The Power of Breathwork and Mindfulness in Business - John Hall

Jon Coogan (00:01.77)
From being a Fortune 100 tech leader to pioneering a transformative approach to peak performance, John Hall is here to redefine how you lead under pressure and excel in every aspect of life. So welcome to Mindset Mavericks. I'm John Coogan, your host, and today we'll feature a guest who truly embodies the power of transformation. John Hall has built up over three decades of experience turning around struggling tech divisions, including by JP Morgan Chase, and realized that key to success wasn't just the systems, but the people behind them.

You made a bold pivot from the corporate world, become a pioneer in performance coaching through his groundbreaking BPM method, an innovative blend of breath work, physiology, and mindset. John's now helping leaders everywhere unlock their true potential. So let's dive into the wisdom and experience of shaped his remarkable journey. So thank you very much, John. I really appreciate you being with us today.

John Hall (00:51.535)
John, thanks so much for having me here. I'm excited about this.

Jon Coogan (00:54.526)
Thank you. know there's certainly a lot to dive into. What I'd like to do is try and understand the people we're speaking to and let our listeners know a little bit about you. Before we dive into what your methodologies are, I'd like to find out a bit about before you became a leader in the tech world, what were some of the early influences in your life that shaped your approach to leadership and success?

John Hall (01:17.467)
Yeah, absolutely. You know, it was, I love this question because it's going back a little bit in time to think about this piece, but I have to acknowledge that scouting, was in Boy Scouts when I was a kid. My parents had gotten divorced when I was 12. And so I got engaged, my mom got all of us engaged in scouting, myself and both my brothers are Eagle Scouts. So we were very involved in scouting throughout childhood. And that really made a profound impact on me.

Jon Coogan (01:22.26)
Hmm

John Hall (01:46.075)
That was probably the biggest exposure I had to really having different male influences in my life that helped with just a lot of creativity, a lot of skills, a lot of exploration, and a lot of leadership as well. A lot of leadership opportunities being in that space. And then of course, I always had a love for technology. was one of those kids that I got excited. I remember back, we were on a trip, I was maybe eight, and we went by the Texas Instruments Factory.

and I begged my parents to buy me a calculator. And I was just fascinated with this calculator for hours. I was like, my gosh, look at this thing. So I'm dating myself a bit, right? I mean, now we have watches that are more powerful than what I got, but yeah, I just always had a fascination for technology as well. I always enjoyed that and pursued that throughout college and then into my early careers.

Jon Coogan (02:19.269)
Yeah.

Jon Coogan (02:26.26)
Hmm

Jon Coogan (02:38.738)
Yeah, that's fascinating. Like I say, it's always great to understand what kind of key influences were. I think Scouts, I'd imagine, would give you some confidence and like I say, give you your first steps into leadership and what that means. In terms of your career, where did that take you? What did you find yourself in?

John Hall (02:58.959)
You know, I was, I came out of college and when I graduated college, I worked for Anderson Consulting for a while, which is now Accenture. It's the company Accenture. So I worked with them for a while, worked with a few local companies in Tampa Bay, but then wound up at JP Morgan Chase pretty quickly and was very fortunate that I just, I rapidly rose and I had a great opportunity within JP Morgan Chase. I started as a database analyst and then a develop, you know, did development work.

project management, program management, the whole nine yards. But really what my biggest success was, doing turnaround, doing turnarounds, being a fixer basically. So I'd get a department that was troubled, I'd get it handed over to me. And of course, you you and I know that when you're having technology issues, like a system's unstable, it's not performing well, it's not the technology, you know, technology doesn't misbehave, it's the people and process behind it. So I got very good at going in,

working with people, understanding what was going on, the dynamics, not just within the team, but within the individual, and then restructuring that department, realigning it. Sometimes people would, you you just shift within that group. Sometimes it was completely bringing new people in, letting those people go to other opportunities. But again, was how to, you know, I always looked at how can I take this team and make it as whole and complete as possible, develop these people.

And what was so profound was that just last month I had coffee with a gentleman who used to work for me years ago. And there were a group of them that he said they were meeting for coffee and they were chatting and they said, what's the best advice you ever got in your life? And these are people I had worked with 10 to 15 years ago. And five of the seven people said it was advice that came from me. It was advice that I'd given them and it wasn't just in their career, it was in life. And so that was really profound. really loved hearing

that kind of impact on people because ultimately that's the mark we're leaving, right? That's the way we're making our impact is it's what are we doing with people? The systems we build may get replaced. The companies we build may get merged or acquired or transform into something else. But really these relationships we build and the impact we make on people is so profound.

Jon Coogan (05:14.876)
Yeah, and I can't touch you on that, but just how important mentors are in your early career and kind of form how you do go about your own business life and leadership. So is there any particular mentors that you had that you saw had a pivotal effect on yourself?

John Hall (05:31.931)
You know, there were two. One is, and I was just reflecting on this the other day, one is it was just a very simple moment. It was so profound. And I was very early in my career and my focus was very much on, know, basically it starts getting to your head. You you're like, go, I'm important. I've got this. I'm growing. I'm doing, I know all this. Right. What was the, think there's a fantastic Mark Twain quote that he says, when I was 14, I was so ashamed at how ignorant my father was.

But at the age of 15, I was amazed at how much he had learned in one short year. you start, you get in and you're young and you think you know everything and you're growing. And I remember going into this meeting with my CIO, gentleman by the name of Bob Rupp. And when I went into the meeting, normally you'd be in meetings with peers or things like that. They'd be distracted. You need to wait or, I've got a phone call. This is important. It's that.

Jon Coogan (06:11.7)
Hmm.

