Building Trust in the Digital Age | Greg Tomchick

In this episode of the Outlier Mindset podcast, host Rodman Schley welcomes Greg Tomchick, a former professional baseball player turned cybersecurity coach and CEO of Valor Cybersecurity. Greg shares his journey from the baseball diamond to the cybersecurity industry, highlighting the importance of building trust, both online and offline. They discuss the challenges of maintaining authentic connections in a digital world, the power of vulnerability, and the steps to personal growth through self-inventory. Greg also delves into the concept of generational wealth, emphasizing the value of life lessons over monetary inheritance. 

To find out more about Greg visit gregtomchick.com

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Transcript

Welcome to the Outlier Mindset podcast, your guide for living a life by design. Here we explore the journey of becoming an outlier, finding your purpose, mastering your mindset, optimizing your health, achieving financial freedom, and building a life centered around your passions. So tune in, transform, and thrive. Welcome to the Outlier Mindset. Let the journey begin.

 welcome to the Outlier Mindset Podcast. I'm your host Robin Schley and today her guest has a fascinating background and a wealth of knowledge. Greg Tomchick is a former professional baseball player turned cybersecurity coach who has transitioned from the baseball diamond to becoming a prominent figure in the cybersecurity industry serving over 250 companies. Now the CEO of Valor Cybersecurity and host of the Connected Mindset Live Show, he lends his expertise to ABC, Fox News and Inc. Magazine helping guiding individuals, executives and brands in protecting their most valued assets in life and in business. Greg, welcome to the show.

 Rodman, thanks so much for having me. Love what you're doing here and looking forward to diving in.



 Absolutely. Yeah, Rodman, I like to say we're more connected than ever but less connected than ever before. For many reasons behind that technology, the comfort that we have in putting ourselves into a corner and that's impacted the way we think about connection. These tools that we have at our fingertips, social media, artificial intelligence to have conversations with computers has made it where we are not valuing the community aspects that we valued for generations and we need a lot more of that. That's why I speak about this both at a business and a personal level today is about reconnecting companies, making them give them the ability to build trust with each other. These tools don't build trust. People can put fake profiles out, things of that nature and no matter where technology goes, the human element is always going to be at the center of what makes us human and what makes us grounded to the earth and that community connection is so important and I'm



 Yeah, an immense impact. We see it as enormous from a systematic standpoint.



 It's mental health. It's the ability to connect when the time is right. You have to exercise this just like a muscle. As an athlete, we knew we needed to exercise the muscle we wanted to use in the game. When the time came, we were under the lights and we needed to perform. You want to be able to do that in front of people, whether you're going to networking.



 Networking events have the least amount of people than ever before because people feel like they're networking when they're online. They are, but it's very surface level. For somebody like myself, I love conversations that have depth in them that are talking about what people are going through, what communities are encountering from a systematic standpoint and how we can start to improve on some of those and be better connected as individual to individual. I always say my biggest breakthroughs come from one-on-one conversations like this. If I don't put myself out there, if I don't trust my ability to deliver when I'm in front of somebody and be able to bring them value, then I'm not going to be able to connect with them and that can cause me to put myself into a corner and just say, "I'm going to stay at home and do what I've always done," which doesn't help either the other person or myself.



 Absolutely.

 I was a military born kid. Both my parents were Navy. We got to travel around to a lot of different communities across the United States, different military bases, interact with different cultures.



 What I realized is a lot of people made connections in the outdoors. There were some indoor sports, basketball, volleyball, things of that nature that people wanted me to go into, but I really felt the difference in those sports that were outdoors where people were moving around and interacting with different folks.



 Usually that became baseball, but my baseball journey was not always the best player on the team. I really had to evolve at each level that I went up. T-ball, they have kind of rec league and then you get into travel ball. Then you start to take it serious where you have scouts watching you, evaluating every move you make, every conversation you have, body language. Are you thanking your coach after the game? They looked at everything and what I realized is that you had to be the full package for them to want to give you a chance.



