ten days and stay at practice. You can start small. The quieting of the mind is key for letting messages, your purpose, mind, and system come to light. A lot of the time, it's not about figuring it out. It's about getting out of the way. We have to get our minds and our trying to control things out of the way for the path to come forth.

For me, that starts with guiding the mind. That can be meditating every morning. My classmates did the interview with the author of The Power of the Mind. That practice is super powerful. That takes one minute. Sit there, breathe, and bring something into your field of vision that creates an experience of awe. Hold it there, and sink it into your parasympathetic nervous system through breath. That's a one-minute practice. For me, meditation is huge. That one is massive. I take mindfulness on the micro level that we're talking about meditation. I bring it to the macro level for my life and with my clients. This is something that is for coaching clients as well. We look at what it takes, the roles and commitments that you've made in your life, and how you balance them around what you're creating.

I teach this in my burnout-to-balance workshop. I do it with all my clients because we have to get ourselves out of the way and make things simple. The way I look at my life on a macro mindful scale is by checking in every week with this wheel I have the roles and commitments. I have my roles all around the wheel, rate them 1 through 5 every week. Some example roles there would be boyfriend, entrepreneur, friend, son, uncle, brother, and all of the things that I am committed to and roles that I am subsumed in my life. Whether they were chosen or not, it’s part of you.

I look at what is a five for me and what my optimal contribution is. This is a macro mindful way for me to check in. What's making me not live up to my contribution in all of these areas of my life, or am I over-contributing in one area of my life, leaving me off balance? That is a big practice that helps me take a step back and look at it at a macro mindful picture of my life. While the micro mindfulness moments for your own mind are fantastic, I find it good to take a step back and look at, “What am I committed to in all aspects of my life? Does it align?” Sometimes a role may have to go. I work with clients on what's the best way to easily, respectfully, and with love let change who you are committed to.

That can free up so much mental space to start a business, discover your purpose, and find love. We have to create space for the thing that we want to come into our life. That can be simply finding your purpose and your path. If there's something in the way of that commitment where you're dedicating your energy, if you are not going to show up, you don't haven't provided space for it. Those are two practices. There's this element called perfect trust. It's the trust that everything seems going in your favor, that this brand is unfolding in a way that is perfect, whether good or bad, regardless of your preferences. That the way that it's unfolding is perfect.

A great book for this is one that I have maybe 23 pages left. Michael Singer wrote The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment. It's all about his life. He dedicated his life to surrendering to the flow of the universe, to letting go of himself, and his preferences, and letting life make him for this ride. That didn't mean that he wasn't working or taking action. He was dropping this craving and aversion. It's getting rid of the craving for what's good, pleasurable, desirable, easeful, and fun, and letting go of the aversion or running away from what's bad, scary, and fearful. It's like looking at what is the root of that fear and starting to rationalize it in your mind.

That's another beautiful thing to do with a coach. Faith comes from surrendering and watching how things unfold in your life. There's also the basic, yet very powerful reconnecting, whether that's scripture and even religion or faith, your following or good, positive thinking, writing, and music. It's to reinforce your faith. Reinforce what you're feeding your mind. Take a little bit of time at night to read scripture. Join a group of people that are committed to being better people. Surround yourself with things in your environment that feed what you want to become or else you'll remain where you are.

Surround yourself with things in your environment that feed what you want to become or else you'll remain where you are.

You know Napoleon Hill. He wrote Think and Grow Rich. He has other books. I finished reading out Outwitting the Devil. It's good. He talks about the fears and overcoming all of these self-limitations. I'm finishing this other one called Three Feet From Gold. Do you know the story of the guy who gave up 3 feet from finding the gold? They studied all these stories of people that never gave up and made a book out of it. That's where the title of Three Feet From Gold comes from. It's inspiring. Entrepreneurship is a challenging journey in terms of mindset. You got to have a strong mindset every day to show up.

I love this advice of, “Be careful with what you feed your mind. Every day, have something.” You mentioned the scriptures and prayer. Have something to intentionally feed your mind so you can focus on the possibilities because, most of the time, people are focusing on what they don't want. People are focusing on all the limitations they have in their lives since they wake up until they go to bed. That's such a good actionable reminder. I appreciate that. There is so much goodness in this interview.

