The Morning Upgrade Podcast Featuring Lance Golinghorst

Thanks for joining me for episode #11 of The Morning Upgrade Podcast where I’m talking with Lance Golinghorst. He’s a husband and the proud dad of 4 kids. Lance is big into functional fitness and uses it to spend more time with his family by being active with them. 

Top Points in This Episode

• Create a points system to help with productivity and motivation. 
• Take the time to find the right customers and find ways to solve their problems.
• Focus on ways to be productive so you can wrap up and spend dedicated time with family at night. 

Links & Resources

Contact with Lance on LinkedIn

Share link for this episode

Find The Books Mentioned on Kindle or Audible: 

Kettlebell Simple & Sinister by Paul Tsatsouline

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Transcription

Announcer:

Welcome to The Morning Upgrade Podcast with Ryan Cote. Where we feature casual conversations with entrepreneurs about personal development and growth.

Ryan Cote:

Hey everyone, this is Ryan Cote with The Morning Upgrade podcast. Today I have with me, Lance Golinghorst. Hey Lance.

Lance:

Hey, how are you?

Ryan Cote:

I’m doing good. It’s a beautiful day in New Jersey, got 10,000 steps in this morning with my wife before my workday started. So that’s always a good way to start today. So why don’t you tell everyone what you do and what you enjoy doing? Like what your interests and hobbies are

Lance:

First and foremost, I’m a dad and a husband. I’ve got a bunch of kids. I’m a 48-year-old guy, but I’ve got younger kids. I have twin boys that are six starting kindergarten here next week. That’ll be interesting in this world of COVID and a two-year-old. And then a six-week-old daughter. When I’m not chasing kids around, I work for a company called Zillions. And Zillions is an Austin, Texas-based company. We work with a lot of manufacturers and distributors and help them make smarter decisions around their commercial strategies, pricing decisions, and how to grow their business by better serving their customers.

Ryan Cote:

What do you do for fun?

Lance:

This sounds counterintuitive, but it’s spending time with my family. I try to find as many activities as I can, that I can stack together, that are things I enjoy but I can also do with my family. As you can imagine, with as many children as we have, time is short. It’s about my most scarce resource. So finding things to do, so I spend a lot of time with my two-year-old pretending I’m a bear and throwing a ball around with my older kids, hop on a bike when we can, or try to get to the pool. Trying to do things to take care of myself and drive functional fitness is really important. I want to be as functional as I can for as long as I can, as my kids get older. And so if I can find things that are active to do with them that helped me stay in shape. Those are things I like to do

Ryan Cote:

Are you saying you do bear crawls as a way to have fun with your kids, but also work out at the same time

Lance:

Exactly. That’s a great idea. I haven’t done many bear crawls, they tend to wreck my shoulders a little bit, but that probably means I need to work on them a little more.

Ryan Cote:

That’s genius. You’re giving me flashbacks. Before COVID I used to belong to a boxing gym by my office. And that was part of their torture, was doing bear crawls on the mat. So that was always a lot of fun, I guess, very functional in terms of fitness. I want to tell them about your morning routine, before we started recording, you were talking about, part of your routine is fitness and you mentioned kettlebells. I’m also a big fan of kettlebells. You mentioned another exercise that you do, not that this is a fitness podcast, but health, personal development. It’s all kind of intertwined. You mentioned you do an exercise with the kettlebell. What was it?

Lance:

Probably my favorite exercise. I do these almost every day. It’s a Turkish get-up. And I keep kettlebell, I work from home, I’m in my office right now, and I’m looking over at my kettlebells. I keep them around. So there’s two kettlebell exercises that I do. One is a set of kettlebell swings. I’ll do 10 sets of 10, and always try to keep my between sets, I let my heart rate drop down between below 110 beats per minute. So the goal isn’t to get tired, it’s just to work that posterior chain. And then Turkish get-ups. It’s probably worth hopping online and Googling Turkish get-up, the get-up tutorial. But effectively what you do, you lay on your back, flat on the ground, take a kettlebell, extend your arm straight out in front of your chest so it’s perpendicular. Your elbow is locked. And then you go from that laying down position to a standing up position with the kettlebell extended over your head, like the Statue of Liberty. 

