Chief Change Officer
#300 Sande Golgart: What If You’re Winning the Wrong Game? — Part One
Mon, 14 Apr 2025
Sande Golgart was the guy who said yes to every opportunity, outran every challenge, and never sat still—until one day, the success story stopped feeling like his. In Part One, he opens up about going from slam dunk champ to corporate high-performer to someone questioning the very game he was winning. He talks about early ambition, the trap of nonstop action, and the moment he realized: “You climb, climb, climb… then realize the mountain isn’t even yours.”Key Highlights of Our Interview:From Slam Dunks to Sales Calls“I was competing in dunk contests all over the country. I used that same mindset in business.”The High Performer Trap“I just kept saying yes. I never said no. I kept moving, kept growing, kept stretching.”Action Over Inaction“Even if you take a wrong step, at least you’re moving. Inaction is a choice too—but it gives you nothing to work with.”The Wake-Up Line“You climb, climb, climb… then realized the mountain isn’t even yours.”No Off Switch“I didn’t even know what I liked. I never stopped long enough to ask.”_____________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Sande Golgart --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.15 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>150,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: Who is Sande Golgart and what is his unique background?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today's guest is Sandy Gogart, former slam dunk champion, longtime corporate leader, and founder of SEG, which stands for Simple Easy Girls.
In this two-part series, Sandy opens up about chasing titles. burning out, getting lost, and realizing he has climbed the wrong mountain. We talk about ego, clarity, and the live pills method, a way of becoming more of yourself by stripping things away, not adding more on. It's personal, it's short, It's philosophical, but it's also practical.
This episode might just change how you measure success. Let's get into it. Good morning, Sandy. Welcome to our show. Welcome to Chief Change Officer.
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here, Vince.
Wow, your background is great. It got you in the center with Albert Einstein right beside you. It feels like I'm hosting not just one guest today, but two. I know we'll be talking about topics that even Albert might have appreciated, which is growth, energy, change, and transition. Before we get into all of that, let's start with your story.
Tell us a bit about yourself, your background, your journey, how you evolved over the years. Then we'll dive into different parts of your experience and your approach to growth.
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Chapter 2: How did Sande transition from slam dunk champion to corporate leader?
Yeah, so I think as I look back, the best place to start is as a kid growing up in Denver, Colorado, I had this growing obsession with the ability to fly. And I would dream about it. and really started to embody that. And then one day as I'm watching the TV, Michael Jordan, basketball player, says, I can fly for a brief amount of time. And I said, that's what I want to do.
And like himself, Dr. J, Dominique Wilkins, I just said, that's exactly what I want to do. I get to feel it in my heart. That's what I wanted. And from that moment forward, every night we had 14 stairs in our house, and I would do 100 toe raises on every stair, 1400, every night before bed. Until I was able to dunk, and then I went on to win the National Slam Dunk Championship in Lubbock, Texas.
our basketball team won the national championship a lot of things started to unfold and then i became a four-year starter at the university of colorado in boulder where i played college basketball like was amazing taking on these experiences and i was set to go to sao paulo brazil to play professional basketball then i had a skiing accident and that's when everything changed
that basketball was no longer this dream of flying. You are now grounded, so to speak, and you have to figure something out. So I went with what I thought I knew at the time, which was in athletics, you size up the competition, you outwork everybody, and you get ahead. So I picked an industry at the time that I thought I could make a lot of money. I knew I wanted to be successful.
I knew I wanted to make a lot of money. I knew I was an athlete. I knew I was capable. But I applied those things to the business life. So for the next almost three decades, I practiced sizing up the competition, outworking others and trying to get ahead. And that worked fairly well by most definitions. I would say I was very successful in the corporate world. Then my kids
reached a point where they were now out of college. They were debt free off in the world. And I started to finally have some time to focus on me. And I started asking myself, is this everything that this was meant to be? My whole focus was on my kids, making sure they were successfully launched into the world.
And I just had this kind of feeling in the pit of my stomach that this wasn't Apex Mountain. There is more here. And I was getting some signs and signals that I look back on that caused me to clean up my diet, stop drinking alcohol. I really start to strip away layers of interference to help me get in tune with nature and really listen to what was going on.
And it was started to point me in a direction. It was like tracking these opportunities. to allow the best version of myself to come out and see if I could drop my ego, if I could resolve my identity, not put these outside pressures on who I thought I needed to be, but let who I am really come to the surface and flourish. What would that be like? How amazing could life be?