 For a long time, I battled with trusting myself as the player that I wanted to be. I knew I wanted to follow in footsteps like Justin Verlander and other great pitchers because I was a pitcher in baseball.



 I realized through that military connection that if I wanted to be a leader on my team, if I wanted to lead myself to the highest levels of sports, I needed to start to trust myself and have standards that I operated within that not necessarily aligned with the scouts' expectations, but aligned with what I thought and what I knew was going to be a good player and a good person, which would scale me well beyond sports. Once I started to trust myself, those scouts started to trust me. My parents started to trust that I was the player and becoming the player that I wanted to be. My teammates started to trust me. I've been able to take that lesson into everything I do now in business and in community is helping other people build the trust that they need in order to go out into the community and be able to do all the great things they want to do. Money meaning self mastery wise.



 All of that aligns with the outlier mindset. That's what allowed me to become an outlier in my community was initially that point of what do I need to do to trust Greg more? That attracted the right people to me who ended up trusting me enough to give me the opportunity at the next level to play in Major League Baseball.



 Absolutely. That's at the core. That's something I always looked for as an individual. And I said, you know, I wasn't getting that at certain points in my personal or professional journey. And when I finally realized, you know, as I was going through that hard internal work is I have to become that person first, that's going to attract the person that I want to be around. And sometimes that's hard to wrap our mind around, because we want other people to show us the way. We want mentors to say, this is who you need to become. We want leaders to say, we see you doing this, here's a way you can be better. But that's you being better for them. Not for yourself, not for the people that you want to serve. So I think that's a fundamental activity when it comes to connection is really starting there. And then everything, you know, the world is your oyster from there, to be able to become in any areas of the outlier mindset what you want to be. But you have to set the standard yourself and not just go along with the expectations of others in those critical areas of your life.



 Absolutely Rodman. I think perspective is a trait. It's a character trait that a lot of us need to develop. A lot of people talk about perspective, the way you look at the world, the way you translate everything coming into you. But that starts as a way of shaping how you want the world to be better around you, how you want to leave it better off than you found it. And then the things you attract, you filter them in and out based off of that. So if you don't have that filter, then everything online, all your different sources that you're digesting, food information, things you put in your body, otherwise that's going to be something that it's just going to flood you. You're not going to be able to filter things out to be able to live that authentic life that a lot of us talk about. And ultimately that's going to tire you out to a point where you're going to feel like you're depressed, you're not going to be able to perform and so on and so forth that we see so much in today's world.



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 I absolutely do.



 In my daily activities, I'm trying to be a forcing function to make that happen in many ways through my show and through the community that I'm building. I think at the core of it is people have gotten less vulnerable because they feel judged, because of how online media outlets and things have shaped what good looks like. I call it a thick description. Things aren't good or bad. There are really multiple levels of anything that we do. And vulnerability is at the core of that



 direct and authentic connection. If we're not able to be vulnerable, share what we're going through, nobody's gonna feel connected to us. So if you're in a networking event and you go up, you just talk about your business, not really why you're in business, what the impact you're making is,



 what it means to you, it's hard for people to connect. And I think that's what a lot of people are doing in community today is they're looking for somebody to deliver on a need they feel they have. I need more money, or I need more health and wellness, or I need more better relationships in my life. And we're looking for people to bring those improvements to our lives without actually having transparency of that need and saying, I'm at this networking event because I'm looking to grow my business to its next stage. Here's what that next stage is. Here's why I'm looking to get there. And if we're able to ask those questions, a lot of people would be surprised how well people are able to connect to you and then deliver and help you get to that end goal. That was something that I discovered as I was going through that trust building exercise. I would go to leadership of a major league team and say, where do you see me going? Here's where my skill set is taking me. Does that align with where the organization's going? Does that align with where this community's headed? Where the game's headed? And when you ask those hard questions and you're able to be vulnerable, it's amazing what happens both for yourself but also for others because they're learning from your journey as well. And I think that's what people used to do when they would sit around a campfire is they'd share those authentic lessons that people were going through, whether it was hunting, whether it was their relationship. And that was able to get them to an area of connection that made it a win-win and made them both thrive. And I think when we get out of conversations like that, we all feel more alive. And then we go make a greater impact on those around us.