John Hall (06:28.411)
myth of multitasking that we live under of, okay, well, I've got all these other things to do and this is how important I'm in. And when I sat down in Bob's office and he's the CIO, I was running one of his divisions at that time. And it was as if all of a sudden he's like, okay, it took him like 30 seconds. He's like, all right, let me just close this out. Done. He was so fully present. I didn't understand all the terms at this time, but what I knew is I was sitting across from someone that I had their full attention.

He was entirely focused on me and what we were discussing. There were no outside interruptions. And he was, we were focused on what was going on at the moment. We weren't talking about the past or the future. I mean, he was fully there. And that's really, I built a lot of what I do is really working to get people to be fully present because our power, our energy, our focus gets so distracted nowadays.

And that was a moment that just really stuck with me because it made me feel so.

recognized, but also it made me realize where I had fallen short with others, right? Where I wasn't giving my full focus, my full presence to the people on my team or my peers. And it really shifted a lot in how I showed up for people.

Jon Coogan (07:45.962)
And it really has just got so much easier to be distracted and not be present. I think I was reading a study the other day and it was around just having a mobile phone present in the same room. How much that diminishes your concentration and how much that's still on your mind even though you might not be looking at it. And it's just so easy to become distracted and just not be present.

John Hall (08:06.905)
Yeah, exactly. Now, it's fascinating because our biology does have an impact. Women are actually a bit better than men at multitasking. I remember the first time my kids were little. They were two and four. And my wife asked me to take them to the grocery store. And she said, by the way, OK, so you're going to the grocery store. Take the kids to the grocery store. And while you're there, be sure to teach them some things so that they can kind of know what, you know, tell them what the banana is or the apple is so they can learn some things while they're there.

You may have well have told me to do advanced calculus while skydiving while fighting a cougar in midair. I mean, I was, I was completely lost at that point. And you know, women, yeah, women do this all the time, right? They're able to go through the grocery store, doing all this with the children and on the phone at the same time. And there's some biology, some brain, neurological differences that do that. But in general, in a work environment where we need to be focused, there was a study that I read and the impact.

Jon Coogan (08:41.512)
Yep.

John Hall (09:04.667)
Now, granted, it takes about 15 minutes for the impact of multitasking to wear off, where we go and we get distracted, we do something else. But they basically said the drop in IQ is more, there's more of a drop in IQ from multitasking than smoking a joint. That basically weed would be less of a drop in IQ. Now, granted, that's a longer term, but they were using that to illustrate the impact that we don't think about.

Jon Coogan (09:20.916)
Wow.

John Hall (09:30.213)
how much it impacts us to multitask and this myth we tell ourselves that we can be effective multitaskers. It just doesn't work.

Jon Coogan (09:38.878)
Yeah, I'm fascinated to start delving into some of those techniques we can use to help do that. And I think one of things I want to touch on before we do get to some of those methods and the shift from being a tech leader to performance coach is just around, you've spoken about turning around some struggling divisions. Can you tell us about some of the toughest obstacles you've encountered and how you overcame them? So I'm interested around the mindset behind that too.

John Hall (10:02.459)
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the biggest ones, had a department that was basically supported over our biggest, I'm trying to get the exact number. had one system was about 10 ,000 people that it supported, but there are probably about 12, 14 ,000 people supported by this set of a hundred applications. Cause a lot of them, that 10 ,000 user base was the same across the big number at about a hundred applications. And the system that was under this other manager, they had not done property capacity.

proper capacity planning, and it was running at about 100. The CPU was running at about 107, 110%. And it was only possible because the IBM hardware had spare capacity a little bit, so it was able to give a little bit more. But it was a meltdown. mean, I was overloaded, CPU was overloaded, memory was stressed. And I remember particularly there was an batch. There was an overnight report that had to be.

And this overnight report was taking over 24 hours to run. So what that meant is that you would get the end of day results for Monday sometime early Wednesday morning. And then it would go out. And the only thing that saved it was they didn't work on it. They worked half day on Saturday and didn't work on Sunday. So by Monday, it would reset. You get your report sometime on Sunday for Friday. And it would reset. So just severe issues across the board in this.

in the technology, which of course got exposed as you went into the people, because you found that there weren't the right processes in place. There weren't the right people in leadership positions. In fact, I found and promoted one of the people on the team. I promoted up to lead that department. She just did a spectacular job, right? So was the skill, the talent was there. It was just a matter of how it was organized. And we had to essentially, a project like this would normally be a year.

You normally budget a year to do this. You've got to move the new hardware, move to a new operating system, move all your applications, plus fix these issues that are unstable and failing. And because of the criticality of the system, I went and I sharpened my pencil. I said, we can cut it in half. We can do it in six months. I went and spoke to my manager who had given me this challenge and he said, I can give you three months and you've got to solve this in three months, which at the time felt like insanity.

John Hall (12:25.433)
to do this, that it was reckless, it was insanity. But there were a couple of key principles that I want to talk about, because I just shared this. I have a group called Founders Group. I work with founders specifically through this group that are starting up their startup. And we were talking about the concept of peak performance and flow. And flow is that state, if you've ever had it, where it's just absolutely timeless. You are like, my gosh, I'm just in peak performance. Everything is just falling into place. And there's

very particular elements to making this happen. You're nodding your head. I'm imagining you have scenarios where you've just totally felt this. Yeah.

Jon Coogan (12:58.428)
Yeah. Yeah. Like I say, it's just everything is like you're on fire. Everything is just, yep, on the money every time. Everything's going well. Nothing's going to make you waiver or divert off course. And yeah.

John Hall (13:06.468)
Yeah.

John Hall (13:14.455)
Exactly. And what happened, so my manager, gentleman by the name of Sajay Apte, was the one who started this because he started the first part of flow, which is transforming, you need stress, but it's gotta be the right kind of stress. It can't be bad stress or distress, it's something called eustress. And eustress is, and he started it because he said, tell me what you need. Whatever you need, I'll get it to you. He said, you have a blank check, whatever you need, I'll get it to you.