And I learned so much from that pursuit. Then I launched two companies. And that has led me to really understand what true success is for me. And of course, it has to do with money and success and doing the things you want. But I've been able to rewire myself to think as wealth in terms of success. Being able to do what I want, when I want, with minimal effort, that's wealth to me.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Sande face climbing the corporate ladder for three decades?
You talked about spending three decades as an executive, climbing the corporate ladder, chasing money, power, recognition. What was it really like for you being in the thick of it all? I imagine on one hand, There was pride, getting promoted, landing big roles, earning a great paycheck. But on the other hand, did you ever feel something was missing? Maybe stress building up?
Or a sense that you were not really fulfilled, even if you couldn't quite name it at the time?
Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't like it was this miserable time. It was just that I thought that's the way that the world worked. We're here. I grew up Catholic as a kid. We're taught you're here to suffer. Don't want too much. And life is supposed to be hard. And so I just thought that's just the way that it was. And as a man, oftentimes we're not taught that it's okay to feel.
So I would say I spent a big part of those three decades numbing myself a bit to what was going on around me and not allowing myself to feel anything. I just had to suffer through it go get the next thing. And I was accomplishing things. So it felt like the harder I worked, the more worthy I was, the more I would get rewarded.
And that was something that in my upbringing was taught to me that you get rewarded when you do well. Something I had to unlearn later in life. But through those times, I started as a sales rep and quickly ascended to a manager position. I've always had a propensity, a desire, and I'm very good at leading people, but more importantly, teams.
I love the idea that we can get more accomplished as a group than we can as any individual. And I'm very good at bringing those elements out of a team to get great results. So I was working for a company called Regus. People mostly know of WeWork. Regus was WeWork back in the 2000s.
So I was running, I ran everything from the Western U.S., Canada to the Northern U.S., about 250 locations, hundreds of millions of dollars in budget. And it was my job to go and take over different teams, make sure that they came together and that we produced great results. And probably the thing I look back on during that career was when I was put in charge of the Western U.S., which was the
least performing lowest performing terrible culture terrible everything and i had the chance to turn it around and get people to work together and we ended up achieving amazing results and outperforming everyone else and being able to get promoted and take another step forward And I had just an amazing career there, but I was still chasing what's next, what's next.
And so after 14 years, I felt this kind of anxiousness that the rest of the world was passing me up. Not everyone is really into office space. There's all these technologies. And I felt like there would have to be more. So I left to pursue more. That taught me a really great life lesson that what I've now learned to appreciate in through the teachings of yoga is that you stop wanting.
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Chapter 4: How did Sande’s mindset about success and leadership evolve?
What a lot of the great Buddhist teachers and there has to be something amazing to that, that you can actually sit in silence and there's the law of attraction. But I want to find out and understand how does it actually work when we have bills to pay mortgages? The real life stuff, like it sounds beautiful to read it on paper. How does it work in real life?
So I've dedicated myself to finding it out, document everything along the way. It's led me on an unbelievable, amazing journey. And I'm looking forward to sharing it at some point with others who are interested in finding a lower stress environment.
way of managing their life but not giving up anything in fact attracting more of what they really want into their life because i believe we're not here to suffer we're here to have an amazing experience and so many of us are numbing ourselves to how amazing this opportunity is that we're missing this opportunity. I think the earth is a giant playground inside the universe.
We're so lucky to be here, but so many of us are walking around shuffling, complaining, or trying to figure out our purpose for being here. Our purpose for being here is to enjoy the heck out of it. It's here. Just enjoy it. Lap it up. Do the things you love. Be productive. Love your neighbor. Love yourself. and make yourself available to help other people and you'd have an amazing life.
But there's a lot that we've learned in life that led us to this point, different constructs, teachings, which are all designed for the right reasons that we have to unlearn at a certain point to really appreciate and experience life to the fullest. So that's what I'm, that's my whole core purpose and mission. And then to share that with people so that
people can understand what is it really like to not do anything for six months? What is it to not make any money and know money is going to come surging back into your life? Are these things possible? What does it really look like? When you think of things like manifestation and different things, I'm exploring them as deeply as I can to be able to bring back to as many people who are interested
to find out like, how did it really work? It sounds good on when I read it, but can I still pay my mortgage? Can I still have a nice car? Can I still have some of the guilty pleasures I have in life? Or do I need to get rid of all of those things? And I think the answer is what I'm learning. There's a bell curve where we have a life energy that's programmed. If we're all energy,
There's a life energy that's pulling us individually in a certain direction. Your energy would be very different from mine. And it's up to us to understand what our energy is, what our true self is all about. What are our unique gifts? Let those come to the surface and let us ride.
that life energy and at any point in time you can go along this bell curve which the first one would be you have no interest totally empathy you're you have no desire you do nothing but you do it because you have a really down outlook on life Then you start to work hard and you think it's all your responsibility. But life is harder. You're trying to chase things you think you want.
