Career Coaching Secrets

Winslow Swart on the Attention Economy: Why Your Marketing Needs to Be Agile

• Davis Nguyen

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In this episode of Career Coaching Secrets, host Rexhen interviews Winslow Swart, an executive coach and business therapist with a background as a martial arts "sensei." Winslow shares how his experience in the dojo taught him to help leaders find their own solutions.

He finds it most rewarding to coach high-potential leaders and help executives become so effective they can make themselves "dispensable." Winslow discusses the challenges of marketing in the new "attention economy," advocating that coaches must be agile with their messaging. His advice for other coaches is to trust your expertise but also to find your own coach, because you can't always be your own sensei.

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Winslow Swart:

probably things that really make me super happy. Those aspiring, upcoming, high potential, early, mid-career manager leaders that you might become those thought leaders and those that everyone's going to know their name and look up to. And so when you know you've had only a front row seat, but had something to do with those individuals that have really achieved their dreams in their careers and become those CEOs, or those elected officials.

Davis Nguyen:

Welcome to Career Coaching Secrets, the podcast where we talk with successful career coaches on how they built their success and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is Davis Nguyen, and I'm the founder of Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, and even $100,000 weeks. Before Purple Circle, I've grown several seven and eight figure career coaching business myself, and have been a consultant at two career coaching businesses that are doing over a hundred million dollars each. Whether you're an established coach or building your practice for the first time, you'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business. business.

Rexhen Doda:

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Career Coaching Secrets Podcast. I'm your host, Regan, and today's guest is Winslow Swart. He is an executive coach and business therapist who helps leaders and organizations align vision with strategy through deep leadership development, culture transformation, and full-scale organizational change initiatives. And it's a pleasure for me to have him on the podcast today. Welcome to the show, Winslow. Thank you, Rexon. I'm happy to be here. I really appreciate this. Yeah, it's a pleasure for us to have you on. So thank you for coming. I wanted to first ask you as an executive coach. So first, what inspired you to become a coach and then start your own coaching business?

Winslow Swart:

Yeah, you know, that's a really great question. What got me started on this career path, right? Did I fall into it or did I make some sort of decision? This is what I want to do when I grow up. So the origin story for me is I grew up, in addition to a few other areas of endeavor, I'd been in the martial arts since very, very young, right? So since, in my case, it was in the early 19th. So I had spent a good part of a, the better part of a half a century studying and mastering Japanese and Chinese martial arts and teaching them. And so by default, as a sensei, a shihan, a sifu, a kendoshi, I became finally an 8th Don in Japan in my discipline. Throughout my career, I guess I had been life coaching and career coaching all the time, right? And so kind of mid-career, really essentially when I was in my late 30s, I started to do some team building and leadership development work, facilitation, coaching, motivational speaking. And it was mostly bringing distinctions of mastery from the dojo into the corporate world and into the public arena and changing the context. And I was doing my homework on what they were doing at Sloan School of Management at MIT, or Senge stuff, Heming stuff, all this other, trying to figure out, okay, how do I be able to speak this language? And then I had this epiphany. I to sharpen my tools. So I went back to college midlife while I had a household of little children and got my degrees in organizational psychology and organizational development, did undergrad, graduate, and doctoral studies in the field because I kind of felt like an imposter, right? What's funny about that is while that was great for expanding my street creds and my toolkit, some of the best stuff that I bring to my clients is the things I developed before I knew any better, right? And so that's so part of, let's say, sometimes the curriculum or the toolkit I bring to cohorts or to coaching clients is the original ideas of how do you help people succeed in life and in work and in career and everything else. So yeah, it kind of comes from that. It's a hybrid

Rexhen Doda:

in my case. Interesting. And so when thinking about the... time that you you also spend doing this throughout the years for example um when when looking at one million dreams is this part of the coaching by the way yeah what's

