Lyn Christian: Unleash Your Inner Badass – A Master Class in Confidence, Purpose & Living Your Truth

Recorded in the Recording Studio at Kiln SLC (Gateway Mall)

Lyn’s company: Soul Salt, Inc.

Lyn’s book: Soul Salt: Your Personal Field Guide to Confidence, Purpose, and Fulfillment

Book recommendations: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t by Jim Collins; It Takes What It Takes: How to Think Neutrally and Gain Control of Your Life by Trevor Moawad; The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber; What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith; Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace by Gordon MacKenzie

This episode features Lyn Christian, a seasoned executive coach with a background in neuroscience. The discussion revolves around personal development, self-awareness, and the importance of physical fitness in maintaining a successful business.

Christian emphasizes the importance of being in tune with one’s highest self and believing in one’s potential to succeed and mentions that these two elements are consistently necessary for someone to reach their potential. Christian also discusses the importance of self-regulation and emotional intelligence in overcoming human nature and becoming a better version of oneself.

Christian shares her personal fitness routine, which is key to keeping the business running. Christian talks about her fencing practice, intermittent fasting, and the importance of a healthy diet and sufficient sleep — believing that treating oneself well is crucial for running a successful business.

The conversation also touches on the concept of possibility practice, which involves focusing on personal possibilities and aspirations. Christian suggests that people often neglect this aspect of their lives because they don’t earn a paycheck or receive external recognition for it. However, she believes that focusing on personal possibilities can lead to greater fulfillment and success.

The podcast ends with discussing the challenges people face in their personal and professional lives. Christian suggests that these challenges often stem from a lack of self-awareness and understanding of one’s core values and encourages people to explore these aspects of themselves to overcome their challenges and reach their full potential.

Kyle Knowles:
Hello there. Welcome to episode number four of the Maker Manager Money podcast, a podcast about entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, business owners, and business partnerships to inspire entrepreneurs to keep going, and to inspire future entrepreneurs to just start. My name is Kyle Knowles, and this episode is being recorded in the recording studio at kiln at the Gateway Mall in Salt Lake City. Kiln uses the word bespoke on their website with the heading Bespoke Experiences. I had to look up the word bespoke, and the definition of bespoke is “made for a particular customer or user.” Kiln’s coworking and actual office space is creative, hip and high-tech. I love it here, and plan to spend many a night and a weekend at kiln with future guests just hoping that some of this magic atmosphere rubs off on the Maker Manager Money Podcast, a bespoke podcast.

My guest today is Lyn Christian whose City Weekly just named Best Life Coach. City Weekly says that Lyn is in the business of courage as a speaker, master certified life and business coach, and founder of SoulSalt Incorporated. Among her techniques are one-to-one coaching, online courses, and intense boot camps. Lyn has been featured in Utah Business, iHeartRadio, TEDx, and American Salon. Lyn is also an author who recently published SoulSalt: Your Personal Field Guide to Confidence, Purpose, and Fulfillment. If you have considered changing careers, are unhappy with your current circumstances, or simply want more fulfillment out of life, look no further. SoulSalt will guide you to uncover the key elements required to create the map you need to succeed.

I stole that straight from the back cover of the book. Welcome to the show, Lyn.

Lyn Christian – disruptor of education coaching; & aging – mmmpod
Thank you. Thank you for the invitation.

Kyle Knowles:
Thanks for being here. By the way, happy birthday. Was it last week?

Lyn Christian – disruptor of education coaching; & aging – mmmpod
Yes, Friday.

Kyle Knowles:
You call yourself a 64-year-old badass. I’m 54. So, what is it going to take for me to join the 64-year-old badass club in 10 years?

Lyn Christian:
Well, so the first thing is I didn’t aspire to that. When I turned 50, I started doing triathlons, and people started calling me a badass. I lifted 245 pounds, which was a double body deadlift. I thought it has to be more than what I can do in competition and more than what I can do in the gym. So I asked around, “Why are you calling me a badass?” Come to find out it’s because I know my truth, and I live it. So if you do that, no matter what the age, in my book, and I did write the book, you’re a badass. If you want to know what those elements are that make you a badass, get the book. Do your excavation. Do the work. It’s a lot of work. It’s a field guide.
When you find out those pieces of truth, if you live by those, if you say no to anything that doesn’t align with those things that you find out about yourself, and you say yes or at least consider those things that you find out about yourself in the book, and then find out what’s the highest self, what’s the best decision out of those options, you’ll be a badass.

Kyle Knowles:
I love it. I love the answer. I love the definition of badass too. Can you talk about your career journey that culminated in being the director of innovation at Franklin Covey then starting your own coaching business?