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 Good evening.



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 it absolutely does. And I think back to all the experiments I've run, I think about things as experiments when we're going out and speaking with people in public or interacting with our community, whether it's online or in person, and just trying different things out. I had to try different things out, different questions to coaches, different questions to people on my team, whether it's business or in sports, and see what their reaction was to it. And you look at folks,



 we both have an admiration for Lewis Howes and all the great things he's doing at Greatest Media. I'm Steven Bartlett with the Diary of a CEO. And if you think about where those people started, these people who are excelling in their unique vertical, a lot of the initial conversation was my life was broken. I was going through the worst possible situation that I could ever think of. I couldn't make this stuff up. It's the authentic me. And here's how I'm climbing out with it in collaboration with a community. So it's amazing. And I encourage everybody listening in, run this type of experiment,



 if you have the wherewithal to do it, you'll see at any event, the person that's talking at these authentic levels is like a magnet to people. It brings all of these people to this one person or these couple of people that are talking about the hard times, not that you have to be negative. It's really just saying, I live both the good and the bad and I share it because I know it's gonna be productive and it's gonna be something that benefits everybody involved. And talking about it, it also helps that individual as well. So it's a lopsided win-win, but at the end of the day, it really means a lot when people are not just sharing all of the good things. Because in essence, as individuals, we're kind of connected to loss, to the ability to subtract things from our lives. It becomes so hard to get rid of certain things. So when you hear about people subtracting things that did not serve the standards they've set internally, it's really empowering. It shows that anything is possible. And that's what we all want at the end of the day. It's something that I think gets us all out of bed is that fact that at the essence, anything is possible when we're able to kind of stretch ourselves a little bit and talk about those hard times that we went through, because you often get a better feedback than just talking about all the good things that are going on.



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 Yeah, absolutely.



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 To me, it's natural alignment, as opposed to really going against the grain of, you know, the person you're uniquely qualified to serve, whether it's yourself five, 10 years ago. It's natural alignment where the person on the other end is actively going through the process of making these critical decisions. And when you can give them a light that says, here's the decision that I made, here's potentially how it would improve that decision, it gives them a road of benefiting from the lessons you've learned. And to me, at its core, that's leaving the world better than you found it. All of us want to leave, well, you know, some people call legacy, but it's really leaving the world a little bit better than you found it in all capacities, rooms that you walk in, houses that you buy and sell,



 businesses that you go in and work for. All of us want to leave the world better off and leave something behind. I think that's what it is at its core.



 And a lot of that, you know, as I mentioned, starts with that internal trust, as you mentioned. And in my

 life up to this point, I have realized, you know, and I've tried to start, you know, 10, 12 businesses throughout the years. The only ones that have been successful were the ones where I was, you know, coaching a baseball team, the cybersecurity world, because I was a cyber attack victim. So I want to serve those leaders to make sure they don't go through what I went through, to learn the lessons before the hard times hit them. Those are the only things really that have been able to be successful for me, because my soul and a deeper part of me was linked to it. I learned so many lessons that I'm able to package up and deliver to people. And it's that experience, you know, people can feel when you haven't gone through an experience and you're trying to, you know, get them along that path, they can feel the unauthenticity that comes along with that. And I think a lot of people battle with that. They want to start a business. They want to get into a job because of the money, because of material aspects. And it's not where life's going to naturally align for you. And it's going to be harder than ever before. And I think we need to almost think about how can we work smarter? Obviously, we have to work hard to accomplish things. We have to make the right connections.