Let's talk about the Enneagram because that's a big topic. Readers, John has one million tools. He has a wealth of knowledge. He's an amazing coach. He brought up this personality test called the Enneagram, which he uses in his coaching practice. Let's talk about that because I'm curious. I've never done it myself. I did it for the first time because he sent me the link. John, what is Enneagram? How do you use it? How can we use it? Tell us everything.

I'm going to give you some things to work on based on myself. I know my own type very well. To give you a little bit of history, the Enneagram is very ancient. It's based on ancient Sufi wisdom. They start to retrace a lot of the lineages. We're talking thousands of years. If it was brought to light from Brazil. Claudio Naranjo was the one who started a lot of their research and brought it back to the US. There had been various certain teachers and practitioners who have expanded on the work in their own ways.

The way that I view Enneagram is we all come into the world untainted and full of responsibility with this exploration, curiosity, and no fear. You can play, sing, dance, and nothing holding you back. There's something that goes missing. There's something where it all happens within childhood where there's a piece of the development path that goes missing. It could be something that your parents or family viewed as positive that ended up drawing you away from what this core personality type was developed to accept or to get.

I'm going to talk about my own. There are 1 through 9 types. I'm a type three. 8, 9, and 1 are going to be at the top. 8 through 1 are your body types. We call it your body or gut triad. That's where a lot of the intelligence is derived from. It lies in the heart triad, and that's more of wanting connection and love. The head triad is 5, 6, and 7. It is wanting competence and understanding. They're all connected. If we start getting into the ways that you go to different types when you're stressed and aligned, to give you from my type as a type 3, when I am dressed, I go to type 9. I take on type nine tendencies. If I'm aligned, I take on some six tendencies. I move over to type six. If you look at the lines of the Enneagram, you shift. It's super dynamic depending on where you are in life and what's happening in your life at the moment.

That's why it's such an amazing tool for me to use with clients because when they are stressed, we can take and see some of the qualities of, let’s say for me, the nine that are showing up in my life at the time, or we can take, “How do we set up your work environment or home environment to support your basic needs as a type three?”

Each of them has a label. Depending on which school of thought you go to, they're labeled differently. Type three is the achiever. What you do as a type three is you are trying to become what people think of as success in order to be loved. The way that this happens and/or develops is when you think of the core childhood place that it comes from, let’s say for me, it's not that there wasn't love in my life. It's that everything got increased and was excited.

Let’s say you bring home a great report card or another trophy. It was like, “Great job. Extra love.” It can happen even from your friend circle as well. Maybe you weren't accepted as a friend or as someone until you experience success. It's like, “When I'm successful, then I'll be loved.” You start developing this personality strategy that can lead to great things. There is no good and bad type. There are good and bad things about every type. I don't even like saying good and bad, but align and not align parts of each type.

For type three, what it can lead to is deceit. It is applying to yourself and others coming and becoming more full of vanity. This is deceit, the way that it can show up. Coming off or putting out a persona, others are going to perceive you as successful that have no idea who you're. Type 3s and 9s are the most disconnected from emotions because, as a type three, experiencing emotion does not an image of success. It’s why I feel it.

Getting in touch with my emotions and broadening my emotional vocabulary is huge for me. To access that emotional intuition when my feelings are telling me that a need is present or is not present, I can't understand that if I'm disconnected from my emotions. As a type three and as a man, those are things that are suppressed. “Don't feel. Be successful. Don't cry about it. Start, get ready, be fierce, and be strong.” You suppress a lot of that. It's suppressing a lot of your humanity and also a lot of your intuition, your emotional guidance system.

The way that I use it is by thinking about the things that are going to set me up for success. As a type three, I need some of the things where I do need space to work hard. It's nice to put my head down and get to work. The thing that I need the most is the words like, “I love you for who you are and not what you do.” It's the best feeling you can give a type three because when it comes down to it and connection-wise, that's what we want. When you're able to see the ways that show up and the thing that we want the least is to feel worthless. When you feel worthless, you're not able to provide value and you're full of shame.

That's the core emotion of it. When you think of what value is, the way that I define value is super important for me to feel good, safe, and loved. Maybe my value in the past was more financial. Maybe my value was in what I do. I was placing so much value on what I do is who I am. Moving from, “I'm valued because of who I am,” is a huge shift for a type three to move into alignment. All of this comes from understanding that part of the personality type and what is the root of it.