Winslow Swart:

interesting was you know i had worked in the in sort of the tech ecosystem for many years and while i was helping coach teams and individuals on their success trajectories i got very interested in the what intrinsically motivated people, right? The kind of that Daniel Pink thing. And so I started thinking about goals are great, but dreams are epic, which is what, you know, my TED talk, the title, Goals Suck, Dreams Are Epic, right? But before that, I was working with inner city at-risk youth and I was working with executives on helping them do epic things in their life and going beyond the predictable and beyond the expected, going beyond the things that we had to do and that we ought to do and working on all also the things we really wanted to do. And then we were having, we were having so much success in helping people achieve and accomplish their dreams, not just their goals. Then we started to develop a mobile platform so we could scale it. That's not on pause right now. That's just in redevelopment, right? But I think the idea of helping people work on their dreams kind of enters into it now, even today. That's not always the task, right? You know, it's not one size fits all in our field. We do have, you know, there are theories of practice that work almost very consistently. And practitioners have toolkits. But being an organizational development practitioner, I really want to make my work sustainable. assessment driven client focused whether it be an organizational an organization a team or an individual I want to find out where they've been where they are going and wrap the program and process around that instead of showing up and saying I know how you can succeed just follow my you know it's not shrink wrapped right it has to be adaptable and adoptable but it really has to work for the client so that's something I've really learned in my career is does that person need something from the dream platform or not right does that something person needs something from the dojo or not, right? You know, so just to really understand the customer and then serve them.

Rexhen Doda:

That's kind of where I'm from. And so when thinking about you going through the coaching journey with your clients throughout these years, what about it do you find most rewarding since you started doing this?

Winslow Swart:

I think there's two probably things that really make me super happy. Those aspiring, upcoming, high potential clients. early mid-career manager leaders that you might become those thought leaders and those that everyone's going to know their name and look up to. It's when you know you've had only a front row seat, but had something to do with those individuals that have really achieved their dreams in their careers and become those CEOs or those elected officials and have been a part of it. You know, I joke around when I, you know, sometimes I'll introduce someone who's an elected official or CEO and say, oh yeah, you know, back then we did this. And I'm jokingly saying I take full credit, right? But I don't, obviously. But it's really rewarding when folks that you haven't chance to help really do some epic stuff in their life and you knew you and you know you were part of it the other thing that transformational thing that i really enjoy is when leaders can make themselves dispensable when they become such great people leaders and develop their teams that do their job so they can do their very next thing which in some cases just be able to take vacation and turn off their damn phone and not have to check their emails every day. If they can just do that, that's pretty epic, right? They can leave it and come back and the place ain't burnt down and it's running as good, if not better than when they left it. So helping leaders develop their bench strength to I mean, that's just really huge for a lot of folks. So coaching them in that regards, I find very rewarding.

Rexhen Doda:

Absolutely. And so just for us to nail it down a little bit, when it comes to the clients that you work with, how would you describe the ideal client profile? Is there a certain demographic, certain industries, certain commonalities in the goals? You know, what's really funny, if you

Winslow Swart:

look at the client list on my website, you'll go, wow, this dude's all over the place, right? He's worked with all these different industries, all these organizations at different size and scale, global, regional, private, public sector. I'm rather agnostic about the industry my clients are in, the widgets, the business they're in, because when people collide or align with process, there's always an opportunity to help people do better, right? So wherever they're coming from, whatever business they're in, industry vertical they're in. There's always a way to add value and help. And where they are in their career trajectory, obviously they have to be in a place where you know, it makes sense to have a career and executive coach, right? If they're too early stage in their career, it might not be a fit. If they're too late in their career, it might also not be a fit. Like if they already know everything and they don't plan to do anything else, you know, and it's just, maybe it's just maybe now go help their people that's running their foundation. Okay. You know, there's some places where, okay, we're just, it's good. We'll just be friends. It's fine. But I think as long as you're working with people who are pushing the boundaries, Raising the bar, making an impact. How, you know, people talk about growth mindset, right? But they have to be interested in their own growth, not just the organizational financial growth. They have to be interested in their growth, learning and growth. They have to be willing to break their own paradigms, right? And if they just want someone to agree with them and help them make a little more money, there's other people that do. If you really want to send, because here's the thing, I mean, frame it this way. That's one of the toughest things to do is to be your own coach or to be your own sensei. Very often folks in senior positions have trouble admitting they don't know everything and have trouble being vulnerable and transparent to say, okay, these are some of the opportunities for improvement. We have to be in a place where. we know that we just can't be our own sensei all the time right and we're willing to be coached so i think that's kind of the magic dust i'm willing to be coached and i'm willing to sharpen my sword and i realize that i can improve and it doesn't mean that i'm going to tell them what to do but i'm definitely going to be a resource