 But when you can find that natural alignment, it's kind of serendipitous how things kind of progress and roll out and the impact you're able to realize you make is what makes life, you know, all the more worth it. And like you said earlier, you know, it makes you feel like you wake up each day and you have that golden ticket.



 You have that, you know, life is rigged in your favor. And I think we all want that, but getting there is the hard part.



 You know, sometimes we can aimlessly drift through our life, not really sure how to break the patterns and live the life that you've always dreamed of. I get it. I have been there, so caught up in chasing opportunities until I found myself in a life that felt foreign to me. It took me years to unwind the messy web to get back to what I've been put on this planet to do. And let me tell you this, purpose doesn't have to feel out of arm's reach. That designed a plan for you to do a little bit each day over the next 30 days in a challenge that I call the Outlier 30. It's specifically designed to help you find or create more clarity around your purpose. So if you're feeling lost and you want to finally turn things around and live that life that you were destined to create, sign up right now. It's free. You have absolutely nothing to lose and the whole world to gain. Visit gorodman.com forward slash outlier 30 today.



 Yeah.



 Change that? remove any



 North North



 Absolutely. I like to look at it as oxygen. You have to use the passion as oxygen as you're building the money that you need, the capital, the social capital around that idea that you want to bring to the world. I think that's critically important. And then money becomes the oxygen that keeps the company flowing.



 But at the end of the day, for one of the things I talk about with a lot of the business owners that I work with on a cybersecurity capacity, because I love the mindset of running a business, I love the building process of these companies, is if the company goes away, if the people go away, what's left at the end of the day? If all the money drains, the brand is gone, the technology tools are all gone, what's left for that business owner at the end of the day or the people that they employ? How would you make those people feel?



 What trust did you build with the people that you interacted with? What type of reputation did you build? And that's what scales any business owner, any entrepreneur, any leader into a great life of legacy is thinking about things from that perspective lens. But boiling things down to, I think we stack on marketing, we stack on branding, we stack on investors and capital people who are infusing capital into our business. But at the end of the day, we need to still focus on that core of a business, which is people, which is meaning, which is impact, and ultimately the trust that they're able to build in the market. Because even if that company goes to the wayside, people say Rodman was the guy who made me feel this way, and I want to see what he's doing now, what he's up to, and I want to find a way to work with him. And that's how business takes place in the world that I'm involved in and the way that I like to do business based off of that foundational structure of trust and reputation.



 a firm believer of that. I think we're all a compilation of our relationships and the standards we've set to get to those relationships. And I think a lot of people in your audience are probably going through that process of finding ways to build better relationships, finding ways to be more authentic with themselves. They bring that out to the world, and it's interesting how the right people get attracted to you. So I think that's so critical, business and personal life. And when we're down, that brings us up. And when other people are down, we bring them up. And it's that unification of what makes people people at the end of the day. And ultimately, we need more of that connection. That's what's going to keep us alive, keep the world thriving, and keep each of us able to satisfy, fulfill our purpose on this earth and to be able to bring our superpower to more people.