So that was the starting point because I knew I had unlimited support. had a direct involvement in the outcome of what was going on. And I had somewhat, somewhat volunteered for this role. So, right, so a couple of elements of it coming in. And as I built this team, I had an outstanding partner who just took over the hardware migration for me. She did an outstanding job, right? And the team started to flow and we very quickly went through the stages of team development to go into peak performance, to go into flow.

And we accomplished this. were a little over 90 days because we wound up needing a three -day holiday for the migration. We migrated with only one. We had a 15 -minute outage, what we can call a SEV1 outage. We had one 15 -minute outage because we had a few things that got missed. It was one configuration file, think, had reverted back. So we had to just go make a quick update and push it. And we took that 24 -hour batch job and reduced it down to run in under 12 minutes.

So not bad for 90, I think it was like 93, 94 days.

Jon Coogan (14:46.802)
Yeah, I'd say significantly less. I can imagine that's a very stressful position to be in though when you've got people wanting those performance reports and you've got all these issues. At that time, how were you managing stress in dealing with these big projects and having all that pressure on you?

John Hall (15:05.071)
You know, I didn't do it as well as I do it today. So I knew some of the basic concepts. I knew some of the concepts of breath, right? But a lot of it was just, I would breathe deep. I knew some basic concepts of breathing and doing that, but I didn't have all the skills and the tool sets that I do today that I developed today for my clients. And there were two really critical things that came out of this, right? So one, it was taking an impact on my health because what was happening is I was just converting the stress

into cortisol in my body, right? So I was like, okay, well, I'm just running at a higher level of cortisol, but that's what I'm doing. I'm not really dissipating this. I'm not really getting through this. So there are a lot of days that I'd go for a walk, go breathe, do some things, but it wasn't entirely releasing all the stress from my system. And the second part was I remember during the middle of this, and it was somewhat heartbreaking that there was a message system. So back at the time we were using internal messaging and I had a whiteboard and

My son would come in, he was probably 12 at the time, and he would see the messages up on my screen, right, as I'm communicating with everybody. I literally had two cordless phones. I was burning the battery so fast, and one I would move to the other, you know, so I could just rotate them back and forth. And my son had a whiteboard up in my office at home. I was working from home because I was working so many hours. My son comes up and in the exact format,

that we used in our internal messaging system. He put, know, daddy colon, will you come play with.

And it was just, it was heartbreaking. I'm like, my gosh, you know, like I'm realizing I'm not being here for him as much as I want to. And so I was like, all right, that's it. Everyone, we're taking two hours off, right? Go, all of us go shut down, go take a break, right? We've been doing this for so long. It was like Saturday or something. And so I went out and spent some time with him. And it's, that was really the moment that I recognized the myth.

Jon Coogan (16:39.978)
Hmm.

John Hall (17:08.621)
of work -life balance, right? Because we think we talk about balance. I don't like the word balance. I really like the word harmony because we think that we have these separate lives. We think we have the work life and the home life and our personal life and our spiritual life. And we think that there are all these little units and we just kind of balance them out like it's some kind of mechanical equation. And the reality is not right. The reality is that we are all these parts together that what's going on at home.

impacts us at work, what's going on at work impacts us at home, that we have a chance to bring our spirituality and deep presence into every moment of what we do, right? And that if we don't take care of ourselves and balance that and have a harmony of that, right, include that in the mix, then that impacts us as well. So that was another big lesson that came out of that was starting to recognize that we aren't as separate and isolated in these different roles that we play that we like to think we are.

Jon Coogan (18:05.428)
Yeah, now it's really nice to hear. I think certainly a lot of the time, just the added stress of trying to keep it too separate just isn't helpful. it is just bring that some of that vulnerability into the workplace as well. can, if there's things going on, be open and be honest with your teams and you don't have to share everything, but you can say, I'm having a hard day today. I need a bit of time. I'm happy to help you. Give me an hour, block it off.

And I think that's something which is missing. does lead to additional stresses at work. So yeah, it's refreshing and a nice tea. Talk about that side of it.

John Hall (18:39.478)
Yeah, no, absolutely. Thank you.

Jon Coogan (18:41.618)
And just because what you have done is quite a significant change as well. You've gone from being and helping companies transform quite high pressures divisions into doing a performance coach. So where did that, where did that change and that pivot come from? Is that what you just spoken about?

John Hall (19:01.039)
That's it. Well, yeah. So what happened was, unfortunately, my first marriage, it was not healthy. There were a lot of dynamics in there that were not good. The kids went to college and the marriage collapsed. And so I found myself in a state of, OK, what the heck happened? How am going to make sure this never happens again? And I really went down a journey of personal development to better understand myself, to understand not to get locked in the past, but to understand, kind of extract the wisdom from the past. What can I learn from that?

And it also led me down this path of understanding the impact that our physiology and our mindset, that mind -body connection has on us. Understanding more about the dynamic of how our body is constantly signaling to our mind, whether we're safe or not, how to feel, and our mind is constantly signaling to our body, how to respond to that, how to react to that. And what was fascinating was the research around this.

For example, there was a study that they took students in New York. They gave them two sets of tests. One set of tests, the test was basically, here's random groups of words. You're going to organize them into sentences. And one group of words was just totally neutral. And the other group, they injected words like Florida, gray, shuffleboard, things that might be related to aging. Both college students, sets of college students took the test.

study was when they walked down the hallway to drop the paper off. And what they found was that the students who had the words related to aging, and they call this the Florida effect, walked 20 % more slowly than the students who had neutral words. The students claimed it had no imp... They claimed that they didn't recognize anything with the words. When they were shown the words, they claimed they had no impact and that there was absolutely nothing from the test that impacted their speed walking down the hallway.