Lyn Christian:
Yeah, so I started out in high school actually, thinking I would become an attorney, because I was in debate. In three years of high school, I earned the highest speaker points in all four. So, in a debate, you have your partner, and then you debate and argue against two others. Out of all the four people in every debate, in every debate of three years, I had the highest speaking points. We didn’t always win all the debates, but I look at that pattern, because I’m a pattern reader, and I thought, “Well, that’s just telling me I should go to law school.”
I was struggling with some health issues. Really, it was an addiction that I wasn’t really talking much about. I was supposed to be training for track. I was out running, and I had a really bad night. The night before, I felt like crap. I sat down in the gutter, literally sat on the curb, and my feet were in the gutter. I thought, “Do I want to spend the rest of my life arguing?” I looked up and there was my elementary school across the street, and I thought, “No, I want to do what this teacher or that teacher did for me. I want to inspire people.” So in high school, I changed direction, and decided to go into elementary ed, which a lot of people were like, “Why are you doing that?”
I thought, “You don’t understand what I felt in that moment.” I went through college. I got out quickly. I didn’t enjoy college. It was a bunch of jumping through hoops for other people’s requirements, and later found out that one of my core values is freedom and integrity. I just felt like a lot of college is around learning and doing things that a teacher expects and not necessarily something that prepares you for life. So, I got through school very quickly, started teaching and found a calling. But after 15 years in the public schools, I could see that things were changing. Children were coming into my classrooms with more home life problems, and unable to learn, and we were not addressing that.
This was in the ’90s. Goldman had just published emotional intelligence, and I thought, “Why are we not teaching these kinds of skills?” I also noticed that where interest and passion intersect inside a child as it does in an adult, that’s where we learn. That’s where we can grow. That’s where we have potential. So, I started nurturing that and giving an hour. It was called individualized guided education and also inquiry-based education. I went down to… Spent some of my own personal money, went to Tucson who was… There were three or four teachers that were publishing on this topic, started modeling my classroom about it around that where every day and throughout the week, there were time slots for the children to start pursuing their own inquiry problems.
We had kids calling Beaverton to find out why did Nike use the swoosh? What does that mean? We had somebody finding a hippie that was underground in the community who had jammed with Janice Joplin. We found all kinds of questions that one kid was like, “Why do psychologists use rats and mazes to learn things?” So, we had him go to the local university, and start partnering with them. They let him do odd jobs, and he started getting a maze and a rat, and doing things himself. These were the kinds of dynamics that I felt like we needed to teach the kids. Also when they came in from recess, we would do some self soothing so that they could be ready to learn.
That very much threatened people around me. I got a multi-sensory teacher of the year award for that from the parents. They voted that, but I could see what was happening to my students and to myself as I could see this freight train coming down the track of standardized tests and somebody deciding how intelligent our kids were based on these IQ tests, and not addressing the whole child. I even spoke and got pushed on by some of my peers. I spoke and I said, “We need to do something different. The charter schools, the private schools are going to eat our lunch if we don’t actually wake up.” They felt like I was treasonous. When you’re on the cutting edge, and entrepreneurs will feel this, and I did have an entrepreneur and innovator in me.
I wanted to do what was best for the children, for their education, and also for their life learning. That was not cohesive when you put it into a public school. It was disruptive. I thought, “I don’t belong here.” They’re going to figure this out one way or another. Capitalism is going to come in and crush some of the public schools, and I don’t want to be around to watch that. I don’t want to be a part of that system, and I don’t want to continue to go to school every day, and have a couple of teachers picking at me and badmouthing me, and then doing that to my students. That’s just anti-educational and toxic.
So, I left and became a consultant in a small group, educational consultant. Then I could recognize that I wasn’t going to be happy there. I asked one of the best network people I knew at the time, my neighbor, and she said, “Why don’t you talk to a business coach?” I’d never heard what that was before. I was like, “What is that?” I went and met with a business coach, and she just wowed me with her lifestyle. She’d been on the mountain hiking. She came down into her office in her home. Her commute was one minute from the tea kettle to her seat. She had a little cup of yummy tea sitting there.
I’m a tea drinker as well, and I thought, “Hiking boots, teacup, small commute, lifestyle I want. How do I get that?” She coached me, and I got introduced to Franklin Covey, and was hired to be an innovator. So, I began writing. They hired me because I had instructional design. The VP that was over innovation at the time hired me because he was a former school teacher too. He said, “Lyn, I know you know how to manage people and budgets. I know you know how to manage time, so eventually, you might become a project manager.” I did. So, I was getting my projects done on time on quality. All the metrics were there, and got some good writing in, did some ghostwriting for Franklin Covey, had some books that were published without my name on it, but some nice little things that said, “Yes, you can do this.”
So, I tossed my hat in the ring to become the associate director of innovation over a project management office, and finished up my coach training on the side because as soon as I’d seen that coach, I wanted to get the training, not because I wanted to be a coach, but because I wanted the lifestyle. I thought, “This person’s character is so well-defined, and she’s adulting. I would want to become an adult. I need that finishing school.” So, I got the training on the side while I was working at Franklin Covey, and then one day, I was working away at this project management office as the associate director, and we had some great success.
I was doing some training around project management and then coaching the rest of the hours of how to use our own project management protocol, a process that we were training to the world. In nine months, we’d accrued $4 million worth of value in close projects. So, it was a very valuable piece of work to be working with. Marva Sadler was the COO at the time, and she and I have remained really good friends as we both have moved on. But it was during that time that one of the individuals from the coaching part of the company came over and said, “Would you consider being our director of innovation which fit?”
I mean, I’m an innovator. I was in the innovation group to write their products first initially. Then I became part of the project management and innovation center, and now they wanted me to be director of innovation at the Franklin Covey coaching section of the company. I just jumped at that, and got the job. That was… As I got into that, I also realized that my heart was still with my own practice that I was doing on the side, because I actually found out I was really good at it, and I loved it. So, I had an agreement. I had a legal agreement with Franklin Covey that I could be their director of innovation over the coaching company, and work for them from nine to five, and go out and train, every once in a while go out out of town and run their coach training, and I could also run SoulSalt.
So in 2004, I left and had built up my own company to the point where that’s what I really wanted to do was run SoulSalt.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome.

Lyn Christian:
That’s a long story. That’s the genesis of me becoming an entrepreneur.

Kyle Knowles:
No, I love it. When you did the coaching training that you saw your mentor, and you were like, “I want to do that coaching training,” you invested your own money to go get some of that training.

Lyn Christian:
Yes. I did. I did on the side. I went to my savings account. I pulled out my tuition, and I worked for the next four years to get that certification, and got my certification through the ICF.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s how you were able to start doing stuff on the side was with that certification.

Lyn Christian:
With that certification, and also, that helped because I had my MCC. At the time, there were only about 2,000 of us in the world who had that master certification. There’s not a lot more than that now. It’s a very high designation to get lots of hours, lots of credentials. It’s not necessary that you have that high of a certification with them, but that’s what I qualified for with all the hours and being able to pass the practicum. So, I have the MCC, and that helped, because Franklin Covey wanted somebody that had that high level of certification through…
We don’t have a governing body right now in coaching. There are a couple that are vying for it, but the ICF leads in my opinion. They needed that behind somebody, so I had the right pedigree.