And so there’s a series of moves you need to make with your body while you’re keeping this lock that your elbow locked out and this kettlebell weight above your head. I’ve worked myself up to, I’m doing a 53-pound kettlebell is what I’m lifting over my head. It’s taken me a while to work my way up there. But as you can imagine, moving from that flat on your back position, through the position where you’re sitting up to getting a leg up and then into a step-up position, it works every muscle in my body. And then once you get from that standing up position to finish that rep, you get back down to that lane on the ground position. So you have to reverse the process to get down. So I’ll do like I said, the kettlebell swings, which effectively is five swings with my right arm and five swings on my left alternating. And then I’ll follow that with the Turkish get-up, which is also 10 repetitions. And I’ll do five with the right arm and five with the left. It’s fantastic. It’s something I can do in my office. The only thing that you need is a ceiling that’s higher than you can reach over your head. Otherwise, you might have a… I don’t know when people live in houses that they can touch the ceiling.

Ryan Cote:

Yeah, it’s true. That’s impressive. I have a 50-pound kettlebell and I definitely don’t think I can lift that above my head and then stand up with it. Not to mention that if I dropped it, it would go smashing into my face, but I guess you work up to it. For those listening, if you’re looking to add fitness to your morning routine, your personal development, the kettlebell makes it very easy. It’s a piece of iron and you can do a lot with it. I always find that simple is better. And so definitely appreciate you sharing that.

Lance:

There’s a book, the routine that I do, I got out of a book. I forget the author’s name. It’s called Simple and Sinister, it’s fantastic. And it gives you the whole scoop behind the philosophy, the benefit of it. And most importantly, some of the routines you can program for yourself.

Ryan Cote:

Yeah. We’ll definitely link that up in the show notes. You said it was simple and sinister. Thanks for sharing that. We got a little kind of a glimpse into your morning routine. What are the full elements? What does your morning look like? How do you start the day off on the right foot?

Lance:

Those are the things I try to do every day. And if I can load them early in the day, I do. Having young children with the youngest two being six weeks old and a two-year-old, oftentimes the routine gets thrown off, but I try to accomplish a handful of things every day. The ones that I consistently do first are spending a little bit of time doing a Bible study. And I just follow Adam Wainwright, walking with Wayno is his guided Bible study. It’s a path to read some old Testament, New Testament, and then either Proverbs or Psalms every morning and get through the entire Bible in the course of a year. And it’s something I’ve never done. And I started in January and it’s been a really great way to start my day and something I could see myself continuing forever. It’s great. And then the other piece is just doing some reading. I always try to have a book or two going. So these days I wake up around five and I grab my six weeks old, give my wife a break. She’s been up a lot of the night, feeding and trying to get the little girl to go to sleep and I’ll grab her and go to a different room and sit in the chair and I can use my phone or my iPad and I can do my Bible study and I can read. 

So those are two things. And then the other things I try to sprinkle throughout the day, I usually can’t get done is I try to make a phone call. I tried to make one phone call to a family member or friend, and try to do that every day. Whether it’s one of my brothers or my mom or my dad, or maybe an extended family member. But that’s been an important part to me that doing that on a regular basis or a daily basis has made a difference. There’s the kettlebell routine I do Monday through Friday. And then the other part of my routine is I kind of build a little bit of gamification for work. As I said, I’m in sales and I help companies make some pretty significant decisions about investing and in software to help their business. And it’s a complex process, and there’s a lot of stakeholders that are part of making that decision. And so I’ve got a list of a handful of things that are really important for me to keep top of mind and actions to take. And so I give myself points for accomplishing those and I try to score four points every single day to make sure I’m keeping on track of the things that are important for enabling my prospects and customers to make decisions. if I’m able to help my company help our customers, that helps everybody win.

Ryan Cote:

I love the idea of the checklist of the things that you want to accomplish at work. It actually kind of segues me into my next question. I was asking about the perfect day, cause I kind of have my elements of a perfect day that I like to check off, you know, like spending time with my kids just certain things I like to do throughout the day. Do you have a perfect day? You said you work from home, so I’m sure you see your family a lot, but what does your perfect day look like?

