This week on Mind Body Success, we talk about mental health and performance coaching with our guest, Kenneth Zhou.

Ken is a Mental & Performance Coach, and his mission is to empower his clients to be their best selves and accomplish the things they want most. He has coached business owners, entrepreneurs, company executives and directors, professional and amateur eSports players & teams, University educators, and individuals struggling with adversity (career, financial, personal challenges).

In this episode, you will hear how Ken’s own personal development journey sparked his interest in coaching, and how he used books and podcasts to teach himself everything he needed to know to be an effective guide for his clients. Ken even shares the books and authors that have been most impactful.

Ken discusses strategies he uses to learn about his clients and help them learn about themselves including mindset work, asking intentional questions, and listening. He also talks about the routines that keep him grounded like a daily gratitude practice.

Finally, Ken shares his favorite hobby, dance, and how it creates a mental and physical release that has taught him about practicing what he preaches with his coaching clients.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Topics Covered:

• How self-development led to a career in performance coaching

Resources Mentioned:

• Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David D. Burns

Guest Info

Connect with Ken on his website at https://www.kenempowered.com/, by email at [email protected], or through social on Discord, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Get in Touch:

• Instagram

Transcript:

Alison Swerdloff: [00:00:00] Welcome to Mind Body Success with your hosts, Alison Swerdloff and Dr. Lisa Hart. Listen along as we take you on a life-changing journey into creating success by incorporating mindfulness, self-care, mindset, and personal development. Open your mind, let your adventurous side out, and allow us to motivate you to remove the hustle and overwhelm while shifting your current reality to the life of your dreams.

Through conversations with high achievers, you will learn tips, tools, and strategies to overcome challenges and live a life of prosperity and abundance. Let the adventure begin.

Welcome to Mind Body Success. Dr. Lisa and I are happy that you're joining us today for this incredible conversation with our guest, Kenneth Zhou, founder of kenempowered.com. Ken is a mental and performance coach and speaker who empowers his clients to become the most opportunistic, effective, and brilliant versions of themselves.

He has worked with professional and amateur esports players and teams, entrepreneurs, educators, and students to improve their mindset and achieve their goals and dreams as well as speaking to organizations of all kinds.

Ken, thank you so much for joining us today.

Kenneth Zhou: [00:01:18] Thank you, Alison. Thank you, Lisa, for having me on.

Dr. Liesa Harte: [00:01:21] Great to have you. I watched your video, and I looked at your website, and I was just wondering, how did you originally get interested in mental and performance coaching?

Kenneth Zhou: [00:01:33] So actually, my interest in psychology and my interest in neuroscience wasn't born of wanting a career in this field. I actually studied economics because I wanted to get a decent-paying job. That's what I felt that college is important for, especially when, at this point, when you're paying so much money. But I found that they were really applicable to me because I wanted to figure out how to process my upbringing, how to process my identity, how to process my purpose, handle stress, and turn away from pessimism. And build the sort of resilience that I saw in other people that I admired.

And I think that after I had spent multiple years just fascinated with the field, just watching all of these sorts of podcasts, reading all of these sorts of books, you know, the first ones that I remember that I loved so much was Feeling Good. I eventually just said, okay, well, I feel a lot better, a lot more confident about myself, a lot more certain on my outlook on life, my purpose, and overcoming the things that had given me a lot of chronic stress in the past. And I asked myself, well, wouldn't this help other people? And wouldn't this be useful to people who are not necessarily, just used to working with a coach, you know, people in the real world, professionals?

And so I just started, I felt that it had something to give. And then in 2017, I just decided, well, I've been thinking about it and mulling over it, you know, maybe it's time to do something about it. And so that's when I got my start.

Dr. Liesa Harte: [00:03:09] Nice. Did you get a certification?

Kenneth Zhou: [00:03:12] No, I worked for free for about four months and my whole thing was, look, you don't know who I am. You know, you are my first clients and if I'm terrible, then you tell me I'm terrible and you don't hire me and you don't pay me when I start asking to be charged. And then I exit the industry. I, you know, say, well, I did not work hard enough. I did not care about the subject material enough, and I didn't learn the skills well enough to be in this industry. And if I succeed, then my clients will tell me. If I fail, my clients will tell me. And that's where I began.