 Yeah, for me, I like steps that people can take. I like to, in my own life, have a little bit of a roadmap and a system I can function off of. I always think about it as first inventory where your life is at. Start to subtract things. A lot of us need to subtract more than we need to add. So I think starting with an inventory, how has my life changed since before COVID? Maybe I'm at home more. Maybe my kids are at home as well. What is the change in the situation? And inventory, the activities that you go through on a daily basis. This is something I do probably monthly, sometimes when my life is going through chaos, even more frequently as I inventory what I'm doing throughout the day. And it gives me a clear perspective on what I need to subtract or try to subtract. That's one of the hardest things we do in life is subtract things that are not serving us. We know they're not serving us, but we continue to do them. So start subtracting some things. I always say subtract a thing and consider adding a thing in the place of that. So you're not necessarily just sitting and waiting during that time. You're adding it with something of where you want to see yourself in the future. That's the time our body and our mind tell us that this is not congruent with the person that we want to be. But we stuff that feeling down and that's kind of that depression aspect is we're depressing the things we know are congruent with us or are incongruent. But at the same time, we're still doing them. So I think a lot of it comes down to that initial inventory. I say everybody should start there. Start to subtract some things, start to kind of become more lean. A lot of people talk about lean organizations or lean companies, but take that into your life and start to operate your life at a leaner, more purposeful type activity life. And that's going to allow you to think about things that you can add into your life. Maybe it's a walk every day. It doesn't have to be strenuous exercise. It could just be listening to a podcast like this, finding ways that fill your cup up and allow it to overflow. I always say that if our cup is empty, we can't serve others. We can only serve them when our cup is overflowing. And I think that's an important concept for people to grasp is if you're draining yourself with activities like sitting down 11 hours out of the day or always stressing about if something wrong is going to go haywire with your kids, those activities put you in a position to feel like you're constantly adding bad things into your routine. So it's inventory, subtract, and then add. Most people are inventory add, and they would just want to add all these routines that are on social media that the latest influencers are talking about. And eventually you have a life that is not congruent with the life you're supposed to be living.



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 It absolutely is. All of us do not have to hit rock bottom. I like to mention that from a cybersecurity perspective, because at one time I hit that rock bottom. And then in other areas when I was getting out of baseball with using alcohol or using things to distract myself from where I really want it to be because it was a hard path.



 And all of us do not have to hit rock bottom, but we have to have some type of wake up call. And I wanna help, and I know you wanna do the same, is help more people be able to have that shock. The electric pulls throughout the body before they hit the bad situation of hurting others or hurting themselves in some way. And there are conscious ways to do it, like that continual inventory that can, as you inventory things, you start to get shocked. My gosh, I didn't even know I was doing this for six hours a day. Or I didn't know that I was so focused on my financial life that I now don't have any relationships or I don't have my health and wellness.



 So doing that inventory is something that I encourage everybody to do. And then as you start to subtract things, your soul, your body, your conscious starts to become more free to explore other avenues that would better serve you. And I think that's just a critical step in anyone's self mastery and personal development.



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 Absolutely, yeah, we have to continue to shift our perspective on where we're headed. Everything is gonna come to an end, whether it's a conversation that we're having, a relationship, or our life, or something we're going after to achieve.



 But at the end of the day, it's who you become as a part of that process. It's not necessarily what you get, it's who you become along that path that makes it worthwhile and makes it purposeful. I think that's so important for people to kind of shift their perspective on is, it's not the destination, it's that journey that we go through to become the best highest version of ourselves, which we all need to do. And ultimately, that's not an easy process. I wanna make sure, I know we talk about it in a way because we've been able to see some of these lights. It's a very difficult process, but when you have people around you who have done it and you have shows like the Outlier Mindset where you can periodically visit people that are going through this journey, people who have done the hard work. It gives you that beacon of light that all of us need at some point in the journey. So we don't have to hit that rock bottom, we can really start to implement some things in our lives that are really gonna serve both us and the other people that we care about. And that to me is legacy when you can have that perspective of how did I evolve and how did I help others evolve along with me through this journey. Not necessarily what we accumulated from a material standpoint. And that's something once you ship that perspective, you start to get rid of a lot of the material things and you start to realize what's really important. And that's something I continually revisit in my daily life because we get emotionally attached to things. You mentioned this earlier where it was hard for Greg six, seven years ago to get rid of that identity of baseball player. And that's all I was, that's what I trained myself to be for 15, 17 years. And when I had to change that identity, it was so painful to go through that and nobody around me was going through that same ship. So there was no one to ask the question, what did you do? What should I not do? I kinda had to figure it out on my own. And it took me back to that place that I mentioned earlier about in baseball, starting to trust myself. I had to rebuild trust with myself and become an expert in something where everybody said, you're just a baseball player. You can't be this new expert in this area. And it takes a lot of people say confidence, a lot of people say trust. But ultimately, I was just very vulnerable about where I was headed, what I thought I needed to get there. And it's interesting how I was able to attract the people who were able to give me the lessons that got me to that next step. And I almost started to look at it as a video game where every day I was just trying to level up one more time. But I did get caught in that accomplishment loop. We spoke about before the show, something I came across recently is, all of us have already accomplished something that we said would make us happy. And I think that's such an important quote that all of us can kinda resonate with. Because at one time, we are where we are right now, because we thought something would make us happy and we've already achieved it. If you think about yourself today, that you're enough, that you've gotten to the point because you've purposely done it. You thought the person that you are today would make you happy, and why is it not making you happy? I think that's such an important aspect for everybody to resonate with, because it gives you back that I have somewhat control of where I'm headed. I really need to do the hard work in order to get myself to that fulfilled, happy state, which is really where your expectations for life are met. And a lot of times, we get our expectations from the outside world. But at the end of the day, it's when our standards are being fulfilled out into the world. I look at expectations as those external, and the standards are the internal out that we uphold people to, we uphold ourselves to. And when that is being fulfilled and we're firm in those, to me, that's happiness, that's fulfillment. And as an individual, as a community leader, as a business leader, I wanna see more people do that. And that's what I try to bring out into the world, whether it's a client, whether it's people within the team, or it's audiences like yours, who are up to great things, and they wanna accomplish great things. But there may just be one tweak that they need to make in order to get there, and wanna help be a bridge to get them there.