Right. But yet it did what we put in our mind, right. Clearly impacts our body. And then there's studies Amy Cuddy did some fantastic works. She has a TEDx talk about this. We're doing a Superman pose, putting our arms outstretched like we're flying through the air or hands on our hip like Wonder Woman. Holding that pose for two minutes increases testosterone, decreases cortisol, increases our self -confidence and makes us more likely to take appropriate risky decisions.

John Hall (21:28.249)
It improves our appetite for healthy risk. So these are just very simple studies, but you see what we're putting in our minds impacting our body, what we're doing with our body is impacting our mind. And that fascinated me, absolutely fascinated me to start exploring.

Jon Coogan (21:43.304)
Yeah, which brings us on really to you've got your BPM methods, breath, physiology, and mindset. Can you explain a little bit what that is? You've touched on it just then as well, but go into a bit more depth so we can understand what that means and how to implement that.

John Hall (21:58.575)
Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I'll give a very practical example, which is one of the ways that I teach BPM to use. I love sharing this openly. I'd love for everyone to know this because it's such a game changer and it's so powerful. But when you think of what's a common application is when we get stressed. We start to get stressed, right? So we're starting to feel pressure in one way or another. Maybe it's time pressure we feel we don't have the time to complete something, financial pressure, we don't have the money to do it. Maybe it's just the comp

or the dynamics of the team that we're working with, but we're starting to feel stress. And we know there's a whole set of responses that happen with stress, but the biggest one that I want to share, the studies have shown that basically if we're in a stressful situation, this was done by Dr. John Gottman doing relational research, but he found in a stressful situation where our heart rate goes over 100 beats per minute, MRI scans showed that blood flow decreases to this front part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex.

So at the very point in time that we need to be thinking logically and wisely and have our most executive functions working to help give a solution, that part of our brain is going offline.

Jon Coogan (23:11.538)
Yeah, which is fascinating. I love hearing the science behind it as well. It's all well and good saying, yep, this is what it does. But to hear the test behind it is fascinating. So yeah, I really, really enjoy hearing that. And what things can you actually do to walk us through what the BPM method is?

John Hall (23:27.887)
Yeah, so let's say we're getting in that stressful situation. We're starting to feel caught up. You know, again, we don't have to have a full blown panic attack, but we can feel the pressure. We start to feel the anxiety. We start to feel we're getting tugged this different way. So the first step that I teach people is breath. And there's a particular breath that we're going to use for stress. And the way that we're going to do that is we're going to breathe in through our nose, deep into our belly. And this is a big change for people because a lot of times we're so used to breathing in our chest, we don't know what it feels like to breathe into our belly.

So we're gonna breathe in through the nose, deep into the belly, and then we're gonna exhale out through the mouth. So if you just put your hand on your chest and your hand on your belly.

and just take a deep breath in through your nose and just see which hand moves more to begin.

John Hall (24:15.205)
just without thinking which hand moved more for you.

Jon Coogan (24:18.128)
Yeah, his chest, his chest seems natural.

John Hall (24:19.301)
Chest, okay. Okay, so perfect. So this time when we do it, I want you to put your hand on your belly and just really focus. So hand on the chest, hand on the belly. This time take the breath and I want you to really focus on taking that air down to the belly, letting the belly kind of expand out when you breathe in and then out through the mouth.

John Hall (24:44.795)
and what's the immediate difference that you feel from doing that.

Jon Coogan (24:47.69)
It is just a lot more intake of oxygen. Yeah, just you can definitely feel it.

John Hall (24:51.567)
Yeah.

Yeah. And what happens is a lot of times people describe almost like coming off the freeway, like they're coming off the interstate and they're starting to slow down because what we've done with that breath is we've actually signaled the vagus nerve, which travels up to the brain that we're safe. That's the first easiest indication to indicate that we're safe. So that deep breath all the way down to the belly and then exhaling through the mouth with a longer exhale than inhale, that will signal to the brain that we're safe.

Jon Coogan (25:00.33)
Hmm.

John Hall (25:23.803)
Because think about it this way, stress is in the mind, but stress is also in the body. So if all we're doing, what do we typically do when we get stressed? We start yelling, calm down, calm down, don't lose it, get it together, right? And essentially what we're doing is if you think of it, our brain is about 3 % of our body mass. Our entire body is stressed. We have a six -year -old girl in the kitchen yelling at an 800 -pound gorilla to calm down, right? It is not effective, it's not going to work. So that breath is the first step.

The first thing, and I love breath because it's just, so easy to bring your awareness to the breath. And you're shifting your focus first off off your mindset of I'm stressed. You're bringing it down into your body and your body now gave the first signal to relax. So now we're to go to physiology. We're going to double down with that. So what we're going to do is just imagine your head being pulled up by a string. Your shoulders are relaxed and your shoulders are back. Your chest is open.

Right? So you're opening up your chest. When we get stressed, we tend to go forward. We tend to clench in, right? That's our natural defensive stress position, right? Or we go over confident, right? We start exploding out. But what we're doing is we're now coming to this position of again, using our body to signal safety. When we open up our chest like this, we're allowing our chest to relax and open. That's a position of safety, right? We're bringing our head up. We're changing the position of our spine. So we've now doubled down.

on this message from our brain, from our body to our brain signaling to calm. And then finally, what we can do now at this point is we've released the hijack on the amygdala. We've allowed blood flow to come back up into this part of our brain. And typically when you do this within a minute, within 30 seconds to a minute, you'll start to notice your thoughts changing. You'll start to notice perspective. It's almost like the system boots up and comes back online.

