Disruptive Consciousness: Don’t Believe Everything You Thought
The Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast
Release Date: 08/12/2025
Breaking the Playbook: Faith as the Founder’s Edge
The Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast
🔥 Excerpt “Either I will win, I will learn, or I will transform.” ⚡ TL;DR Frances Strickland joins me to explore value, pricing, clarity, and faith in business. She outlines how structure, leadership, and flow reveal the hidden leaks that keep founders from predictable profitability. We talk about defining an ideal customer, practicing value based pricing, and selling in a way that honors both the buyer and the work. Frances shares stories about financial pressure, reinvention during COVID, and spiritual nudges that shaped her offers and networking strategy. At its core, this...
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From IBM to Independent: John Gallagher’s Leadership Leap
The Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast
🔥 Excerpt “People change when the pain of remaining the same is greater than the pain of the change itself.” ⚡ TL;DR John Gallagher left a secure corporate role at IBM to build a purpose-driven coaching practice rooted in faith, intentionality, and transformation. In this episode, we unpack his journey from executive leadership to entrepreneurship — exploring how feedback, surrender, and alignment with purpose shaped his life’s work. John and Rick discuss leading with integrity, building Kingdom impact through business, and finding harmony between faith, work, and personal growth....
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Living Real in a Shallow World: Dr. Camille Preston on Resilience, Self-Love, and Leadership through Crisis
The Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast
🔥 Excerpt When you give yourself the space to fully process and be present with all of it, every breakdown has the potential for a breakthrough.” ⚡ TL;DR Dr. Camille Preston—business psychologist, author of Living Real, and founder of AIM Leadership—joins Rick Meekins to unpack what it means to lead and live authentically in the midst of compounded crises. From grief and burnout to self-love and leadership, Camille challenges the illusion of success and explores how embracing intensity, presence, and vulnerability can transform both leaders and organizations. 📄 Show Notes We live...
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The Hidden Heist of Success: Bill Cates on Money, Mindset, and the Power of Referrals
The Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast
🔥 Excerpt “Referrals aren’t the icing on the cake—in a lot of businesses, they are the cake.” ⚡ TL;DR Bill Cates—best-selling author, keynote speaker, and the renowned “referral coach”—joins Rick Meekins to dissect the intersection of money, mindset, and business growth. From challenging the scarcity myth to reframing referrals as the foundation of sustainable revenue, this episode explores how founders can build wealth, relevance, and credibility through generosity and strategic relationship-building. 📄 Show Notes I’ve met plenty of founders who treat referrals as...
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“Anything Can Be Fixed”: Lillia Sanders on Profit Protection, Pricing Power, and AI-Driven Clarity
The Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast
🔥 Excerpt “Anything can be fixed financially. Anything. Sometimes it’s just within the company—making small tweaks to how you’re charging, what you’re not charging for, where your money’s going—and then laying it out so you have a plan.” — Lillia Sanders ⚡ TL;DR Fractional CFO Lillia Sanders joins me to talk about rebuilding from the ground up—personally and financially—and what every founder needs to know to protect profits, make data-driven pricing decisions, and stop running blind. We dig into the discipline behind clean books, the courage to raise rates, the...
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Fail Fast, Win Relentlessly: Kingsley Maunder on Assumptions, MVPs, and Real Innovation
The Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast
🔥 Excerpt “You have to assume the vision—but don’t take those assumptions as facts. Test them. That’s where you learn to fail fast.” ⚡ TL;DR Author and product builder Kingsley Maunder joins me to dismantle the romance of “big ideas” and replace it with a system founders can actually use: start with the problem, define success and failure lines, ship the smallest thing that solves the biggest pain, and iterate on evidence—not ego. We unpack bleeding-edge vs. table-stakes features, why messaging misses are data (not drama), and how to prioritize a roadmap with impact,...
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James Burden : Neurodivergent and Unapologetic
The Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast
🔥 Excerpt What if the way you speak—or the identity you cling to—isn’t the problem? Speech therapist and coach James Burden unpacks stuttering, ego, and the surprising power of letting go to actually win. ⚡ TL;DR James Burden—speech therapist and founder of Stuttering Blueprint—joins me to challenge the myths around stuttering, reframe it through a neurodivergence lens, and trace how a season of personal upheaval (divorce, burnout, a brain tumor) led him to a different definition of success: inner peace. We dig into radical self-acceptance, “white-knuckle fluency,”...
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The Comeback Code: Resilience, Reinvention, and Results with Roderick Jefferson
The Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast
🔥 Excerpt “If I don’t trust you, I won’t buy from you.” We go straight at the hard stuff: building trust at scale, using AI without losing the plot, and what happens when life redlines—and then resets your purpose. ⚡ TL;DR Sales enablement pioneer and keynote speaker Roderick Jefferson joins me to break down go-to-market enablement, why trust and empathy still close deals, and how to use AI as a productivity force multiplier—without outsourcing your judgment. We also get personal: his near-death stroke, the wake-up call that reordered his priorities from work–life to...