Kyle Knowles:
The MCC, is that more focused on coaching business people, or is it life coaching? Is it a combination of both?

Lyn Christian:
The MCC is based on the core competence that underlies any other kind of coaching, whether you branch out at executive coaching. You branch out in entrepreneurial coaching or life coaching. Now, my particular brand of coaching is an amalgam. I have been personally mentored and trained by Marshall Goldsmith. In fact, that’s his foreword in my book. He is the premier executive coach in the world. So, I have been trained how to do executive coaching. I’ve also gone into studying from David Peterson, Dr. David Peterson, who’s a former head coach for Google. So, I’ve continued to be trained in executive coaching. I’ve gone to Australia, and learned from Grant Soosalu and Marvin Oka, who wrote the book on mBraining, multiple brain integration, which is neuroscience background.
I have a neuroscience background, and trained with them personally before Grant passed away, so I have this neuroscience background that helps in all veins, and then I have a myriad of other certifications. I have CIQ, conversational intelligence, with Judith Glaser before she passed. I have a number of things that I’ve put together that fit executives, and fit entrepreneurs, and can also fit into career reinvention. The basic thing that I do is assist people to be the best version of what they possibly can be, which is the recipe inside the book. Be an executive or an entrepreneur or somebody who is like, “I don’t know what I want to do with the rest of my life, and I’m 40, and that’s scary. How do I reinvent?”
I know how to do that. I’ve done that about 12 times between my personal life and professional life, but the underlying key to my coaching is I can get in and see the person in a way that maybe they haven’t seen themselves, reflect that to them, be by their side as they start to grasp this element or two of themselves that they maybe haven’t, and then be able to move up the trajectory, because the truth is there are a lot of things about us, then unless we understand these things, we don’t reach potential. In my book, and I’ve written a blog on this, if anybody wants to look at my high potential blog out on SoulSalt, there are two things that are consistently necessary for somebody to reach their potential.
The first one is they have to be in tune with their highest self, so they have to be listening to themselves. One of my entrepreneurial clients calls it her gut toaster. I talk about it in my TEDx talk. You have to have an inner wisdom that helps you make these decisions, because entrepreneurs, innovators, we need to know when our yeses are… In fact, we need to know the difference between our yeses and our hell yeses, if I can say that word.

Kyle Knowles:
Yes, you can.

Lyn Christian:
So, sometimes it’s a felt sense. So if you can be in touch with that higher self, and you can also believe that there’s a comet with your name on it, there’s a vision. There’s a mountain calling for you. There’s a higher level, a higher degree of mastery that you can get to. Those have to be in place for someone to reach their potential. I know how to assist people to see those things if they don’t, or if they do see them, how to awaken them so they can take off.

Kyle Knowles:
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, business owner, high-level executive, it’s that personal inner stuff that needs to be worked out anyway to be an awesome executive, right?

Lyn Christian:
Right. If you look at it, I started being mentored by a millionaire, a self-made millionaire when I was still a school teacher. That’s one of the reasons why I left education too. I would go over and sit with him in his home, and he would mentor me about business, and I would read books. Then when Franklin Covey hired me, I would read all kinds of business books, and I would be in these meetings with these executives. I learned business in the trenches. A high level, very talented female executive from a tech company that I’m working with right now refers to it as getting your MBA while you’re working. So, I would say that I have learned a lot about business and human dynamics and decision making, and that’s what helps me be in the pocket there with executives.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. What are the most common reasons a business owner or an entrepreneur would hire you as a coach?

Lyn Christian:
They need to level up. Let’s say that you are coming in. If you’re… Let’s say that you’re an entrepreneur, and you’ve created a business that now has $20 million in the bank, and you recognize that you have a shelf life. You’ve got to transition. Either leave the company or transition to a useful place, and put a CEO in place if you’re smart. One of the most published and reprinted evolution revolution articles is out of Harvard, and it talks about these stages of needing a different leadership for a different stage. So if you’re an entrepreneur who’s reached that, and you’re just like, “I wonder if my leadership fits,” it’s a good question to ask. It’s a humble question to ask. It’s a smart question to ask.
Making that transition of where do I play, and do I still play here? Am I a serial entrepreneur? Should I leave and go start another one? Those are questions that they have to answer, and those are critical. If you’re a CEO coming in and taking the reins over from an entrepreneur, that’s a sweet spot from me as well, because I understand that dynamic from the entrepreneurial side and also from the organizational side. That’s what helped me with Marva and Marva Sadler as the COO at Franklin Covey, where we were hemorrhaging money at the time, and we needed to get our projects completed. We had a failure rate of over 70% of our own projects, and so we needed to start applying our own process.
Well, you start to see that there’s this time in the life cycle of a business where somebody needs to come in and put the operational, systemic, functional pieces of the pie together. So, assisting someone to take over after an entrepreneur has finished, that’s another sweet spot. Did that answer your question?

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, it did. Totally. I want to go to your book for a little bit now. I mean, I love the quote by poet and philosopher, John O’Donohue, that starts your book. I’ll just read it right now.

Lyn Christian:
Yeah, please.

Kyle Knowles:
Learning to trust your soul, it lies in opposition to looking to others for life purpose and personal teaching, and it waits patiently for us each day, quietly calling us back home. Can you talk about how you came across this quote, and how it influenced you?

Lyn Christian:
I felt like John was giving me the prelude to the book. Anybody who knows him or has read his stuff, basically, you’ll recognize these words. He alludes to the fact that we all need to be the choreographer of the topography of our life. I believe that. This came to me from Stephanie Milani who was reading my book, because she’s the wife of my publisher. She said, “That’s what John O’Donnell or O’Donohue is saying.” I went, “Yeah.” She sent me this quote, and I said, “Yes, we have to put this in the introduction.” So if that resonates with you, I would say go out.
He’s passed now. He died very young. If you go into YouTube, and listen to him, you will be inspired by everything you hear him say, but he gave that prelude to me. I’m very grateful, because he said the words that nailed the purpose of the book.