And you start going, okay, wait a second, we could do this. We could do this. We start seeing opportunities. And this is where I teach asking a better question, right? We can start asking better questions. We could start focusing on different things in our mind, but we've used our body twice to allow us to open up, right? And allow our mind to then resume normal, you know, thinking, and we can start priming it with what we want it to do. So that's very high level. obviously I'm used breath work a number of different ways in the practice, but this is my

John Hall (27:49.655)
one of my favorite things to share because it's so practical, it's usable by anybody, whether you're in school, right? You're a stay at home mom that has a busy schedule, whatever you're doing, this is just a very powerful tech.

Jon Coogan (27:54.292)
Hmm.

Jon Coogan (28:03.442)
Yeah, no, I love that. I'd like to it is so simple. You don't need any equipment. You can do it anywhere and it's inconspicuous you could be doing this and no one's going to know that you're even doing it. So I do love simplicity. I've had a few things in my personal life as well, which has caused a lot of stress and anxiety. And one of the things that we've used is a form of breathwork and it really is amazing just how much difference it makes. Is there any particular breathing patterns or counting that you'd recommend? How much difference does that make?

John Hall (28:34.255)
Well, yeah, so there's three ways that I use breath work. So I use breath work tactically. So this was a very tactical application right here. You're in a stressful situation. That breath of the deep inhale through the nose to the belly, exhale through the mouth is tactically designed to calm down. I also use breath strategically. So strategically, a very great strategic breath work technique is one called box breathing.

So box breathing is a technique used by Navy SEALs, used by FBI agents, used by athletes. And what you're doing is you're basically envisioning a box in your mind. So you can do four or five seconds, whatever feels good to you. And you're inhaling for four, you're holding it for four, you're exhaling for four, you're holding that for four, and you're just visualizing that in your mind at the same time you do it. And what's fantastic about strategic breathwork techniques, whether it's box breathing,

Wim Hof has a great method that I love. There's different styles, different breaths. I have about four five different breaths that I can use. But this strategic breathing where you're building breath work into a daily practice, what you're doing is you're actually conditioning your vagus nerve. You're conditioning your body, you're conditioning your mind to increase what's called your window of tolerance. And your window of tolerance is how much chaos, adversity, stress you can handle.

without going into a stress response, without going into what's called hyper or hypo arousal. And if you've ever hit decision fatigue, if you've ever had a day where you are like, I can't make another decision, I am burnt out, I don't even want to think about what to eat tonight, right? That's an example of going outside your window of tolerance. You've you've exceeded your capacity to handle stress, make decisions, right? So you think about what is the value to an executive or a founder.

to be able to handle more chaos, more uncertainty, right? More adversity in their life, be able to be calm and be able to still be in command and thinking logically, right? What's the value to that? So that's where I use breath strategically to expand that out to your point box breathing is one of those. And then the final way is I use breath really, and this is through an hour long breath work session, but I use breath as a way to get down into your beliefs.

John Hall (30:51.641)
So we can start to work with limiting beliefs and start to shift them. So what I do is using breath work and different breath patterns. It's very dynamic. I build it dynamically based on the client, what we want to achieve, what the belief is, knowing that client, what we want to achieve. But essentially I get you into a meditative state that's deeper than you would achieve through just sitting, meditating alone, especially for people who aren't practice meditators. And we create a place where we can start to

access and shift these limiting beliefs. And this is so powerful. I had a founder, just, we were doing this a few months back and he had a business that he had built and then it just COVID came and it just destroyed his business. He was about to go public and COVID came and just completely wrecked his business. And he had rebuilt it, very, very successful, had rebuilt it, but he had this belief in his mind that I should be much, much further along.

in my business and in my company and everything, my brand and everything I've built, I should be much further along than I really am. And we were able to do this and shift this. And he was like, my gosh, John, I can see where I'm exactly where I need to be, where everything I've learned is now only going to allow me to grow even faster and do even better than I did before. He's like, this is such a gift. This is just, this is game changing. Right. So sometimes these shifts

have such a profound impact on us because these belief -based statements are, and there's a study, but I know for time, but these belief -based statements are so much more powerful than trying to use willpower and just say, I'm gonna make something.

Jon Coogan (32:33.45)
You know, that story you've just given us really resonates with me. Similarly, I had a business started a year before COVID, all doing fantastically well. Shipping costs suddenly, I think it went up from about 1 ,800 for shipping container to over 10 ,000. And like I say, a very stressful position does set you back massively and it is hard to overcome those, like I said, self -limiting beliefs and just thoughts that actually we should be further ahead than we are. So it's great to hear that the breath work can help.

certainly reset those challenges you have in your own mind about where you should be and what you should be doing.

John Hall (33:10.095)
Yeah, exactly. you know, this is one of the one of the illustrations that I use to to convey this point is if you think of an iceberg, right. And we like to think and I have this image that's a boat next to the tip of an iceberg and they're roughly the same size. And, you know, we like to think that where these boats that we can just point the direction, we can drive off wherever we want to go, that that that boat is an entirety of us. And that's kind of our mind. That's the mental model we have is why I'm just going to set my mind on something.

I'm not going to go do it. In fact, we even say, we even use the terms, I'm going to set my mind on it. I'm going to set my mind on it. I'm going to accomplish it. And we can wind up getting very frustrated at times because what we neglect is 90 % of that iceberg is underwater. And that 90 % of the iceberg that's underwater, that's our beliefs. That's our unconscious operating system, right? That's constantly operating. There's actually Daniel Kahneman wrote a fantastic book about this called Thinking Fast and Slow.