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Run Toward the Fire: John Graham on Risk, Meaning, and a Life of Service
The Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast
🔥 Excerpt “You can chase adrenaline or you can build a life that matters. One keeps you entertained. The other keeps you proud.” 📄 Show Notes I don’t often meet someone who literally ran toward war just to see what he was made of. John Graham did—and then spent the next few decades turning that raw hunger for danger into disciplined service and leadership. In this conversation, we trace his arc from Algerian border crossings and frontline diplomacy in Vietnam to a mid-storm bargain with God in the Gulf of Alaska, and ultimately to a life committed to peace, justice, and building...
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Built for Impact: Business, Balance, and the Abundance Mindset with Lauren Bencekovich
The Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast
🔥 Excerpt “You’re never going to feel confident enough until you just do it. Act first—the confidence follows.” ⚡ TL;DR RN-turned-founder Lauren Bensakovich joins me to break down how she built a boutique healthcare recruiting firm on an abundance mindset, disciplined outreach, and zero-nonsense personalization. We get into masterminds, automation (used intelligently), coaching candidates with integrity, and how AI helps—but doesn’t replace—high-stakes recruiting 📄 Show Notes Abundance isn’t a hashtag. It’s a way of operating. In this episode, I sit down with Lauren...
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We don’t experience the world—we experience our thinking about the world. Once you spot the difference, stress stops running the show.
⚡ TL;DR
Executive coach and author Tracey Gazel joins me to dismantle the myths founders carry about stress, mindfulness, and “hustle.” We break down a practical, three-tier framework (physiology → mental training → social dynamics) to recognize triggers, exit burnout, and operate from calm, high-quality thinking—no cushion, no sabbatical, no drama.
📄 Show Notes
If you’re a high-achieving founder, you’ve probably convinced yourself stress is the price of admission. Tracey Gazel would like a word. In this episode, we unpack why most of us live in our heads 95% of the time, what that costs in decision quality, and how to get back to the only place strategy actually works—the present moment.
Tracey and I get tactical. We walk through her “stress slide”—the early physiological tells (tight jaw, fists, that familiar knot near the shoulder blade) that precede lousy choices—and how a 30-second pause shifts you out of fight-or-flight and back into the prefrontal cortex, where composure and judgment live. She differentiates mindfulness (observing thoughts) from meditation (quiet mind) and explains why you don’t need a perfect practice to access a quiet mind on demand. Music, a brisk walk, even a bike ride can be legitimate “meditations” if they shelve the noise.
We also talk burnout triage: sleep by cycles (6.0 or 7.5 hours beats a guilty, broken eight), gentler mornings, and short, structured resets throughout the day. The rule is simple: the feeling state you’re in is a dashboard—if you’re anxious or irritable, you’re not doing your best thinking. Don’t brute-force it. Step away, reset, and return with better cognition.
Finally, Tracey maps her three-tier leadership framework:
- Physiology—sleep, hydration, oxygen, morning cadence.
- Mental training—understand the mechanics of thought; you’re the thinker—choose which thoughts get airtime.
- Social—triggers, communication, listening, and culture—where your inner game shows up externally.
If you want fewer 2 a.m. spirals and more decisive execution, this one will pay for itself by next Tuesday.
✅ Key Takeaways
• Use the dashboard: your feeling state signals thinking quality—low state, pause; high state, proceed.
• Catch the stress slide early to avoid escalation and poor decisions.
• Shelf the problem to solve it: step away to engage default-mode creativity; then decide.
• Sleep by cycles, not guilt: 6.0 or 7.5 hours; protect a calm morning ramp.
• Train selection, not suppression: you can’t stop 50k+ thoughts/day—choose which ones you entertain.
• Lead from presence: composure is a competitive advantage that cascades into culture and execution.
👤 Bio
Tracey Gazel is an executive coach, consultant, speaker, and author who helps driven high-achievers build mental clarity and calm composure under pressure. A former healthcare leader based near Vancouver, she blends mindfulness, neuroscience, and practical leadership coaching to upgrade decision quality for senior executives and founder-led teams.
🎁 Giveaway
Unlock Focus, Calm & Clarity (free audio) + access to The Focus Lab (Tracey’s free monthly drop-in).
How to get it:
- Connect with Tracey Gazel on LinkedIn with a quick “RPOW listener” note.
- Request the “Unlock Focus, Calm & Clarity” audio and the next Focus Lab date.
- Show up once; leave with a cleaner head and a practical reset routine.
🧭 Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
01:59 The Journey to Executive Coaching
04:43 Understanding Mindfulness and Meditation
10:04 The Stress Slide and Its Indicators
12:21 Recognizing and Recovering from Burnout
15:48 Techniques Beyond Meditation for Mental Clarity
19:37 Creating Space for Innovative Thinking
21:00 The Three-Tier Framework for Personal Growth
26:23 Understanding the Mind and Its Habits
30:28 Finding Balance: The Importance of Breaks
34:41 Transformative Client Stories and Lessons Learned
38:22 Choosing to Live Fully in the Present
42:15 Outro