And after four to five months, I said, okay, you know, I've been doing this for free for some time. Let's say I charge. Are you going to stay? Are you interested? And most of them stayed. So I'm happy to have continued from there. I think that certifications are, I think they're extremely important. I have, you know, instead continued to learn and read and apply on my own. But I think that that doesn't mean that certifications are not important. I think they are very, very valuable.

Dr. Liesa Harte: [00:04:16] I agree. I was just curious.

Alison Swerdloff: [00:04:19] You mentioned some of the books you read. Is there anyone in particular or any two or three authors or gurus who interested you more than others?

Kenneth Zhou: [00:04:33] I think his name is Daniel Kahneman is one. I think that Daniel Pink is one. I have read a lot. Okay, so I separate what I learn and read into two different parts. One is subject matter material. This is stuff like textbooks. This is stuff that, you know, you get a curriculum and you say, okay, well this is a performance psychology textbook, something really content-heavy, and you're going to learn a lot of techniques. You're going to learn a lot of terms, but that doesn't mean necessarily that you'll know how to interact with people, right? Just because you understand the subject matter, doesn't mean you know how to inspire it and communicate it effectively to somebody else. And basically, convince them that it's important in facing whatever they're facing.

And so a lot of those books are important, but the ones that I've found the most useful are those that talked about the coaching habits and how you communicate to people, how you relate to people, how you angle your own personality and angle your own communication style to get people to understand what it is you're trying to inspire in them. And I think those are the most important ones. So I, you know, I couldn't, I wouldn't normally list subject matter experts, but Daniel Pink and Daniel Kahneman are my top two go-to's.

If I had to say one book that really started it all and finally made me get on this treadmill. I think it would be How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Alison Swerdloff: [00:06:11] You know, for a lot of people, that is the first book, along with Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich.

Kenneth Zhou: [00:06:18] Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Alison Swerdloff: [00:06:21] Now a lot of what you do with your clients is discuss mindset and how to shift their mindset to move forward. How do you feel mindset affects everything in our daily lives and how do you work with your clients to shift theirs?

Kenneth Zhou: [00:06:35] First of all, I think mindset is predominantly a self-fulfilling prophecy. Think about it like this: every single person has data that comes in through their eyes, their ears, their experiences, their upbringing, and the same person who goes through the same experience can have a completely different outcome to somebody else, depending on their mindset. Because their conclusions, their takeaways, their behaviors, and their beliefs are impacted by how they process that information. And so mindset really is the culmination of all of those dials, of those belief systems, of those framings, of those, you know, how they limit themselves or how they unlimit themselves and see the world.

And I think that mindset creates behaviors. Because if you believe your you or your world, is a certain way, you will behave, act, and think a certain way. And the more that you think a certain way, the more that you'll reinforce those thoughts, those beliefs, and behaviors, and it becomes a cycle where you build and cement your own world.

And I think that in that sense mindset affects everything. It affects how you learn, affects how you treat other people. It affects how you interpret what happens to you. It, it affects whether or not you feel like you have autonomy over your choices. And whether you give up autonomy and responsibility over your choices. And it also affects how we treat other people. And I think that that's why I focused so heavily on mindset because, you know, if you're just giving somebody tools, you know, if you're just teaching somebody meditation, you're just giving them tactics. You're not really substantively, changing how they behave and use and see, you know, the tools that you give them.

Alison Swerdloff: [00:08:29] So how do you work with your clients on shifting their mindset to get them to that point of being able to get out of the negative and into the positive aspects of their lives?

Kenneth Zhou: [00:08:39] I think, uh, you guys know this very, very well, but I think my favorite approach is always going to be questions. It's always going to be stepping out of your shoes as somebody who thinks they know everything. Because when a client steps into a, well, your zoom meeting, you don't know anything about them. You don't know who they are or what they've experienced. You know, a lot of people want to give advice in this world, and it completely strips the person in front of you of context, of being heard, of being understood.

So the first thing that I do is always spend as much time as possible understanding the person. Cause otherwise, you're preaching to the wrong crowd. You don't know what they've been through and you don't know, you know, what their motivations are, what their struggles are, and what their beliefs are. And if you don't understand why they've come to be the way that they are, well, you're just limited in what you can do as a coach.

And so the first thing that I do is understand who they are and really, really listen. And, you know, sometimes you have to double back and ask the same questions again, just to see if they give different answers and see how they respond and change over time. And I think that's the best way to interact with anybody really. I don't, I don't think that this only applies to coaching, right? Anything that you do, it's best to understand other people. And that being said, what is your favorite way of starting?