He talks about two different systems, system one and system two, and that comes into play. It's our feelings. We like to believe we are logical people, but we are really emotional people that sometimes do logical things. And you know, you may say, well, John, that I don't believe that at all because I'm very logical. I go every morning I wake up and I go exactly to this coffee shop and I know exactly to get this biscuit and I know exactly to show up at work at this time. Well, guess what? That's your emotions choosing comfort.

and familiarity, right, every single time. And that's the emotions that we will consistently choose as comfort and familiarity. And where does change come? Change comes outside our comfort zone. So if we don't acknowledge that, if we don't acknowledge that part of the iceberg that's underneath, that that is just as much a part of us as well, we wind up getting frustrated in what we quote unquote set our mind to. And we find ourselves getting held back a lot of times or not quite getting the results we desire.

Jon Coogan (34:49.706)
Mm -hmm.

Jon Coogan (35:07.338)
If, whether it's aspiring leaders, whether it's students or stay at home dads or whoever it might be, if somebody wants to start implementing breathwork into their daily routines, is there a best way to do it? How long, for example, should they be doing it? Does it make a difference for day or night or?

John Hall (35:26.075)
You know, I recommend so I love the great question. So if you just build in five to 10 minutes of breath work daily and I'll give you a practice that you can do box breathing is one that's a great one. Another one that you do a lot of times I'll wake up in bed and I'll do what's called a three part breath. So I'll just I'll be laying there in bed and I'll breathe into my belly. I'll breathe into my chest and then I'll exhale. And it's a very simple practice, but you start to learn.

how to control the breath going into the different areas of your body. And you're also training your mind towards mindfulness. People think a lot of times that meditation or mindfulness is the absence of thought. And it's not at all. It's really the concentrated thought. When I was, a few years ago, I went to visit my nephew and my brother. My nephew was maybe eight at the time.

And we had been told that there was a rabid fox that was running around the neighborhood. My brother lives out in the country and we've been told there was this rabid fox that was out there. And so we went for the walk at night and my nephew had the flashlight. And of course, now we were thinking about the rabid fox somewhat, but my nephew was very much focused on the rabid fox. And so that flashlight was just shooting all around in the ditch, in the culvert, in the road ahead, in the trees, in the bushes, right? That flashlight was shooting all around.

And we finally had to take the flashlight away because we couldn't walk. It was almost impossible to walk because you couldn't see the road for where everywhere the flashlight was going. So when you're doing breath work, when you're doing this practice every day, what you're doing is you're training your mind to keep the flashlight on where you want it. Because if we start to think about our normal day and how much the flashlight of our mind, the awareness of our mind hops all around, right? We can be in the midst of something.

And all of sudden we're thinking about what's going on for lunch or what's for dinner. my gosh, did I forget that appointment, right? That's what we're training our body and our mind to do is keep that flashlight focused.

Jon Coogan (37:26.59)
That's a fantastic analogy. Yeah. I wasn't quite sure where it's going to end up, but now I think that's, I think that's a great analogy and definitely something I can resonate with. quite often ping -ponging around and not the best at focusing, so it's something I need to work on. And with that in mind, one of the things that we've briefly spoken about is how to transform stress from being a downfall into performance advantage. So what can we, tell me a little bit about that. How can we actually

make that our daily practice.

John Hall (37:59.587)
Yeah, so there's, I actually, so this is something I work with founders on, but it's essentially on how do we achieve flow and there's very specific steps to achieving flow. And a couple of those I'll talk about on high level, but you do have the components of ensuring that you have a very clear goal, a very clear outcome. Right, we spoke about the example of me and this big migration. I felt I had volunteered. I knew the impact if it wasn't done.

And really, it's almost more important to know the impact if it isn't done. You need to know that as much as you need to know what you want to achieve. So both parts of that are in there. The other part is, as you mentioned, you want to have a team and be familiar with your team or if you're working individually, you want to make sure that you're able to communicate clearly. There's very specific communication styles that I teach. There's one called a very active listening style that I've actually adopted from relational therapy.

but I brought into the workplace because it shifts our focus from, know, how many times when other people are speaking to us, instead of really listening to what they're saying, we're listening to, we're thinking in our brain about what we're going to say back to them next. Right? So, you know, this other person's talking and they're conveying information, but really what's going on in our head is, well, how am I going to respond? And what do I need to say? And, well, my gosh, well, what if they think this, right? We're just wrapped up in our own thoughts. So being able to effectively communicate.

which also eliminates a lot of ego friction in the team, right? As we start to be heard by each other, we unify more as a team than when we're coming in trying to prove our part of it. When we're trying to come and improve our value or prove our worth to everybody else on the team, that's nowhere near as effective as being able hear the other parts of the team and work together. And then finally, another big component is the transformation of bad stress to good stress.

So it's actually critical to have stress to achieve peak performance, but it's critical that you have the support that you feel, right? You need to know you have the support and you have the ability to make an outcome. So here's an analogy I'll use and I'll try to convert this from American football to what everyone else in the world calls football. We call soccer, right? But imagine you're at a match and it's a championship game and you're watching your favorite team. They're about to

John Hall (40:22.489)
Right. And now one of the players goes out to kick a penalty kick and this could win the game. And right. There's obviously stress and pressure for them to make this kick successfully, but they're trained for it. They have a team supporting them. They have a coach supporting them. Right. This is something that they're prepared for. They have everything they need to be successful with this kick. Right. Now imagine the same game, the same scenario, the same game winning kick that's required. And they call your name.

come out of the stands with a few other random people to completely replace the players face off against this professional team. And now the pressure is on you to make that kick. Right. And if you haven't played at that level before, imagine the stress of, and by the way, they put your name and number and home address up so all the fans can know who to contact if you miss that shot. But we do that all the time in business. How many times do we put people into situations of stress?

Jon Coogan (41:09.342)
Hmm.

John Hall (41:22.009)
and we don't think about providing the support that they need to transform that bad stress into good stress.

Jon Coogan (41:30.634)
So thinking as a leader now, what things could you do for your team to try and give that support? Is there things that you can suggest or offer as tips to current leaders who want to help their teams with stress?