Kyle Knowles:
I wondered if it was the genesis of the original SoulSalt Incorporated, or if it just it fit with the book.

Lyn Christian:
It fits with the book, and it came within hours of when we said, “This is the final draft.”

Kyle Knowles:
I love that.

Lyn Christian:
I’m a big believer that the things you need come to you when you need them, but the spirit of what he was saying has always lived inside of me, and I believe it lives inside of everyone. That’s why it runs so deep when you read it. If it hits home for you, you’re a good candidate for reading the book. You’re a good candidate for going out and exploring what we do at SoulSalt, because we’re just bringing you home to yourself. The SoulSalt book is a coming of self book for adults.

Kyle Knowles:
I like that description. I wanted to ask you, why do so many people feel less than or not worthy of possibility? Is it the really human nature, or is it pounded into us from parents and pulpits?

Lyn Christian:
Probably both. We don’t have to rail on the parents and pulpits, because we’ve all had experiences with well-meaning parents, none of us that have been parents. That’s a humbling job. You never get it right. Even if you’re trying to be in tune with your kids, you’re going to miss fire, and those tender little hearts are going to be crushed at some time when you least expected it. There are a lot of should coulds and not tos. There are a lot of organizations that are going to say, “Here’s your role. Here’s your script. Live your life.”
We also don’t take our own mortality very seriously, and so we get to the end of it, and we have a lot of regrets. More people have regrets than not. I mentioned that with Bronnie Ware’s book or her information, but I think there’s this other piece that you mentioned, which is some of it’s just neuroscience. We have four parts. I’m going to use Judith Glaser’s model of the head brain. We have four parts to our brain, and two of them that we use the most without knowing it would be the brainstem and this primitive brain area, the limbic brain. So, its job is to sense things in our environment, and let us know, “Not safe. It’s safe.”
So, it’s always vigilant trying to find out how it can keep this human species of live. There’s a lot of threat in the world. I mean, we’re on a spinning planet, hanging on to gravity to keep us here in a hostile environment. Asteroids are out there. Lack of oxygen is out there, climate change. You look at everything that’s happening, and it’s not necessarily a safe environment to raise anything with constant change. So, there’s a part of us that can feel that threat, and so we’re looking constantly for, “Am I safe, not safe?” So, we are tuned into looking for the negative, because it keeps us alive versus charging after the positive.
That’s just a matter of neurochemistry and our innate biology, and so we have to override, and we have to become smarter. That’s why I think Goldman’s work in the EQ work, emotional intelligence work was so important, helping us tune into self-regulation conversations that are mature with ourselves about what’s really happening. Yes, I have cortisol spewing through my body right now. I’m triggered. How do I get untriggered? How do I give myself the discipline of the 20 minutes to let that dissipate if it’s going to, and become more sane and get into my prefrontal cortex?
How do I not just stay in the analytical part of my brain? How do I not stay in the neo cortex, and just think things, and become a head on a stick? So, there are three other brains we have to work through and self-regulate to get to the prefrontal cortex. Then if you’ve listened to my TEDX talk, the beauty of being in the prefrontal is you can drop into the neurons that are firing in the heart and the gut, and get a full sensation, but you got to be in the front of the body, not on your back float trying to defend yourself. That goes against human nature. So if you haven’t explored some of these things, and ventured out, there’s a good reason.
You’re not a failure. You’re just part of the human race, and this is what it’s like to overcome being human, and become a better version of you as a human. You probably have a suspicion that it’s in there. If my words are sparking that for you, just say you’ve had many good reasons why you haven’t found these things before, and I’ve given you just a brief description of some of them. Now, it’s your turn. If something’s sparking with you, and you’re like, “Yeah, I really want to know my truth and live that,” okay, here’s the invitation. Read the book, or I have an online course called Be True. It’s a good starting point.
It’s one of the chapters in the book, but that’s a really good place to go out on my website, and find that, and just nail that one thing down, and you will feel different, and see yourself in a new way that gives you courage and more purpose and more fulfillment.

Kyle Knowles:
I don’t know if I’m unusual, or if you can talk about other people that maybe feel this way, but I mean, I’ve spent a lot of time books, I don’t know, Tony Robbins, whatever.

Lyn Christian:
Right. Right. Right.

Kyle Knowles:
So, a lot throughout my career, throughout my life, but sometimes it feels like I just come back, and it’s circular to the point where I’m like, “Kyle, you got to get your shit together.” What is that about? I keep coming back to that. I don’t know what that shit is exactly. Do I need to get it together? Do I… I mean, what is that about? Do you have people come to you with that kind of situation?

Lyn Christian:
Yes. Yes. A lot of people that come to me are stuck somewhere, so I don’t know. Excuse me. We’d probably have to get into a coaching session, but one place to look, excuse me, is what did you find out about your core values? Do you know those?

Kyle Knowles:
I do.

Lyn Christian:
Have you noticed where you’ve maybe not been in alignment with those?

Kyle Knowles:
Yes.

Lyn Christian:
That’s one of the reasons. That’s the very first step. That’s why I say if you get the book, you can go to chapter three. You can go to my online course called Be True. It’s worth the investment. That’s a starting point. You go back and look at your life, and look at some of those decisions you’ve made, and you ask, “Why am I always going against my line of integrity?” So, you’re out of alignment. Once you get in alignment, you can engage flow, and you can overstep some of the things. Also, we’re habitual. We are wired for habit. So, you’re going to have to rewire some of those neuro networks, and that requires an objective kind awareness of, “This has to change. This one thing, I’m going to isolate and change.”
Sometimes we try to change too many things. We’re not light switches. We can’t just flip them on and off. We’re more like a dimmer switch, and so we incrementally need to become aware of that thing. Then once we’re there, we have to set humble, tiny, bite-sized steps in place, tiny goals. Consistently do those, and being daunted, fearlessly consistent and persistent. That’s a big process to even just unwind one thing. But once you unwind one thing, it’s like if you’ve ever tried to untangle a knot in a dog leash or in a bottle or yarn, that’s what we’re talking about.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Lyn Christian:
Get one thing done and the rest goes forward.