The root of that is super aligned for me. Regardless of what any test says, when you go through each of the types, the tests will lead you in the right direction and you feel them out with a teacher to see how they resonate with you. They deeply resonate with me. Success was the only option. it was such an eye-opening moment for me to start working with the Enneagram because I started seeing all of the resources and experiences of life I was leaving behind by success being the only option and my only focus.

Taking that step back like I mentioned about the practice, mindfulness, and looking at my life, it's part of self-knowledge, and understanding your core personality type. The goal of the Enneagram is to be able to leverage all of the types when the needs are there. Set yourself up with a team. There are beautiful virtues of all of them. Whenever you're not aligned, that's when you start to revert back to those challenge tendencies.

It brings a lot of that to my vision where I say, “How can I set myself up for success? What are some of the concerns that I have every day? How can my need for efficiency, productivity, and experience in life begin in the way of owning relationships? How can this need for prestige or this material representation, in the beginning, be in the way of what I can create? Why am I worried about it?”

I'm worried about the image, “What people are going to think? How is that going to hold me back from what I can create if I set that to the side?” It's looking at that understanding and integrating it and not being ashamed of it. I'm 4 and 3. I experienced the stresses and upsides of that, the harmony and the drive. It is a place where you can learn more about yourself in a dynamic way and each other, doing this with your teams and people that you care about. You can make a big difference because it's knowledge.

What I love about it is what you said, the ability to create more self-awareness because all of us have blind spots. We go misaligned and unconscious. We are running the childhood automatic programming and you don't get to step back. Sometimes you don't get to see because you are in the way that you're like, “I don't even know why I'm feeling this way. I know that something doesn't feel right.” In my brief experience, it looks like it's such a great tool to shed light on those blind spots that we have when we are reacting over and over. This is huge, and I love everything you have shared about it. I cannot wait to continue learning more about my types. This is awesome.

It is incredible. There's such a wealth of knowledge within it when you learn about the devices, virtues, and core strategies of each type, how they try to navigate the world, and learning it a lot about yourself through that. It shows you what you default to when you're out of that thinking mind and in reaction. When you're in a space of reaction, you don't have the clarity, pause, or the space in your mind to choose how you want to behave and how you want to respond in situations. When you are in reaction, you are operating out of your core enneagram type.

When you're in reaction, you're operating out of the base conditioning that you've been programmed through in life. How do you reprogram that? It is through building that self-awareness, understanding what you default to, and having that trigger a good response. For me, whenever I notice myself say in a situation like starting to talk about something that I feel someone else would like to hear as opposed to what's authentically me, I notice it and like, “Here's me trying to gain acceptance, love, and connection because if I prescribe this situation or describe myself how I am, then they won't accept me.” It's noticing that and saying, “There it's. What do I need for myself to be authentically myself?”

That's that trust and faith that I am enough because of who I am and not what I do. It builds that awareness so then you can notice when you're defaulting into your type, and then you can say, “There it is again. Let me make another choice. Who do I want to be in this moment?” That's how we gain mastery of our lives. If we can choose what we want to do each moment, how we want to respond, what we want to say, and then even what we want to think about at that moment, then we've achieved mastery.

When you master your life, that doesn't mean that everything's rosy and you never experience any hardship or anything like that. You create your experience over what life throws at you. It's not letting what life throws at you create your experience. That's mind mastery. It's reversing that and being able to make a choice in that moment. My cause notices old behaviors coming up. Make a different choice.

It's pure mindfulness because, to do that, you got to operate from the present, which is uncertain and is the only place where you can create this new reaction. I love how everything ties together into self-mastery.

That's why I love the Enneagram so much because it can tie back to what is core fear that's running your life now. We all have one.

Even saying what you were saying, achiever is in the middle of mine. I'm type 9, which you go to whenever you are misaligned. It is the last of the list. There are many things you say that resonate with me. Even though those are not my core, I'm like, “Totally. That's me.” That's powerful.

There have been many times where I've discovered something about myself like, “How did I not know about that for the last decade? How did I not see there?” See and feel like it's going to be the same thing many years from now. Embrace that and surrender it.

I love that so much because even though we have worked on some of the core wounds, different contexts, situations, and complexity of the outside may trigger it again. You're dealing with it but from a different depth and lens. It's like an onion. You peel and there are more layers. I’m not expecting it to be perfect, linear, pink, or all of these things that are important because people sometimes, including me, think that there is a destination, but it's all about the journey of building that resilience muscle to continue practicing even when we fall off track because we will. We are human beings.