John Hall (41:46.299)
Yeah, absolutely. know, one is just having a very open, listening discussion with your team. Right. So having that discussion of how things are going and what do you need to be supported. It was still one of the most powerful statements that my, my man, I remember Sanjay Apte was his name, that he looked at me during that project when he said, you're going to take it from a year to 90 days. And he looked at me and said, what do you need? What do you need? And that statement as a leader.

to your team is so empowering. And I think a lot of times we can get caught up and we're like, I don't want to ask that because what if they ask for more money or this or that, but those people want to be successful. They want to succeed. You'll lose team members. You'll lose very valuable team members. They will leave your team, not solely for compensation, but because they want to be part of a winning team. When you're on a winning team, when everyone around you is winning,

you feel great and you want to be in that space and compensation and other things start to fade away. So sitting down and just saying, hey, where are you stressed and what do you need? And being able to listen without your own ego getting involved, without being defensive, being able to truly hear that and you'll start to see insightful things come out. And a lot of times it's very simple changes. This was something I put into place all the time with turnarounds is, what's going on, getting to know that that

person, that team member, where they're at. So you know that colleague where they're at, you find out what they need. They now feel that they're heard. How many management studies have there been going all the way back to changing the lighting in the factories? That just simply the experiment of changing the lightings made people more productive. So you start to go on that process and you learn what's going on with the people. And then things just unfold naturally from there. think that's the starting point. There's one thing to do today. It's if you've got people who are stressed out, understanding what's going on and

This is also a part, can get it in the little gray area, but I always as a manager, I didn't just stop with what was going on in the workspace. If something came up that was personally going on for people, I wanted to understand that too. And I created a space for them to be able to share that. Because a lot of times that's a temporary position, that's a temporary thing they're going through. And I remember hearing a study,

John Hall (44:04.803)
You don't, don't know if you have Chick -fil -A's in the UK, but Chick -fil -A is, it may as well be a religion here in the U S right. It's like very big, very popular. Chick -fil -A is a, is a huge brand that's loved here. And the founder of Chick -fil -A, sorry, the current CEO of Chick -fil -A was sharing a story about his father. And he had an employee that was a manager on the night shift at one of these restaurants. And he, his father climbed up on the roof. He had heard some stories, some reports, the manager wasn't doing quite well. He climbed up on the story.

Jon Coogan (44:07.857)
Yep.

John Hall (44:33.607)
on the top roof of the building and found empty beer bottles scattered all over the roof. And he came down and he found out this guy had been drinking, he'd been drinking on the job, he'd been drinking there, but this was someone that had been with the team for a very long time. And he said he never remembered his father, he always remembered his father, pulled the man aside, had a discussion with him, shared his disappointment, shared what was going on, but also was very empathetic to what the man was going through. Put a plan together to support him.

That man went on to just be such a solid, dependable employee from that part out because his father had taken the time to care enough to learn about what was going on in their personal life. And again, it's back to what I shared about the myth of work -life balance. We like to think that we come to work and everything's away and we treat people that way and we miss out on the humanity on who we all are. And when we're fully tapped in that power and people are showing up,

fully without thinking, well, I've got to leave this at home or this here or this there. That's when you really get the best performance out of everybody on your team and you just supercharge your organization.

Jon Coogan (45:39.994)
what I've loved just listening to everything we've talked about for the last half an hour is how much of it isn't just about business. We're specifically talking about business, but how much of that does translate to personal relationships, whether it's family, friends, partners, and I'd say just active listening, so not listening to come back for your response and just having that empathy, being curious, and just being open and honest with your communication. that's just so much of what she does translate.

both in personal and business life. So it's great to you talking about just having that vulnerability and open discussions with members of your team too.

John Hall (46:18.905)
Yeah, I appreciate that. And it's something I learned a lot of my one -on -one clients, right? That it's not about, you could build the most amazing business in the world, but if you don't have the relationship, if you don't have your health, if you don't have true wealth in the terms of quality of life, right? You may have the number in the bank account, but you don't have true wealth. Your business success doesn't matter, right? Your business success doesn't matter. It's a distraction, right? So why not integrate it all in? So you're enjoying the success.

in every single layer.

Jon Coogan (46:51.38)
There's going to be people who are potentially skeptical about some of these practices, things like breath work and mindfulness. What can you say to these people? What would you say to those people who might be skeptical about it?

John Hall (47:03.877)
You know, I'd love for them to, know, obviously they can come to their site, they can find more information about it, but do the research on it. There's a lot of research that's available. There's a lot of books that are available. You know, I've taken data from a number of different books or research topics. I love using, actually, AI has been fantastic because I can go use some of the large language models that have internet access to say, remember this and help me gather the research, but I'll just go constantly pull the research paper and then go click on the link.

because AI does some kind of hallucinate sometimes, but I'll go click on the link and you can find these research studies out there. And the research is just absolutely fascinating at the tie between our mind, our body, breath, physiology. And you see this in, I think what's happening nowadays is we're starting to use science to catch up with a lot of the, it sounds a little awkward to be talking on a business podcast, but it's what we call more the spiritual practices, right?

So you see, here breath is used in a lot of different spiritual practices. Mindfulness is used in a lot of spiritual practices, right? But it was almost like it was used in isolation, right? Well, what good is meditation going to do for me if I'm just gonna go sit on a mountainside? That's not what I do. I'm in the midst of everything, right? But the gift is when we start to bring that same practice into our day to day life, right? So we aren't sitting on a mountainside, but we're incorporating mindfulness.

attitude or meditation or breath into our daily practices, which have been, know the benefits of these. Science is starting to prove decrease in the cortisol levels, increase in confidence, the positivity. shared the study by Amy Cuddy, right? There's just, there's so much science behind it. Do the research. If you're skeptical, do the research and you'll be amazed at what

Jon Coogan (48:51.708)
You've obviously had a lengthy and quite varied career and what would you, if you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice at the start of your career, what would that be?