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Chapter 5: What lessons did Sande learn from the startup and disruptive technology world?
creating that furnace of stress and anxiety and now we're immersed in it and now we're just blindly going back to the well being overly stimulated and having this pressure on ourselves to just do more now conversely when we allow ourselves to relax especially our minds And Kong, pay attention to our thoughts. Pay attention to our feelings.
Start to manage our energy so that we let things flow through us. And we don't hold on to past traumas, previous experiences. We don't start worrying about a future that doesn't exist. We're not creating a future that we don't want in our mind. You're just being. Now you can allow yourself to start to feel, create awareness for what's really going on around you.
And you will then become incredibly inspired to take action when it's the right time. That's when you spring into this. I've studied Gandhi's life quite a bit. And in Gandhi's life, there was this magical moment where he was mediating two different sides of a divorce. And he realized, I have this amazing power to bring peace to situations and to mediate.
And he went from being a very unsuccessful person that's wandering all over the place to this very inspired person that had an amazing amount of energy that he could pour into his life's work. And then we all know the story then of Gandhi. Same thing with Albert Einstein. For a long time, he couldn't get three people to show up to one of his talks. He had to shut him down.
No one was interested in listening to him. He wasn't all that interested in being anything other than pursuing what he could see in his mind that he was being fed through lucid dreams. Somehow he knew what it was like to stand on the front end of a light wave and travel through outer space. He was receiving those kind of messages. As he was paying attention, he just knew light bends.
When it goes around a planet, it bends. I can't tell you why or how. I just know because I've been on one. He's never physically been on one. And so he hired mathematicians who were actually smarter than he was to prove the things he already knew. And then it create the theory. They just basically delivered the mathematics to prove the theory of relativity and
But he only knew it because he was being fed that information, which became his light's purpose was how do I prove that this happens? I know deep in my soul. And he was willing then to go through whatever it took to prove that those theories and they sapped through two different eclipses until they captured it. And he had it nailed to the decimal point.
Which you just couldn't know, except he was being fed that information. So it all comes down to waiting and allowing yourself to be quiet internally and externally. Sit in silence, not forever, just until you really tap into who you are, your own self-worth.
and a touch of inspiration that's a first track go check this out so go check it out do it the best you can then look for another clue of what you should do next and then do exactly what's in front of you being a hundred percent present and then your life will lead you in tune with your life energy to an amazing experience.
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Chapter 6: How did toxic workplace culture affect Sande and what did he learn?
The more you keep listening and responding to that, which I would call inspiration, as opposed to doing something someone else is telling you, right? If you have a coach that says, Vince, you need to do 30 episodes with these people and do it this way. It becomes work. And that's when change becomes really hard.
But change becomes really easy when you're listening and you're in tune with yourself and you're in coherent vibration with the universe. And you're like, that sounds exciting. Do it. And that's what I've learned through Segway Consulting. That's how I came to know that simple change is easy. And simple, easy growth, simple, easy change. It's there.
You have to allow yourself to be inspired because when you're inspired, you can do amazing things. When you're uninspired, you just don't want to do anything. And so many of us are trying to chase inspiration. what we think we want and do what other people have told us is the right way. And we're trying to fit ourselves into that mold. Life is very difficult. It's hard.
I'd spent almost three decades acting that way. And I feel like when you look at the mental health stats and everything else that's going on around people, it's a clear signal that we're doing something wrong. And that if we can just get in tune with more of these things
inspiring thoughts that will spur action then we'll actually be more productive align with our true self and act and treating each other better but it has to happen one person at a time that's it for part one we heard how sandy chased success
get lost and realized the summit wasn't even his. But next, we get into what happens after the climb, how to grow, how to heal, and how to build something that actually fits. We'll also dive into the live pills method and what it means to shrink down without falling apart. Don't miss it. Until next time, take care.
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