 There's enough.



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 it's so powerful, and that to me is legacy, it's sharing the bad and the good. One of the ways, one of my core values when I think about generational legacy or generational wealth, and I saw this from my grandparents and their grandparents, is the lessons and information that they were able to convey. In my life, when I wake up in the morning, I'm like, how many lessons can I learn today? And I have to put myself in a lot of uncomfortable positions in order to bring that to fruition. And then what I do every weekend is I sit down, and I think I write a letter to both of my kids, and I talk about all the bad things that may have happened to me that week, all the good things, all the things that they did that made me really happy, and really lifted me up as I was going through different phases of my business or my life or my relationships.



 And to me, that's going to all accumulate, whether they put it in a book or not, or they just read a letter a day when I'm no longer here. For me, that's generational wealth. They're getting this wealth of information. Maybe I leave behind a lot of money, maybe I don't. But at the end of the day, hopefully that lifts them up to be able to feel the situations I put myself in, and that's going to give them hopefully the lessons that I learned the hard way that's going to allow them to start, not from scratch, but for where their dad was able to get to, and hopefully they carry that on. And that, I think, impacts them, their kids, their kids' kids. And that, to me, is a huge part of generational wealth where most people just look at it as the dollars in the trust account or the check that they get when dad passes away. So that's something I've come across the past year or so, is what does generational wealth mean to me? And I think that's a big component of it and something I try to fulfill each day and then each week as I document it.



 Yeah, everybody can check out my website. It's Greg Tomchick, just like my name is spelled, dot com. That will take you to all the links to be able to connect with me on social. All my new books that I release go through there. You can check out the Connected Mindset Live. That's really my hub for everything. I'm on every social media platform except for TikTok, and that's just a little bit by design from a security perspective. But I love to connect with people. It's really at the core of what makes my soul feel alive. So definitely use me as a resource. And I love shows like this, Rodman, and just want to recognize you for everything positive, everything productive, and everything educational that you're bridging for folks to connect to their higher self and for them to become the outlier in their community and their life for the people they love and the people they want to serve.



 Audience member asks a question ]

 Yeah, it's a great question.



 It's set your standards and uphold them in every situation.



 That's really the best way I know how to live today. It was a hard journey to get to the point where I could set my internal standards of what I felt was a great life lived and a great life of service. So I encourage everybody to set those standards, document them, and then uphold them and be able to know when those standards are being broken or not upheld by the people around you. And that's going to help you build a great life

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