John Hall, tell me about your vision.
Let's see, where are you going, where are you headed,
what do you see as a division of the past,
future, present, beyond?
All of that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely, love the question.
So, you know, I actually wrote an article recently
about this on LinkedIn.
I was talking about, you know, my background's technology.
I was a technology exec for 30 years,
specialized in parachuting into troubled areas
that were having technology issues and turning them around.
And, you know, technology doesn't misbehave on its own.
It's the people in the process
that actually drive these issues.
And so I got really good at working with people
and understanding people
and understanding what makes them tick.
And to the point that people were coming back
five, 10, 15 years later saying,
I remember that piece of advice you gave me
and it didn't just change me in my career,
it changed my life.
And that was really, really powerful.
Really was.
And it led to, when some opportunities came along,
I had some shifts in my marriage, you know, it ended,
and I went down the path of like, what happened?
How do I make sure this doesn't happen again?
And started really discovering
a lot about the mind-body connection, right?
A lot about how, you know, I say all the time,
we like to think we're emotional, we're logical beings
that sometimes have emotions,
and we're really emotional beings, right?
That sometimes that fits a logic.
And so my vision is really getting people to understand
the potential we have in the mind-body connection.
Understanding that we don't just operate
in our mind automatically.
It's not just like these computers, right?
That just kind of function on their own.
We aren't just walking computers.
We're humans.
And we have a human experience.
And that means that our somatic experience,
our mind-body connection, our emotions,
all of it are key to really stepping to our power.
So my vision is just like going in and understanding
it's not about the technology, it's about the people, right?
My vision is that people understand the potential
that every single one of us has,
and how to tap into that potential using our mind,
using our body, right?
I'd say when our head, heart, and core is in alignment,
that's when we're in our power.
And I really want to share that so that everybody understands
the potential that they have available to them.
I second that.
We talk about this a lot on VisionPros,
because it's very aligned with how we see things,
heart and mind.
Having the combination of both of those is,
as a lot of masculine people say, heart and gut,
or I'm sorry, mind and gut.
I really want to avoid this whole heart feeling thing.
Not our vision leaders.
And other people who come to this show understand
that we dive into the depths of principles.
And there's plenty of times where I take a breath,
and I think through and I feel through, right?
What's next?
And again, it's a community of people who appreciate that,
and looking for wisdom from people like you,
who have spent decades figuring these things out,
going through the hard knocks of life too, that occur.
I'm twice divorced.
I don't think you probably know that.
The thing about people like John too,
for those of you listening in,
is we are, John and I both, producers, not consumers.
And because of that,
we're not coming into environments like this,
where we feel like we have to read the dictionary
of the other person.
Or the encyclopedia story of Jackson.
We just show up and surf.
And do I speak well for you on that,
or did you do six hours of research on me
before you jumped on?
No, 100%.
I mean, I learned enough about who you were,
and obviously we connected.
It felt great seeing you on screen,
and a natural look, just connection there.
And I love what you brought up as well about,
sometimes we avoid the heart.
And one of the things that is so important,
is we get so caught up sometimes.
And I was in this trap for a very long time, right?
We go through school, and we're educated,
and we're taught how to use this.
We're taught how to use logic.
We're taught how to use our brain, right?
And we believe, and there's an illustration I use,
all the time with clients.
And I have a picture of an iceberg.
And if you ever see an iceberg above the surface, right?
It's about the same size as a ship.
Iceberg of emotions.
That's right.
And it looks like we should just be able to point
that thing where we want it to go,
and it's gonna go where it's gonna go.
But pick maybe that second one there, right?
I mean, it's like 90% of the water.
No, you're good, you're good.
90% of an iceberg's underwater.
And it's more than just our emotions, right?
Yeah, it's more than just even our emotions.
It's our subconscious patterns, our limiting beliefs.
It's all the programming that we've experienced
over a lifetime.
And this is what will drive us if we aren't aware of it.
And we'll get frustrated, right?
Because we're up thinking we're this top part
of the iceberg, and we're like,
I'm not going where I wanna go.
I don't understand.
I'm pointing this way, I'm moving this way,
I'm setting my goal on this, my vision's on this,
and I'm drifting off this other direction.
I don't understand why.
And it's why I really studied this mind-body connection.
But on top of it, it's one of the three ways
I use breath work, right?
So I use breath work very tactically in a situation.
I teach clients to use breath work strategically
to expand their window of tolerance.
But what's really beautiful,
we get into like an hour long breath work session,
is I get down to that operating system level.
I get down into the identity of who we are.
I get down to that 90% of the iceberg,
and we can start shifting things around that way.