Rexhen Doda:

so for these people that are listening that fit that criteria um how would you describe the engagement of them working with you is there a certain program of a certain length how would you describe that engagement

Winslow Swart:

you know that's you know bandwidth, right? So what is the bandwidth? You know, are there folks that we meet weekly? There are folks that... will engage monthly, but they'll have some homework, right? You know, there are folks I'll work with for three months. There'll be folks I'll work with for a few years. I think that's always about, you know, how you scale the engagement has to do with, you know, what's going to add value, right? What is the appetite, the interest, sometimes also the budget, right? So I think we have to be flexible. I know that there are folks who definitely have, you know, this is how it is and we don't do it that way. It's not going to happen. I'm very client focused. So I know if we can work together for three months, we're going to work together for three years. Not because I'm Mr. After Work and I'm going to upsell you. It's more like we're going to add enough value and make enough impact where that's going to happen. Right. And if it doesn't, that's fine, too. If it doesn't, that's OK, too.

Rexhen Doda:

Right. And where do people find you right now in terms of and this is a question generally for other coaches who are listening in terms of marketing channels. How do you find people or how do people find you? Is there a certain marketing channel?

Winslow Swart:

Yeah. You know, this is kind of where you kind of come into play because I'm relearning how we do that. Right. I've been a very viral, organic, you know, kind of in a space where. Most of my work has come from referral, right? And building upon a customer base that that, you know, has, you know, I've been engaged in. I think pre-COVID that was, you know, in other areas, it's been a global platform, right? I think because, you know, the air was let out of our sails a little bit and the sands shifted every third feet, I'm really interested in building global engagements more. Right now, I'm a bit hyper-local, hyper-regional because, you know, that's sort of my sandboxes here. But I'm really interested, you know, myself in expanding the market reach beyond, hey, Winslow's great, you need to talk to him, right? And, you know, I remember when I was working with my daughters about scaling our startup a few years ago, one of my girls that was on my marketing team, she was making a pitch. I had all my girls pitch me, you know, what was it going to be our channel for scaling? And one of them, she said, you know, she had her, you know, she was at, she had her dry erase marker and she was at the whiteboard and she goes, you know, YouTube is the gateway to Thank you. about how strategically we accelerate what we do with AI as sort of our strategic partner. It's a whole different conversation. At the same time, it's like, wait a second, I need to be my own customer and utilize the platforms. Greg, Sean, you and your team does to scale the market. So I'm not going to be the marketing expert in this field. I'm actually more likely to be a student of what you're doing. I would say.

Rexhen Doda:

Yeah. Well, I got a good news on that because for marketing, we are actually thinking of like with some of the coaches that we had on the podcast as well. And with some from our community, just a small group, five to 10 people, we're thinking of doing like a webinar is going to be one in the seventh and one in the 19th. So I'll just give you a link if you're interested to just learning about the strategy is going to be Davis mostly hosting that nurse. I'm just going to send it your way.

Winslow Swart:

Yeah.

Rexhen Doda:

And yeah, we'll share more about it also. at the end of our conversation. But yeah, there will be a very good fit for you, I think.

Winslow Swart:

I would love that because one thing that I've been doing, which is working fairly well, you know, to answer the question, you know, in terms of, you know, what has been working is content creation, blogging and, you know, kind of distributing that and social platforms and others, right? So I think that, you know, being a subject matter expert, you have to own your category, right? So in terms of, you know, as a writer and as a subject matter expert, I think my superpower power is content creation. Distribution of that content is probably where I need to partner with others better, team up a little bit better. So

Rexhen Doda:

yeah, I think that's what I'm

Winslow Swart:

interested in learning more myself.

Rexhen Doda:

In looking into the future for the next, let's say, one to three years, where do you see it going? Do you have any specific goals you're working towards?