John Hall (49:04.827)
It would really be what I teach people to do now. just recently went through, we had a hurricane come through Florida. And when I was a kid, I was 10 years old. I went through a hurricane. I remember this one very clearly because I went through the eye of the hurricane and the eye of the hurricane was just, it was fascinating because you read about them, but to actually go through when you can look and see this wall of clouds all around you, this chaos, you went through the chaos to get there.

But you're in this, you look up, it's a blue sky. It's perfectly clear. There's no rain. There's no heavy wind. The birds literally started to come out in the middle of the eye of this hurricane. And so what I've taught people, I've learned to do myself and I now teach people this is we can get caught up in the chaos of life. We can be totally out in the edges of this hurricane, right? And you think about the things that pull you off. We can be so absorbed in the past and not letting the past go that we're out.

We can be so focused with anxiety about the future and what might happen that we are anybody but here in this moment. We can be so wrapped up in our mind that we're just lost in our thoughts. We aren't even involved in the conversation with the other person or involved in what's going on because we're so wrapped up in our mind. Or we can be flooded by our emotions either because we're ignoring them and we're about to drive a car into a deep flooded street that's going to sweep us away because we're ignoring it.

or we're recognizing we're caught up, we're just staying caught up in that emotion. We're ruminating over what that person said to us three days ago or what someone said in a meeting. When we learn to release all of that, when we learn how to become here in the now, be focused in the now, be truly present in the discussion, right? To be aware of our emotions, but not to the point of I have to be wrapped up in them, but I'm aware.

something's going on, I'm feeling this gut feeling that this isn't good or no, this is good, I wanna move forward with it. Then we're in that eye of the hurricane. Then we are able to be so calm in the midst of chaos all around us. And when you get there, you start to learn, my gosh, I never knew what it could really feel like, because I've been in the Southern States so long. So if I could go back and teach myself anything, it would be that practice. It would be how to bring it all together and be fully present at every single moment and truly enjoy life.

John Hall (51:29.7)
no matter what's going on.

Jon Coogan (51:31.882)
This may have kind of covered what your answer might be, but I'm intrigued now because it seems like you've had quite a transformation both in terms of your career and your mindset since you started working life. But what does success mean to you now?

John Hall (51:51.909)
I mean, success is really where I'm at. Success is really where I'm at at any given moment. And if I'm able to not generate, but I feel connect with the deep source of peace, love, and calm that exists at any moment, I'm being successful. Now, look, I love a nice vacation.

love a nice steak. I love a nice car. I love a nice home. I love all those other things. But the ability to just connect at any moment and feel that at that moment is, it's not a destination. It is the journey. It is the way that we've learned to live our life. And that when you can feel that and you show up anywhere in life, at home, at work, you know, for yourself, that feeling, right, then you're truly successful and you'll be amazed at what comes out as a result.

Jon Coogan (52:47.038)
That sounds like an amazing place to be. being success is being happy where you are. So yeah, I'd love that to be the same place for everyone, for everyone to be able to say that. And it sounds like certain messages you're putting out is you're helping people reach that stage. What I want to do now is just give you a final second to leave our listeners with any final thoughts really. And just see if there's anything you want to share with our listeners before we do finish. And also just to find out where we can find out.

more about you and about the work you're doing.

John Hall (53:20.857)
Yeah, absolutely. So final thought, and I love this opportunity, John. Thank you so much for the opportunity to do this. I've enjoyed this conversation so much. the final thought would really just be start taking some time to be still in your day. Right. I'd love for it to be breathwork that you're still. But if you have something else, if there's even a song that you can put on that that that love, there's some moments if you just take

five to 10 minutes a day and you learn to be truly still. Disconnect from all this, right? I've got my watch on my phone and the computer, right? Disconnect from all the business. Learn to be still for a few minutes each day. It is so impactful what will unfold and what will start to open up as you do that as a regular practice. You know, I have my own practice. you're, sometimes it might be prayer, music, movement, a walk, but find a time to turn your mind off and embrace that stillness.

John, I do have a gift that I am building out for people. It is very niche. It probably very a small number people this appeals to. It's called overcoming imposter syndrome. I can't imagine there's many people that have ever felt like they don't belong where they're at, but I do have a using this set, this framework that I built EPM. It's a mini course. It's my gift for overcoming imposter syndrome. So you can go to my website, johnhawkcoaching .com. There's a pop -up.

or you can click in the work with me option and it's right there. And you can sign up for that course, go through it, you'll get it free for two weeks. And if you've never experienced, I realized this when I was writing out the marketing, right? You do, who is it for and who is it not for? And I realized the who it's not for, I'm like, my gosh, if you've never really stretched yourself, if you've never felt an imposter syndrome, it's because you've never really stretched yourself and there's a lot more that's possible for you out there, right? This is something we all bump into.

as we start to stretch ourselves. So that's a gift. JohnHawkCoaching .com. You can learn more right there.

Jon Coogan (55:25.566)
Fantastic. Yeah, I'll definitely be checking that out myself as well. So I'm one of those people who's felt it many times in life. And like I say, try and push yourself and push your boundaries every few years and yeah, immediately you're straight back in that position where you're trying to justify your own existence where you are. So yeah, I think it's definitely going to be beneficial for a lot of people. But yeah, thank you very much for coming on today. I loved hearing about your incredible journey and shared lots of insights with us. I really appreciate the talk. Thank you very much.

John Hall (55:53.487)
John, thank you so much. So good getting to do this.

Jon Coogan (55:55.85)
Thank you.