Kyle Knowles:
I find it so interesting that the way we speak to ourselves, we would not speak to anyone.

Lyn Christian:
Anybody else.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. I mean, it’s horrible.

Lyn Christian:
Well, but you’re probably just spewing out recordings that you’ve heard, and then you get to a place where you can say, “Okay, what’s the reason that I did that? Okay, that’s a good reason,” and you stop having so many expectations, and you start like in the chapter in the book on success. You start defining your own success metrics.

Kyle Knowles:
I think it’s really easy in our careers working for a company to always be discussing possibilities, and doing more, being more. Why don’t we spend more time in our personal lives focusing on possibility?

Lyn Christian:
Gosh, maybe that’s because you don’t earn a paycheck, or you don’t get a raised, or you don’t get outside appraisal… Not appraisal, but acknowledgement. I think a lot of us, some cultures are more so than this. I find this one in Utah very prevalently as I live here in Utah with many citizens is that the home is the thing that is so pedestrian. So, we don’t necessarily feel like… If we succeed there, we’ve really won the prize. It’s got to be the outward, and so instead of the inward world, it’s the same thing with ourselves.
Why do we talk to ourselves this way, but we wouldn’t do that outward? We have to look inward, and that starts with self and then goes to home. So, there’s a lot of reasons, but you’re nailing something that is often the case for a lot of us.

Kyle Knowles:
I mean, I just love the chapter on possibility practice and that whole concept. It was eye-opening to me to try to even list 10 things for each of those list of questions. Some of them, it was very easy, right?

Lyn Christian:
Right.

Kyle Knowles:
Where I’d like to go?

Lyn Christian:
That’s a fun one.

Kyle Knowles:
There’s a lot of places I’ve never been, so it’s easy to just start listing everywhere that would be cool to go, but some of them were harder for me to dive into like accomplishment and the things that were more about me, and not some external thing that I could go buy or go see.

Lyn Christian:
That makes sense. Unless you’ve been raised from the cradle up of what are your possibilities? What’s possible for you? What would you like to do? What do you aspire to? What is your heart saying? We don’t have that language nailed down, and so a lot of us are… We have to do that later, retrofitted. If you’re in that place, be patient. Good reason. There’s a lot of things that have happened up to this point to put you where you are.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, and sometimes it feels self-serving or selfish, or that could be wrong.

Lyn Christian:
Yeah, because you’re not used to it. But if you look at the people who are leading the way, and having some of the most inspired lives, it’s because they’d allowed themselves to know that truth about themselves, and then to live pieces of it. You can’t live all of it. I think once you find out how big, audacious, bold, and badass you really are, it’s hard to be true to all of it, because there’s so much potential and possibility. But if you can be true to a percentage of that, your heads and shoulders above most human beings.

Kyle Knowles:
I know that you mentioned that one of your mentors had you spend 30 days coming up with 100 possibilities.

Lyn Christian:
Judith did, yes.

Kyle Knowles:
What’s a rough guess about what percent of those have actually come to fruition?

Lyn Christian:
Gosh, if I had the journal here, I could show you. I would say it’s 20% to 25%.

Kyle Knowles:
It’s still a lot.

Lyn Christian:
It’s a lot.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s a lot.

Lyn Christian:
That’s a big beautiful thing in my life, and as I look at that original list, I’ve made another list since then. I would say that 40% to 50% of the things, I would no longer put on the list, and I would replace them. So in the book, I encourage you, once you have your possibility practice going, you have to spring clean it every once in a while, and check off things, because you grow and you evolve. Some things that really mattered to you five years ago will have no… There’s no value in them anymore. You can nod at them and go, “Yeah, that’s where I was. Look where I am now.”

Kyle Knowles:
Was physical fitness and fencing on your original list, or was that something that came later on those possibilities?

Lyn Christian:
The physical fitness started kicking in after I turned 50, because I had worked with one of the well-known, world-renowned gyms that’s here in Salt Lake, which is Gym Jones. I worked with Lisa and Mark, who are the founders of that. They had just finished the 300 movies, and had had a lot of success. Shawn Trujillo, a very successful businessman here in Salt Lake, he and Angie who have the Lunatic Fringe salons, they said, “You should work with Lyn. She’s been our business coach.” So, they hired me, and after we finished our work, mark turned to me, and he said, “That was really interesting. Thank you. I want to coach you now. Come to the gym, and I’ll sponsor you.”
I had never been in a gym, and I was turning 50. They taught me how strong I was. I did that double body deadlift, and went, “Holy crap, I’m strong.” Then they challenged me. They said, “Look.” By that time, Rob Maximus McDonald had come in and been a manager. He’s not with them any longer, but they all challenged me, and said, “We’ll keep sponsoring you here at the gym. You seem to love it,” and I did. I loved it. I loved seeing how strong, and I had a lot of endurance. I did a 20-minute plank, and I thought, “Why are you guys making a big deal about this? Nobody’s shooting guns at me. I’m sitting here. I can go into a meditative state. Nobody’s kicking me, yelling at me. This is a peaceful thing to do.”
They were like, “That’s unusual.” I mean, Rob was timing me, and he just finally said, “Look, I’m going to go lift some weights. I’m going to leave the timer on your back. Tell me when you’re tired,” and it was 20 minutes later. Then I found out, “Oh, this is supposed to be a really hard thing.”

Kyle Knowles:
20 seconds is hard for a lot of people.