Lance:

You know every day is a little bit of a different flavor. For me, my perfect day is productive. I’m not sure if you can hear the sound, but I’ve got kids outside my door right now and my door doesn’t have a lock. So the other use for my kettlebells is that I use it as a doorstop. So it keeps the kids from barging in. My perfect day is spending an hour holding my newborn daughter, playing with the two-year-old. When he wakes up at seven we play, you know, two-year-olds have a great imagination. So we play and we have fun. His older brothers wake up, we have some breakfast. And then by eight o’clock, I get in my office and I try to make my day as productive and effective as I possibly can. So I can accomplish the things I need to do, score those points in my system, and be at a spot where I can wrap up so I can fully give attention back to my family when I walk out the door. And believe me, they’re waiting outside the door by the time five or six o’clock rolls around. 

And then we just try to get outside and I live here in Minnesota. So we’ve spent a lot of time outside in the summer and it’s a little trickier in the winter. There are different types of activities, little kids, we spend more time inside. But it’s family in the morning, hammering work, putting in as much time as I possibly can, focusing on the most value-added things, and then trying to wrap that up and focus on family. And then I usually, after the kids go to bed around 10 I usually hop on and take 30 minutes just with the goal of making sure my inbox is empty so I can start the next day fresh without worrying about open items.

Ryan Cote:

Yeah. It’s nice to have a clean inbox. I’m picturing you holding your newborn, doing squats. You were talking about injecting fitness into your routine with your kids. You could do wall squats and squats while you’re holding your daughter.

Lance:

That functional fitness is important, really important to me. I can’t remember if I mentioned this or not, but I’m a 48-year-old man with my oldest two boys are twins, they’re six. And my youngest was just born last month. And so it’s really important for me to make sure I’m incorporating and thinking about ways that every day do things that give me strength through range of motion. So I can be as functional as I can and be out there as long as I can in this body. Because my kids are going to be more active and I need a way to keep up with them.

Ryan Cote:

I love that. I love the whole idea of functional fitness. I think that’s really key. With the morning upgrade, it’s a personal development podcast. So the people that I interview are usually growth-minded, growth mindset. And it’s funny, in all these interviews it’s always, relationships are always a very common theme. So I think that’s something I’m starting to pull from, doing these interviews. It’s all about relationships, especially now more than ever. I got one more question for you and then we’ll wrap this up and you can tell everyone how they can connect with you. So you’re in sales, you said, and I’m just wondering, and I do sales too, so I know it’s very hard, it’s easy to get into slumps and what have you. How does your personal development and mindset help you with your sales? Like have you ever had to face any hard situations and how did you handle it? What comes to mind?

Lance:

One area people sometimes get hung up if you’re not in sales is of trying to trick people into doing something for your own selfish interests. And that’s absolutely not the case, right? The thing that makes me so excited, I love what I do, is I get to work with a bunch of different companies in different industries. I focus on a certain area that I can pick up patterns and I can help start to connect the dots for companies that are their own unique snowflake but have similar attributes to others. And really if I’m finding ways to help solve their challenges and help enable a decision to potentially invest in a product like ours, that’s a huge win for them. So the thing that I love about sales is that I get to do something different every day, I had the chance to influence without authority and I get to help people. And so, to get back to your question, there are times of challenges right? Because what I do or what I’m trying to add value, isn’t the best thing for everybody to do. And not everybody is a customer. 

So taking the time to find the right people and get some time, there’s a lot of noise out there, everyone’s competing for everyone’s mind share, and it could be challenging. There are ups and downs. And the thing for me that I keep going back to, I’ve recognized the older I’ve gotten that greatness isn’t something you do one time, or it’s like this brilliant flash. For me, and the way I’m successful and the way I can be successful and help my company be successful and teach my kids to be successful is been good. It’s being good and executing really well every single day. And if I’m good and I’m good and I’m good and I’m good, the results are going to be great. And so getting back to the process, finding the right things that are important, that make the biggest difference for me and the actions I take are where I’m always going back and looking and trying to find ways to do good a little bit better.

Ryan Cote:

I really resonated with that answer. That was really good. All right, well, thanks for being on the show. What’s the best way that people can connect with you if they want to reach out to you and connects.

Lance:

I’m on Linkedin, If you just search Lance Golinghorst on LinkedIn. Golinghorst is G O L I N G H O R S T. Just shoot me a message and connect and I’m glad to chat, always looking for people to share ideas with.

Ryan Cote:

Great. Thanks, Lance, thanks for being on the show, and thanks to everyone for listening.

Announcer:

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