Absolutely, it's huge.
Oh, it's been about 10 months probably,
but about 10 months ago, I printed that iceberg out
and sat down with my six-year-old and eight-year-old
at the time, and we reviewed that.
We went over the iceberg of emotions
and how to process them.
And it's one of the greatest things that,
and I know that if I teach my kids things,
and I'll meet them at an emotional level
with the right type of information at a younger age,
then it's gonna prepare them for things
that a lot of adults have never even heard of.
And you've got a company called Intentional,
as well as johnhawkcoaching.com.
Talk to me about the evolution
and where the vision came from.
Yeah, I had been in corporate for 30 years in technology,
and I was in a marriage,
it was an abusive marriage for 25 years.
I went through, I think this is one of the biggest challenges
we've had for men recently,
is masculinity is so under attack,
it is so questioned, it is so not understood,
it is not appreciated.
And if you think back to men-
News flash, news flash for those of you listening in.
I went to jail, most people don't know that.
I barely started to be able to talk about this in February,
I don't make any big point,
but I hear you loud and clear, John, continue.
Yeah, and I share with people all the time,
if we were born three, 400 years ago,
pre-industrial revolution,
as men, we would have grown up around other men,
around 12 to 13,
depending on whether our family was wealthy or not,
if they were wealthy, would have a male tutor
who was hired in to teach us,
and we would also be seeing our father or whatever,
who was the wealthy person,
would be seeing them in day-to-day action.
If our families weren't wealthy,
we'd be apprenticed off to someone,
another man in the village or a relative,
and we would be following again that man around all day
and seeing how he interacted with other men, with women,
how he conducted his trade,
and we would be learning that way.
I mean, we learn through absorption,
we learn through being around other people, right?
And especially at that younger age.
And now with the industrial revolution,
we have, and I know school teachers
that have made a tremendous impact in my life,
and I am not knocking this in any way,
but we have taken boys,
and for the first five years of my education,
there was not one man that was a teacher.
They were all female teachers.
And the man that I did see
prior to my parents getting a divorce was basically, right,
what do boys see?
They go to school, they come home.
If you're seeing a man,
if you happen to live in a two-parent household, right,
with a man there,
you're seeing him at the end of the day.
After he's worn out, burnt out, he's gone out,
he's done his thing, now he's coming home,
you don't see him in the prime of his action.
And there's a line from Fight Club
that I use all the time, right,
where a generation of men raised by women.
And the reality is that that has taken a toll
because we don't have models to see
how we should behave and how she'd act.
Huge.
And so I carry, this is coming from
a lot of self-discovery, right, to get to this point.
It's a bit off topic, but I love where we're going on this.
No, no, no, it's perfect.
And, you know, I had a marriage
that I came into with co-dependency.
I came into it at a very early age
with what my parents went through is,
it's on me, I need to do more,
I need to make this happen,
and I didn't know how to set healthy boundaries.
I didn't know how to really take care of myself
in a healthy way,
and got into this marriage that just became,
that was abusive.
And I allowed that to endure for a very long time
till literally, I joke,
I have 12 stitches on the back of my head,
that I joke God took a two-by-four
to the back of my head to wake me up.
Had to wake me up.
You know, I hit a tile floor, I passed out,
I hit a tile floor.
It started a chain of events
that got me down this path
of starting to understand the situation I was in
and starting to change and shift out of that.
And so this evolution has been a very personal journey for me
because it has really been about
how do I break free of these past patterns?
How do I shift this stuff?
How do I step into who I am?
And I have a real,
I know you're like, John,
you're talking about a relationship
but here you are coaching each other on an entrepreneur.
I'm actually thinking, John,
I thought I was the only one with this story for a while.
Go ahead and keep going.
And no, but the reality is,
I do not like the term work-life balance
because it invokes the scale in front of us,
like the scales of justice
and then work is on one side
and life is on the other side.
We're gonna put little chips in
and that is just not the way that it works
because it perpetuates a myth
that we have separate lives.
We have a work-life and we have a home-life
and we have a personal life
and then maybe on the weekend,
we have a spiritual life.
We go do some spiritual thing.
We have a spiritual life
and we isolate ourselves
into all these little bits and pieces
instead of understanding the cohesive person that we are.
And Mickey Singer,
I don't know if you've ever read the book,
The Untethered Soul or The Surrender Experiment.
He is just absolutely amazing,
just such an amazing book.
I'm geeking out.
I'm like in his 60th lecture on Audible,
but he talks about, right,
the best spiritual practice
is not where we go off in the woods
and we meditate
and we isolate ourselves for three weeks
and we do all these things.