Dr. Liesa Harte: [00:10:15] Oh yeah, well, you're right. You have to really get to know the client for sure. Where they are, where they want to be, established that gap. Which brings me back to the question I wanted to ask you, you know, since you are a mental and performance coach, and we have an idea of how you approach with a new client, what about with yourself? Because you found this on a journey of self-discovery. What have you done to change your own mindset or beliefs?

Kenneth Zhou: [00:10:43] I think the biggest one that has had an outcome on my life was the application of gratitude. And it sounds very simple because everybody online talks about, oh, you have to be grateful, right? You have to be positive. Right? And I think it's something that is thrown around everywhere. But through my upbringing, I was one of the most pessimistic and defeatist people I have ever known. I struggled a lot as a kid, I had a lot of experiences that put my self-esteem down, um, my worldview down and made me feel like I had no choice and I had no power in my outcomes.

And I also so knew that living this way was not going to turn out well for me. You know, there are, the life outcomes that are affected by how you see yourself, but they're also the biological outcomes by how you see yourself. The more negative you are, the quicker that the telomeres on your DNA start basically shrinking and the more damage you do to yourself. And so yes, you might be having a poor life as a result of negative behaviors and thoughts about yourself, but there are also physical and biological ramifications to how you treat yourself.

And I specifically remember Conan O'Brien, who's one of my favorite comedians, but, uh, back in 2010, He had been kicked off his prime show and it had been something that he had worked up to and looked up to for a long time. And, you know, Jay Leno had retired and then came back and took over the show again against what he thought was his. And he talked about how he never wants to give in to cynicism and that his message to all the young people was to not give in to that negativity and to always do something about it. And that stuck in my mind for years as a negative person, knowing all that I knew about what, what happened if I stayed on that track.

And, you know, it took me years to finally get to a point where every single day I was saying, okay, every single hour, I'm going to practice gratitude. Every single time that I feel something negative, where I make a mistake and talk poorly to myself, instead, I'm going to choose to be grateful for something that I have, something that I've done, something that is I've experienced. And that changed my life.

I don't think that I could be a coach had I not done that because then I would be talking about concepts but not implementing. And you know, when I think of gratitude, I think of Conan O'Brien. That one clip still plays in my mind and that no matter what happens, and certainly, there's been a lot, especially this past year that has happened, that is negative and cynical. And I know that all of us are dealing with it. You still have to show up. And that's what I try to live up to every single day.

Alison Swerdloff: [00:13:35] Attitude for gratitude is the biggest motivator. And once you start seeing the positives, even within the negatives, it does totally change your life and your outlook, and your vision on the world, around you.

Kenneth Zhou: [00:13:52] Yeah. All props to gratitude. I wouldn't be here without it to be quite honest.

Dr. Liesa Harte: [00:13:58] Okay. I had another question that, first of all, I had to look up what e-sports are. So now I get it, but it looks like you work with quite a variety of clients. I mean, individuals, teams, athletes. Is there one type of client you especially enjoy working with?

Kenneth Zhou: [00:14:18] This is both an answer and a non-answer, but it's not based on their background or their industry, but I prefer predominantly working with open-minded people. I couldn't care if you came in and you said, you know, you had been struggling with trauma and you're working with therapists for the last 10 years, and you need somebody to help you process through the future. Right? And to give you some sense of hope for the future. I don't care if, you know, you're an e-sports player and, you know, you're 19 and you're still, you know, trying to figure out the world around you. And you know, you're playing games for 15 hours a day and you're stressed out because you thought this thing that you enjoyed now is becoming your occupation. Right? And you know, you're taking time off of school and risking that growth for this chance at success.

If you are open-minded, I will enjoy working with you. If you have the attitude to show up. Attitude to try things and to commit to them more than just the first time where you feel, you know, meditation, oh, this is weird or trying a new, you know, certain habits or certain new thinking patterns, oh, this is weird. If you can get beyond that and commit to it and be open enough to stick with it, then, I'm happy to work with you. So that's what I mean by not exactly what you were looking for.

Dr. Liesa Harte: [00:15:44] Exactly. No, that is exactly what I was looking for. I just didn't know it.

Alison Swerdloff: [00:15:49] Do you work with a specific area of e-sports or is it e-sports in general?