Winslow Swart:

Yeah, you know, I really have, you know, in the past in my career, I have really enjoyed not only the work I've done regionally, but the work I've done, you know, globally. You know, what I've been in, I've worked in Asia, Europe, the Mideast, Latin America. I find it just, you know, invigorating to work in other... an intergenerational and a multicultural environment, right? So I think my challenge myself is to continue to add value outside of, let's say, my regional comfort zone. So, you know, in Texas or in California or, you know, anywhere in North America, okay, you know, I can read the room pretty well. It's being able to read the room when I'm outside of my region and also be effective there, which has gone very well in the past. I'd love to continue to do more And

Rexhen Doda:

so we're like thinking about that as goal. Where do you see a challenge right now that you're trying to solve for next to get closer to that?

Winslow Swart:

I think that, you know, a lot of things have changed in how we market, how we communicate, how we distribute. You know, there's one thing is a recent article I wrote, which I was not thinking full on the global scale yet about it was I wrote an article called the attention economy, the attention economy and why you probably won't read this. Right. So the attention economy has to do with, you know, the span. The bandwidth people have to even absorb information, process it, and decision make. A lot of that has really changed. You know, it's like TLDR is not, it's become a three-minute article is too long, right? Too long to read. It's how... how to penetrate the consciousness of learners, not because they're not intelligent, not because they're not curious, not interested. It's what people become used to, become accustomed to. And so I think that dissemination of the messaging, I think the challenge is being effective there, right? I see that sometimes there was an article I wrote on LinkedIn, could have been, I don't know, in the early days of LinkedIn, it's almost 20 years ago, I got hundreds, thousands of views and hundreds and hundreds of likes, right? Which was a lot back then, right? Now that message would, might get me five, you know, a hundred views and five likes. Okay.

Rexhen Doda:

Yeah.

Winslow Swart:

So how we communicate this means we become really important. We've seen this

Rexhen Doda:

actually come up as a topic a few times on the podcast, not just like you're comparing it way to a few years ago, but it was just like, comparing LinkedIn was just a couple of years ago it was just like a lot more engagement and something changed in the algorithm there either was it post COVID or something like that something changed and from an interview that I had with a coach they did a lot of layoffs and somehow the algorithm kind of like got messed up a little bit and it's just like not as much engagement right now with LinkedIn as it used to be so it has been some challenge that has been brought up in the podcast before too

Winslow Swart:

well and And Rick John, you bring up a really interesting point. The rate of change right now, and largely because of AI, the rate of change is exponential. It's absolutely exponential. Like the bomb going to deliver in two weeks on AI. Everything we say is going to probably become, some half of it's going to become obsolete, obsolete two weeks after that, right? Some of it won't. There's going to be some knowledge. and concepts that will survive whatever happens. But a lot of it's going to just change as quickly. As soon as we set it, it's going to evaporate and it's become something else. I wrote an article last year about marketing, marketing called playing in traffic. So whether it be viral or digital, how we play in traffic has to be really alert and agile and forward thinking. So when we're playing in traffic on LinkedIn or any other social platform or in any other channel we have to be really forward thinking because whatever we're doing and whatever's working right now we just can't get comfortable right with that and i think it's cool for you know for me to remind my fellow boomers or xers or whoever it's like we have to be continually learning and consuming new content to understand where we need to be able to Because I think how we serve our customers, that doesn't have to change that much, right? Not that, I mean, the core, the substance of what we do is, you know, that's fantastic. But, you know, how we frame it, how we package it, how we distribute it, you know, definitely has to be fresh.

Rexhen Doda:

By the way, I really like how creatively you put the titles on. These are very, very titles. So, yeah, it seems very, very, very, I don't know, very special in a way that you're just like the one for the attention and why you probably want to read this. Yeah, if you look at the

Winslow Swart:

blog page of my website, there's a lot of fun titles in there. You know, Hire Weird is one of them, right? If you want innovation, hire weird, right? It's like, you know, don't hire like yourself. And, and, you know, during a South by Southwest, we were guerrilla marketing, you know, we were doing some, you know, it's like, you just don't need to be able to look at things in a way that it's just, you can't, my brother who's, who's marketing and advertising in the TV and film business. He loved to say, you can't bore people into doing business with you. And I like to say, you can't bore people into learning either. So that's why as a teacher facilitator, everything I do has to be experiential. You have to engage the learners. In fact, you know, when my brother says, hey, when you say hi, you think, who's your panel? My panel is the participants. My panel is the participants. I'm putting the toolkits in their hands. They are going to be the subject matter experts by the time we're done, right? You know, it's like you have to flip the script every chance you get, in my