Lyn Christian:
When I met this group, they showed me some things, and they said, “If you’re going to stay here, you need to have a functional reason.” The actors, actresses, the Navy SEALs, the fire fighters, all the people coming, the MMAA fighters, all the people coming into this gym have a function. You’re just here because we invited you. If you want to stay, you’ve got to compete or do something.” I had almost drowned as a child, and I said, “Oh, shoot. I know what I’m going to need to do, because I need to learn to swim, and I need to run myself through triathlons,” which scared that crap out of me. It scared something more, but I won’t use that four-letter word.

Kyle Knowles:
You can. I used it already.

Lyn Christian:
Yes. It scared the shit out of me. I also knew that it excited me to finally, at turning 50, learn how to swim, and not just swim, but swim competitively in open water while wearing a wetsuit. That’s a dangerous place during a triathlon. The swims where a lot of people die in triathlons. They trained me so well. I took second in my age group in my first triathlon. I was amazed at how my body was recovering when I was still pedaling, not up a steep hill, but pedaling on a smaller grade. Then when I got to a steeper grade, I could kick it in, and I was like, “They have trained me so well.”
I had such deep respect for what they did for my body that I’ve maintained that. But over time, I could tell that the large muscle recruitment was wearing me down. I was aging and hormones and going through menopause and things like that. So, my son and I tried a season of Spartan races, and it was the same thing. I was burning myself out, losing agility and not being as nimble, and I’d always wanted to fence. I thought, “I’m going to go do that,” so I started fencing, and that brought back the coordination, the balance, the nimbleness, and it required everything that I had learned in endurance sports transferred.
I noticed I was fencing this week, and I was fencing against 40-year-olds at the national tournament. I’d get off the strip, and I could just nasal breath my way over, and not even be out of breath after a tough bout, and they were taking off their masks, and drinking water, and wiping their brow. I was like, “Okay, this fitness is still there,” and so I use it because I think it’s a key to keeping the engine alive that runs my business. I want entrepreneurs to hear this. You can wear yourself like a secondhand desert industries person, and expect your business to be a million-dollar proposition. It’s not going to happen if you’re treating yourself like crap.
If you can get yourself into a position where you can think and feel, and act, and respond in a way where you really respect yourself, your work will show that, and your business depends on there being a functional engine under the hood, if you will, to get those tires moving, and the pistons firing.

Kyle Knowles:
Right. So, what does a typical week look like for you, physical fitness-wise? What are some of the things that you’re doing during a typical week?

Lyn Christian:
Monday, I do some intermittent fasting, so I don’t have breakfast. That’s because I’ve had maybe cookies and ice cream or something on the weekend. I don’t go crazy, but I’ve had something I typically don’t eat. I use the whole 30 diet, Monday through Friday, and then I’ll have more embellished menu, but not going crazy. Then I have… I’ll get up. I’ll do stretches. I will do knees over toes to keep my joints going. I’ll do some complex shoulder moves, because I did have a shoulder repair. I had to go in and get a rotator cuff surgically sewn back together, and take the dogs out for a walk. Then I do 30 minutes of fencing footwork and blade work, and then I go to work.
Then after work, I have a training session that is for the endurance or the strength or some piece of that. Then I do another 30 to 40 minutes of something with the fencing, and so that repeats itself until Fridays. I only do the intermittent fasting on Mondays, a good healthy three meals from whole 30, get eight hours of sleep as much as possible, seven hours and 45 minutes minimum, sometimes nine hours. Drink plenty of good water. On Fridays, I do an endurance run, which is basically steady state for an hour, hour and a half, keeping my heart rate at 120, 130. Saturday morning’s open fencing.
Wednesday nights are I have another lesson. Then by Saturday this time, I’m done with that, all the training, and the rest of the weekend is recovery, so a lot of walks. I roll out every night. I have a salt bath every night. I do flexibility moves every night. That’s how I keep a 64-year-old body being able to compete with 40 year olds at national tournaments.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome.

Lyn Christian:
It’s been fun.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s a lot of training, I guess, a couple hours a day, really, between the fencing footwork and the other stuff you do.

Lyn Christian:
There are a lot of hours through everything. I would say there’s about 20 to 25 hours a week minimum. I have a coach here in Salt Lake that works with me on Wednesday nights one-to-one, and then I have a coach in Denver. My head coach is in Denver. He comes to the national tournaments with me. He’s my strip coach, and coaches me on the sideline, he and his team.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. You just got back from fencing up in Kaysville today?

Lyn Christian:
I did this morning. I ran up there. I only had about an hour, and I ran up and got 45 minutes in. I wanted to, because I’d spent well over 12 hours fencing on Sunday and Monday this week. I’ve not done a lot. I’ve just been in recovery, and I want to go up there and just get my moves on, and keep the ball rolling to see where I was after a national tournament. I went from an E rating to a D rating, so it’s like a martial arts if you go up a belt. I went up a belt. I did well enough to do that. So, I just needed that for my mental and physical to say, “Yeah, you were tired, but you’re excited to go up and just spend 45 minutes fighting somebody.”

Kyle Knowles:
That’s so fun.

Lyn Christian:
It’s a lot of fun.

Kyle Knowles:
It’s exciting. You mentioned in your book coming out twice. What do you mean by that?