Kenneth Zhou: [00:15:54] So e-sports has a lot of different titles. Think of it as, you know, the thing that I can compare to most is e-sports kind of has an umbrella of all sports, right? In the sense that in sports, you kind of have different arenas for every single game. You have different arenas for soccer, for basketball, for hockey, you know, for cricket, you know, things that we don't do in the United States. But in e-sports, you know, a single organization will have their toes in a lot of different titles. You know, they'll have teams for League of Legends, which is probably one of the biggest e-sports out there right now. Counter-Strike which has been around for probably 20 years at this point. Valorant, which is a new game, and I do coach a lot of players that play that game.

Most of the time, the type of coaching that I provide is the out-of-game stuff. So it's not a single type of title, right? If you play a game at a very high level and you want to succeed and you want to be able to make the decisive quick decisions that you have to do under pressure to communicate well when you know, stress is at its highest and your teammates may not be performing up to your expectations. You have to learn how to navigate those things really quickly. And that's not an end game thing, that's something that you have to develop out of game. And I think that more and more e-sports organizations are starting to see that, so there's more hope.

Alison Swerdloff: [00:17:26] So you're coaching, not just performance, it's full life coaching in that aspect as well.

Kenneth Zhou: [00:17:34] Yes. I think that it is important to do both. I think that life coaching is important to develop motivation, right? But performance coaching is also more about stress testing, handling high-pressure situations, having the techniques and skills that are so practiced that you can implement them when you're under pressure, right? Not meditating when you're safely in the comfort of your living room in your home, but how do you reduce stress? How do you, you stay focused when you're actually on the field.

And you know, this game determines whether or not you become a professional. Whether or not other teams will take you seriously and potentially give you trials and allow you to work in it professionally. So there's a lot of risk there. And there are a lot of teenagers, but also college students that take their classes. Some of them might have work and then they spend 7:00 PM to 12:00 AM.

Dr. Liesa Harte: [00:18:36] Right.

Kenneth Zhou: [00:18:36] You know, training. And so the outcomes are very, very focused and you have to be able to have a strict regimen and be productive and maximize not just the outcomes of the onstage games, but the outcomes of your practice. Otherwise, you know, you don't know what you could have achieved. And I think that for most competitors, that's something that they're not willing to accept.

Alison Swerdloff: [00:19:01] I think that's the same in every sport.

Kenneth Zhou: [00:19:03] Yeah. Well, that's the thing though. I think it's all relative, right? One of my favorite basketball players growing up with Kobe Bryant, and he had just this ruthlessness and this inability to accept laziness about him. And even in the Lakers, when he talked about looking around, he said that he thought that other people did not work hard enough and that he always wanted to inspire people to work harder. So it's, it's all relative, you know, so, yeah.

Alison Swerdloff: [00:19:33] Very true. I have a question for you on a personal level.

Kenneth Zhou: [00:19:38] Sure.

Alison Swerdloff: [00:19:38] You're so involved with working with your clients and with their performance and their mindset. What do you do for yourself? What are some of your forms of self-care or hobbies, something you do for fun just to get away from life, the real-life for a little while?

Kenneth Zhou: [00:19:57] You know, I'm going to have to be honest here. I have not gotten away as much for real-life recently, as I want. I'll answer your question by saying, how do I stay sane and manage, manage my stress as much as possible. I live on routines. I don't just have a morning routine. I have nighttime routines and I have conditional routines. And I think that over the past six years now, I've been experimenting with how to develop and refine these routines. And once again, that helps my clients too, of course, but, you know, I did this because it helped me.

And so some of the first things that I do are in the morning, I always set time aside to be mindful, to meditate, and to also make sure that I set the tone for my day. Is my purpose in mind when I go about my day? Am I staying true to my end goals? Am I taking good care of myself? Are my relationships in order? Is there something that is in my blind spot that I have to evaluate and that I'm not taking care of? And if I'm not taking care of it, what are some habitual things that I can change? There were times in the past few years where I was working straight til probably 9:00 PM, and I said, you know, is this fair to my girlfriend? Is this fair to my friends who I have not talked to enough? And I said, no. And I said, okay, well, guess what, you can talk about being effective to your clients as much as possible, but if you can't set a time limit and cut it down and force yourself to be more effective, you're sacrificing relationships and you're not improving how you work.