Rexhen Doda:

opinion. I really like that. And so right now, I also wanted to ask you throughout time as a coach and having your coaching business focused on that what have been some investments that you've made that you feel very good about and proud of or you feel like there was a good return from these investments could be one could be many could be investments in yourself investments in the coaching business what are some investments that probably you feel like there were a waste of time or like investments that you feel like you could have avoided or didn't turn out to be that good

Winslow Swart:

well I hope you're okay with my answer because it might not be what's expected of the traditional guest. The best investment and probably the really good investment that I've made or at the very top has been investing in my children, their education, their knowledge, their experience to help build another generation of thought leaders. So I, you know, I have friends who have really great condos and on the beach and all this sort of kind of stuff. And I love that. I have kids that live in other parts of the world that are making a dent in the universe. Okay. So whatever that cost us was worth every penny and things that we might not have bought for ourselves or The dividends are many, many because look, you know, we planted trees for which other generations will have shade. Yeah. And I would think also in terms of all the people I've taught in a dojo, even though my dojos have not always been profit centers. As a sensei running a traditional Japanese dojo, a lot of times I was supplementing the overhead of my dojos, right? But I've taught thousands of people whose not only their lives have improved, but they've made other people's lives better. so for me those are my major investments okay a real estate thing here and stuff okay fine you know what nothing spectacular obvious in that regard what spectacular is is a couple of generations of folks that are now also positively influencing generations of folks.

Rexhen Doda:

Interesting. I really like that. And it seems like it makes a lot of sense investing in the new generations that come and doing the same thing like a few years later for the next generation. It just keeps improving that way. So right now, and for the coaches who are listening to this, this is the question is what advice would you give to other coaches like yourself and could be an advice for yourself as well who are thinking of scaling their impact i would

Winslow Swart:

say that trust your your knowledge trust your wisdom trust your experience to be able to support your your actions and your visions to scale that no no goal or vision for your growth is too big for you if you have made one person's life better as an executive career coach you know it you can make a hundred or thousands of people's lives better. Okay. So, you know, like if you have imposter syndrome, it's like, who am I to be such a big nut? You already own it. Own your expertise, own your superpowers, whatever they are. Know what your kryptonites are too. You know, people that are do the strength finder stuff, talk about how our arts and strengths can be in the balcony or the basement, right? Be aware, continue to work on yourself, right? You know, you don't have those blind spots. Okay. So, you know, do that. Do your own customer. How Have a coach, have a sensei. Don't try to be your own sensei all the time, right? But I would say the main thing is if you are effective and successful at helping others, you know, grow and achieve and improve, then double down on that, tap into it and take that with you to choose next opportunities and that light into the world, right?

Rexhen Doda:

Don't keep it a secret. Thank you. Thank you so much, Winslow. And thanks so much for coming to our podcast today. For anyone who wants to connect with you or find you, they can go. Number one, they can go into LinkedIn and look up Winslow Swart. They'll be able to find you there. The second way is they can go into the website, winslow-consulting.com, right? Yep, yep. That's two easy ways to get

Winslow Swart:

in them on other

Rexhen Doda:

social platforms.

Winslow Swart:

You know, I was overseas with one of my colleagues one time, and he's a millennial. And, you know, this was only a couple of years ago, and I was doing something on my phone. He said, what are you doing? I said, well, I'm doing this on Instagram and here and that and the other. And he looks at me and goes, wow, dude, you're the oldest millennial I know. I'm just kidding. You know, I'm excited. accessible on social platforms.

Rexhen Doda:

Cool. Thank you. Thank you so much, Winslow. Thank you so much for coming to the show. It was lovely to have you on. Okay. Thanks for having me. I really

Winslow Swart:

appreciate

Rexhen Doda:

it.

Davis Nguyen:

That's it for this episode of Career Coaching Secrets. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode to catch future episodes. This podcast was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, or even $100,000 weeks, all without burning out and making sure that you're making the impact and having the life that you want. To learn more about our community and how we can help you visit joinpurplecircle.com.