Thank you for being so vulnerable. I've learned so much about yourself, your journey, and this powerful tool. I'm sure the audience is super curious to even learn more about you because your story and you as a human being are fascinating. I conclude my interviews with the rapid-fire question. I'm going to ask you a question and you tell me the first that comes to mind. What's your favorite book?

Celestine Prophecy.

Who is your biggest role model?

The first person that comes to my mind now is Jay Shetty.

Did you read his new book?

I haven't read the new one yet. It's on the list.

I haven't read them, but I listened to a podcast where he was interviewed about it. What is the most important piece of advice you would give to your younger self?

It would be, “Slow down.” I give that piece of advice to me right now too. It’s like, “Slow down. Enjoy the process. Everything's unfolding exactly as it should. You're going to be alright.”

What has been the most challenging part of entrepreneurship for you?

The most challenging part has been consuming a new identity and what that means within social circles. Showing up in my purpose and authentically wanting to cause ripples, backlash, and perceptions to change. That's one thing that you have to understand as you are going into another line or into your purpose. When you shift major parts of what you're doing and how you're showing up in the world and align with who you are and what you want to do with your life, there will be new people that support you. You'll become better friends with people that you've known for six months than people you've known for a decade. People will fall off. Things will change. That's the way.

It goes back to type three. The most challenging for me was I was becoming what many people that were connected to thought of as success. I was there. I was living in my type three baseline security. Becoming something that maybe is different in other people's eyes of success but aligned with my own harm. That was the step. That was the struggle and identity. You hear of it sometimes talking about ego death. it was like letting a part of yourself try to allow what you want to be born.

For me, even saying, “I'm an engineer and a consultant,” to now, “I'm a coach,” introducing myself like that was such a big shift. I remember back in 2015, even though I was certified as a coach, I couldn't even say I'm a coach. I'm like, “I don't believe that. I am an engineer. That's way more perceived well in terms of success.” I relate and I'm still going through it. I can connect with you at the level that you're describing so much. Even with my relationship with my husband, I'm still trying to figure out what that looks like of me as an entrepreneur versus me having a corporate job. Many things change. When one thing change that is that foundational for you, then you got to figure out the rest, like the ripple effect. That's powerful my friend. I have a question. How do you deal with failure? The first thing that comes to mind.

You take it for what it is. Do you miss the mark? I interviewed Richard. He said it beautifully and I kept it. He mentioned that it was something more than the Japanese say about it. They don't say failure but, “You've missed the mark, but a lot more arrows that you can pull out to fire and you may miss the mark a few times. You'll never hit the mark if you don't pull backfire.” The way that I look at it is even if I miss the mark, I'm taking shots. What will allow me to die a happy man is taking the shots.

Even if I miss the mark, I'm taking shots. What will allow me to die happy is taking the shots.

Where can our audience find you? Tell us all the good stuff.

Your audience can find my podcast at The Present Professional Podcast. You can find all things and sit down with leadership development, team building experiences, and coaching at Humessence.com. They can find all things about me there, then also my Insight Timer profile. If folks want to interact with me on a yoga-meditation basis, I keep on there both yoga and meditation at times. Everything is pretty much connected between Humessence, Insight Timer, and The Present Professional Podcast. You can also stop by my class in yoga Thursdays at 5:30 PM if you want to take a class in person when you're here in Houston. I love to meet and act with your audience in any way that I can. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It's always fun.

I appreciate you so much. To the audience, you have to follow John. Go to his website. He's amazing. What I love about you is you walk the talk. Everything he coaches his clients on, he's practicing himself. Integrity is a big thing for me. I admire you, John. Thank you for being here and for sharing your wealth of knowledge with all of us. Thank you, everyone. I'll see you next episode.

Important Links

• John Marshall
• The Consciousness Development Continuum
• The Power of the Mind
• The Untethered Soul
• The Surrender Experiment
• Think and Grow Rich
• Outwitting the Devil
• Three Feet From Gold
• The Present Professional Podcast
• Insight Timer – John Marshall
• https://www.Instagram.com/CoachJohnMarshall/

About John Marshall

John is a leadership and mind mastery coach. He helps leaders and aspiring professionals master their minds to master their careers, relationships, and health. He is certified as a coach, and meditation and yoga teacher. John is the podcast co-host of Present Professional.