And so you have to put your feet to the fire and say, okay, well, something needs to change. And that's sort of the purpose of that morning set of time. And I usually give it anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. And I just say, okay, you know, this is the time for self-evaluation. And I think that helps. And then honestly, at the end of the days, when I need to do some, you know, just personal enjoyment, I do play games myself. Not as much anymore, especially since the COVID, and since, you know, my workload increased, but I do enjoy video games, which is probably why I got into the space, so.

Alison Swerdloff: [00:22:17] Sounds like it. Well, assuming COVID didn't happen and you want to do something other than with your habitual aspects of things and playing your games, what else do you enjoy doing for fun?

Kenneth Zhou: [00:22:33] Oh, that'd be easy; dance. I love dancing. Actually, I started dancing in college about 10 years ago. And you know, one of the things that I didn't mention cause you know, I don't know if we have enough time for my whole life story, but dance was my outlet for stress. It's so amazing because, right, you're listening to music, which A. soothes the soul, but you know, to neuroscientists, that it suits the mind. And B. You're moving and you're learning to coordinate your body. Oftentimes, dance as a social thing, right? There's somebody teaching you, you're in a class, and you get to listen to all different types of music. You know, my favorite was lyrical hip hop dance, which is interpreting the song, not by the genre and not limiting yourself to a genre, but expressing what's the songwriter is trying to convey with their body.

And so that was, you know, my favorite thing to do. And if COVID didn't happen, I would still be back there. I think that I kind of had an issue about six years ago, what I, where I had a tendon tear. And so for a few years, I was really, uh, depressed because dance was my outlet from stress. It was the thing that I put like, okay, dance. This is the thing that I'm going to use to balance me out. And then it was taken away from me, so to speak. And that's sort of why I needed to do the gratitude work that I talked about.

Because at that time I was at my lowest, I had no ability to handle stress. And then all of the negativity that it had just came crashing down on me. And so that was really a defining moment. So I'm glad that I've been able to learn so much from these amazing authors, researchers, psychologists, you know, scientists who have done so much work and publish so much information because without them, I would have never learned how to handle the things that were in front of me. So I'm grateful for them.

Alison Swerdloff: [00:24:28] Excellent.

Dr. Liesa Harte: [00:24:29] This has been fascinating. Very, very fascinating to me. Yeah.

Kenneth Zhou: [00:24:35] Well, thank you for having me on.

Dr. Liesa Harte: [00:24:37] Yeah. I'm grateful that you were able to join us and I wish you all the success in your career. Very interesting person.

Kenneth Zhou: [00:24:47] Thank you so much.

Alison Swerdloff: [00:24:48] Ken, if our listeners wanted to find out more about you, whether to learn about you or ask you questions, or potentially even become a client. How would they reach out to you? What is your email or website or how would they find you?

Kenneth Zhou: [00:25:04] Okay. My website is Ken and Empowered. So, E M P O W E R E D .com. And every type of communication is on there. My discord, which is something a lot of gamers use is on there where they can join a community and you can pretty much asked me anything. You know, I don't need somebody to be a client for me to, you know, help them out for a little bit. And my email is [email protected], and I'm happy to answer any questions or to talk to anybody, including yourselves and, you know, thank you so much for having me.

Alison Swerdloff: [00:25:42] Thank you very much for being our guest. And we will let you know when this is being published. We'll send you the link so you can promote it on your own social media, as well as ours. And I am very grateful that you have decided to be our guest. Thank you so much. We enjoyed learning about you. And as Ken mentioned to anybody listening, you can reach him at kenempowered.com or email him at [email protected]. And you can find his social media on his website. Ken, thank you again. And we will definitely be talking again soon.

Dr. Liesa Harte: [00:26:16] Bye, Ken.

Alison Swerdloff: [00:26:17] Bye-bye.

Dr. Liesa Harte: [00:26:30] Thank you for listening to the Mind Body Success podcast and being part of our amazing community. We hope you enjoyed this conversation and gleaned some tidbits that you can incorporate today to start changing your life. Our goal is to be your guides and look forward to continue to provide amazing content.

Don't forget to join in the discussion at Mind Body Success podcast.com for full show notes, resources, and further conversation. If you have a specific topic idea, feel free to recommend it.

Alison Swerdloff: [00:27:01] We look forward to seeing you on our next episode.

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