The best spiritual practice is literally us
in this moment sharing our life experiences
in a very deep way to impact other people.
That is a spiritual practice in and of itself.
Yeah, oh, absolutely.
I love that.
I'm going to add a little bit to what you talked about
with the work-life balance equation
and how people can feel with that.
I untethered myself from words
for the most part several years ago
and I'm so grateful for that.
I've got a family member.
I'm not going to go too generic there.
I've got a family member who is a semantics obsessed individual
and I've seen how detrimental,
how much it destroys their relationships
because they're so obsessed with one viewpoint
over specific words and they're an intellect.
That's their obsession is having to control
the paradigm of how somebody sees something.
I love what you're talking about.
I love work-life balance and the thought process on it
but I came to appreciate the story of the plate spinners
and how a plate spinner doesn't spin all plates equally.
It depends on what's wobbling at the time
and what's out of balance.
Sometimes you got one persistent plate.
You might be a teenager on drugs.
It might be a marriage that's on the rocks at a certain time.
There's lots of things that can call our attention
and so our priorities aren't based on equal distribution
as much as what needs attention at the time.
That analogy can be contorted in a way
where I feel bad about it, of course, I can.
The holistic opportunity in my opinion is to take the good
from what is shared and to then apply that.
One thing that you shared at the end there, I got to get
right back on track with that because it hit me
and now it left me.
I'm going to come back and watch this.
We're at episode 1025 in a year and a half into this.
That's awesome.
Yeah, it's absolutely amazing but this is one
I cannot wait to come back and look at.
I will shift gears to the divorce side
and the children being raised by women's side.
I was raised by six women, John.
Oh, wow.
My mom and five older sisters.
All my sisters are seven to 15 years older than me.
I always joke, God gave me six months.
He knew I was a handful.
The male figures as well and not getting my dad's side
of the family, I spent a lot of time around male influences
but we should have gone around doing productive things.
It was a duke's hazard though.
We were having a very different experience.
So this idea, industrial revolution and what took place
beforehand and thinking through the internships,
the apprenticeships, even the idea of indentured slavery,
not to condone in any way, shape or the imagination
of current oppression but the ability to gain traction
as mentored by somebody and having the protection
of security and safety in that environment
when it was done with nobility in mind.
It's very different than the society we have today.
Yeah.
Leaves us with a lot of lessons to learn on our own
and try to figure out.
It absolutely does.
I was fortunate enough that I was in Scouts as a kid.
I was very involved in church.
I had a lot of other men in the community that stepped in.
Really good teachers.
I literally remember the name of teacher, Mr. Reuben Lane,
who was my high school teacher, was just phenomenal.
I mean, just a phenomenal guy.
But I carried this.
I struggled with this because I never really...
I felt like I was an imposter when it came to my relationship
with other men for a very long time.
And it was only through a lot of my own deep work
that I began to tear down those walls
and build the relationships with men to the point that I value.
I have brothers that I value more than anything.
It is just a contribution to true wealth in my life
with these men that I just totally respect
and I'm totally open with and totally transparent with.
But it's a shift.
It's not...
A lot of times we feel so isolated
because our relationship with other men
are either based on stereotypical patterns
that we think it should be, right?
Or we just feel isolated altogether
and we don't get to this point of deep connection with other men.
It's amazing.
If you're listening in and you want to get connected,
you got johnhaulcoaching.com, of course, LinkedIn.
It's not hard to find John, by the way.
He's out there in the world and he's ready to help out and mentor.
Mentors love to mentor.
So again, don't hesitate to reach out to either one of us.
Also drop questions if you have them.
John, I'd love to have you back.
This is a shorter kind of introductory episode,
but you've got strength of depth.
I've got a ton of questions that I can ask and dive into further
so that our audience continues to get to know
where can all this go?
And some people, they're going to be a little bit slower
if they want to reach out.
And for those of you, if that's you, that's okay.
Don't force yourself to dive into situations
that are outside of your comfort zone.
But know that we'll bring John back
and I'll be excited to dive in deeper if he wants to.
And I don't know.
What do you say, John?
You want to come back?
I'm glad I'm ready.
Let's book it right out.
Let's get it.
Let's get it set up.
I love this conversation.
I love what we're doing already.
So that'll be great.
We'll discuss the details afterwards then.
And everybody else have a fantastic rest of your day.
Keep being vision pros.
Go after your visions, pursue them and find wonderful people
who will help you bring those visions to fruition.
There's a lot of people out there who will.
You just got to find people who truly care about you.
Not always easy, but worth doing.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a vision pro yourself.