Lyn Christian:
Well, so I came out in my 40s, and recognized that I was attracted to people of my same gender, had a hardest time pulling the L word out of my mouth, and saying, “I’m a lesbian.” I knew I was different from a young age, but I like men and women. I can see beauty in both of these genders. But if you have to ask who do I really want to bond with, it’s the soul of a female. Knowing that was like, “Oh, okay.” So, I came out, and then a year ago, I was following up… About a year and a half ago now, I was following somebody, an actress, and she came out as non-binary. I was like, “What is that?”
I knew non-binary people. I knew about the pronouns, but I was like, “Why am I drawn to her, and think that she’s so special watching what she’s done with her life? Then what is this?” So, I started studying. I went, “Oh my goodness. I’m not binary.” So, I don’t… For me, and I can only speak for me, gender identification is very fluid. A lot of people think it’s just male or female. It’s not. There’s a lot in between. There’s a lot of research on this. I’m in a female body. I’m a piece in this female body. I don’t need to change it. I actually feel more like a guy sometimes, but I don’t want to be a guy.
I think men are beautiful. I love my son. I love my grandsons. I have nothing against men. I think they’re so damn fun to interact with. In fact, I fence mostly with men, and I love the camaraderie that they have. I like how they see the world in many, many ways. I don’t necessarily like how a lot of them see the female, but that’s an individual thing. As a collective, I like that camaraderie and the slap you on the back, and let’s go. I just jabbed my sword into your shoulder. Maybe that hurt a little bit, but it was all in fun, right, Lyn? I was like, “Yes, it was, and I’m going to hit you twice as hard next time.”
I like that kind of coming around to each other, but I don’t identify as heavily male or female. That’s for me how it’s the non-binary. So, they, them feels better than being called she. So, I’ve been mistaken as a guy sometimes if they’re not looking at me closely. I was following my daughters one day, and they were buying lingerie, and they were at a local department store. The guy who was standing there, and he was, “Sir, you can’t go in there.” I said, “That’s okay. I’m their mom.” He did a double take, and he said, “Oh, sorry.” I said, “No offense.”
It’s just I exude a certain male ethos to some people, and I float between the genders. There are a lot of us who do that. You look at the younger population, and they have embraced that. They’re teaching us a lot. So at age 63, to find out that you’re non-binary was like, “Holy crap, where have I been?” Thank goodness that we have these names for it, because all of a sudden I settled in and went, “Oh, yeah. That’s why the lesbian word was so hard for me to say, because I’m really not one of those people.” I can appreciate them and I hang out with them, and I’ve partnered with them, but I’m really not that.

Kyle Knowles:
Well, thank you. Thank you for answering that question. So, how has being a former lesbian or non-binary business owner affected business? Is that-

Lyn Christian:
Well, there are some people who at one point in the government said they can’t work with us, because our tagline was about being a badass. I was like, “That’s fine.” We’ve lost contracts. There are people. I get criticized on social media for my pronouns. However, that’s not who I’m looking for to work with. I’m working with the people who are open to change, that are progressive thinkers, that are ready to evolve themselves. If you want to find out the best of you, you can’t be in a camp that others other people, because you’re going to find an answer to who am I? That’s going to be somebody else’s answer. So, they’re not my people, and that’s okay. Somebody else should be coaching them. No problem.

Kyle Knowles:
I like that. I like how it filters.

Lyn Christian:
Sure.

Kyle Knowles:
I do. I like how it filters. I like your statement about the younger generation, because I think we’re in good hands because of their tolerance and their love, and they want inclusion. So, I’m really hopeful for the future because of that.

Lyn Christian:
I am too. I am too. They do give us a lot of hope, and they see the world quite clear as how it is. Love is love. We are a global community now. We’re not separate. When we other somebody, we other a piece of ourselves.

Kyle Knowles:
Right. What’s the book? I know you’ve read a ton of books, especially when you’re Franklin Covey probably, and during your certifications and things like that. What’s a book that you recommend to people the most?

Lyn Christian:
It depends upon what they’re looking for, so give me a category.

Kyle Knowles:
How about business?

Lyn Christian:
Gosh, so many good business books. I like It Takes What It Takes right now. I have a couple of executives reading that. There are some basics that you should know like From Good to Great, some of Jim Collins’s work.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s great.

Lyn Christian:
I think it’s good to have a subscription to something like HBR, Harvard Business Review. If you’re an entrepreneur, if you have not read the E-Myth, you need to read the revised E-Myth. Gerber really nailed it there. I think that’s a good one. Another category? Do you have another category?

Kyle Knowles:
Just I guess self-development or personal self development.

Lyn Christian:
Well, I like Marshall’s What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Self development, oh man, there are so many good ones out there. If it’s reinvention, you definitely… It’s an older book, and until I get my reinvention book, which I’m working on right now done, this is a good one by Ibarra, which is your Working Identity. It’s a good one for that. One of the books that influenced me the most was Orbiting the Giant Hairball. Orbiting the Giant Hairball Ball by Gordon MacKenzie, he used to be a holy man, self-identifying holy man for Hallmark.

Kyle Knowles:
Wow.

Lyn Christian:
… and so creative, and the book inspired me to want to have the illustrations in the book that I had. Then I’ve also learned a lot from Sunni Brown. She has a couple of TED Talks. She also wrote Doodle Revolution, Gamestorming. That’s where I learned that I was a visual thinker. A lot of us don’t understand how we think a lot of us are either internal or external thinkers. We might be visual thinkers. We might be auditory thinkers. It’s helpful to know what you are so that you can leverage it. Those are just a handful, but I’m constantly reading.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. Thank you. If you could go back in time, and talk to yourself when you were thinking of starting your own business, what are some of the things you would say?

Lyn Christian:
What a great question. I think that’s so relevant for your audience. I would say you are suspicious that you have this company inside of you, and you are absolutely right. The only thing that’s going to get in your way is your own mind, so keep finding good mentors, keep working, learn from your mistakes, and don’t give up.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. Can you share any moment during business ownership that made you cry or want to cry?

Lyn Christian:
Most recently when I hear people using the book and becoming themselves.

Kyle Knowles:
So, those are tears of joy.

Lyn Christian:
Those are tears of joy. I mean, there are a lot of things we’ve lived through 2008, and we’ve lived through the pandemic, and stayed viable as a company. Those are some really scary times, but the tears would all be tears of joy, because I look at business as a sport, as a game, and you can’t fail. You can only stop trying. So, the things that affect me the most, where I might cry, would be more personal and things of the heart.

Kyle Knowles:
So, you’re out there on social media, and you’re sharing a lot about yourself, but what’s something that most people might not know about you?

Lyn Christian:
Yeah, because I feel like an open book. Even though I can be an extrovert, there’s a part of me that’s an ambivert, which I really do need my quiet time. I am able to sustain a few really close relationships, but I’m not a person who has a gaggle of really close friends. When I have a connection with somebody, I want it to have a lot of substance versus a lot of quantity. So, even though I have a lot of associates, I have a pretty small inner circle, and maybe that’s something I don’t know.

Kyle Knowles:
I want to just go through a lightning round of questions just for fun, and the first thing that pops in your head, but what’s your favorite candy bar?

Lyn Christian:
Oh, my favorite candy bar. Oh my goodness. I don’t partake of those very often. If I were to have a candy bar, it’d be a Snickers or a Reese’s peanut buttercup.

Kyle Knowles:
okay, or otherwise a protein bar probably.

Lyn Christian:
I don’t even eat-

Kyle Knowles:
You don’t even eat protein bars.

Lyn Christian:
I don’t. I feel like if I’m going to have that, I might as well have a real bar, and so I’ll wait till the weekend.

Kyle Knowles:
So, you have a cheat window a little bit. It’s just a light cheat.

Lyn Christian:
Well, I call it… Instead calling it cheat, because I reall-

Kyle Knowles:
You don’t go crazy anyway.

Lyn Christian:
I don’t. I just call it an embellished weekend.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice.

Lyn Christian:
There you go.

Kyle Knowles:
I like that. Favorite musical artist?

Lyn Christian:
Ooh, it’s not one in particular, but it would be the female jazz artists that are in traditional pop and jazz, so Ella, Billy, some of those folks.

Kyle Knowles:
All right. Favorite cereal?

Lyn Christian:
Cereal, if I’m going to drink or eat a cereal, I’d probably be… It has to be a combination of… Put grape nuts in it, some cracklin oats, and some really good high quality oatmeal that’s been warmed up.

Kyle Knowles:
That sounds really good, actually. I’m hungry now. Mac or PC?

Lyn Christian:
I run part of my life on Apple products, but my PC is a service, or my computer is a PC service.

Kyle Knowles:
Google or Microsoft?

Lyn Christian:
We are using Google right now.

Kyle Knowles:
Dogs or cats?

Lyn Christian:
Dogs.

Kyle Knowles:
Phantom or Les Mis?

Lyn Christian:
Probably Phantom.

Kyle Knowles:
I’ve been dying to ask you this, and I think you referenced this, but tell me how you got New York Times bestselling author and one of the most famous leadership coaches, Marshall Goldsmith, to write the foreword to your SoulSalt book.

Lyn Christian:
Number one, I had a personal connection with him, so he knows who I am. Number two, I pulled on my network, and Marva from Franklin Covey reached back and helped me connect with who he’s currently using as his coordinator, and then Marshall’s good graces.

Kyle Knowles:
So awesome. That’s big time. That’s really big time. You’re writing another book. You mentioned this. What’s it going to be about?

Lyn Christian:
It’s going to be about how to reinvent yourself. We had a team meeting yesterday, and a person who works on our finance team said, “It should be called no shit. No shit.”

Kyle Knowles:
Pronounce that again. No shit like question… No shit. You said no shit, Sherlock, or is that no more shit?

Lyn Christian:
Like no more shit. No. It’s more like how do you really get down to who you are, and get-

Kyle Knowles:
Get rid of the shit? Is that-

Lyn Christian:
Yeah. There are reinvention strategies that I don’t put in. So in the SoulSalt book, you find out who you really are. Then in this next book, it’s like, “Okay, how do you figure out what you can really do with who you are, or who you think you are in the moment?” Because sometimes we don’t know who we are till we show ourselves we did that thing, “Oh, now I can do that.” I didn’t know I could fleche in fencing. I didn’t know I could do an advanced lunge until I did one, and I went, “Oh, I’m a fencer who can do that.” So as an entrepreneur, you may not know that you can do a brick and mortar business until you do one. That next book is the reinvention, the strategies of how do you take who you are at your best, and then do those things that you think you can do with it.

Kyle Knowles:
So, how can people find you and SoulSalt?

Lyn Christian:
Well, we have a really good presence online, so soulsalt.com is a great starting point. You can see our online offerings. Our courses are… They get really good reviews. We have great blogs. I personally am posting on Instagram at SoulSalt. You can also find me at Lyn Christian, but it’s L-Y-N. It’s one N. We do have Facebook. We’re on LinkedIn. We don’t do anything on Twitter. That’s where we’re present.

Kyle Knowles:
What’s the reason you decided not to do anything on Twitter?

Lyn Christian:
Well, for one thing, I started there, and that’s how I got to know Sunni Brown. We become associates of some sort. I needed to be able to manage. Just like with my friends, I can’t be on all the platforms, and at some point, I probably won’t be the person who is posting. I’ll be having people tell me what to post, and that moment’s coming very, very soon. But if I needed to do the posting, I needed to have a limited amount of places to do that, and I couldn’t do all of them.

Kyle Knowles:
Well, Lyn, I’ll include links, all things, Lyn Christian and SoulSalt in the show notes.

Lyn Christian:
Thank you. Thank you.

Kyle Knowles:
At mmmpod.net, that’s makermanagermoneypod.net, so mmmpod.net. I just want to thank you, Lyn, for being so generous with your time today, and being willing to be on this fledgling podcast. It’s been a pleasure learning from you, and I hope we can work together in the near future.

Lyn Christian:
That’d be great. You have done a great job at setting things up, doing your homework, and showing up. I do a lot of podcast interviews. You need to continue what you’re doing, because you do your research, and you come prepared, and you get quality. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t get the quality, so good on you.

Kyle Knowles:
Well, thank you so much, Lyn.

Lyn Christian:
You’re welcome.

Kyle Knowles:
All right. Have a great day.

Lyn Christian:
You too.

Kyle Knowles:
All right. Bye-bye.