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The 5 Questions Podcast
Join us as we unlock real estate and business insights, one question at a time.
The 5 Questions Podcast
Steffany's Holistic Approach to Business and Life Will Transform Your Success
Steffany Hanlen, powerhouse performance coach and serial entrepreneur, shares how her journey from NHL skating coach to business leader was driven by curiosity and the right questions rather than expertise.
• Building success through asking powerful questions rather than positioning as an expert
• Creating scalable business systems by addressing the whole person, not just technical skills
• Focusing on energy management instead of time management to juggle multiple ventures
• Approaching life holistically from the center of a circle, not as a linear journey
• Building strong teams as key to entrepreneurial success across industries
• Understanding your unique values to create sustainable performance and avoid burnout
• Finding your authentic self rather than comparing to others or trying to please everyone
Connect with Steffany:
Website - https://steffanyhanlen.ca/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/theeverydaymillionaire
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/tedm.podcast/
Sponsored by: Waiz Ahmed
Contact: 416-876-9960
Email: waiz.ahmed@gmail.com
Welcome to the 5 Questions Podcast, where we unlock real estate and business insights, one question at a time.
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Speaker 1:Get your deal done. Welcome to the 5 Questions Podcast. My name is Mario Amar. I am your host questions podcast. My name is mario lamar. I'm m your host and our guest on today's show. She is a powerhouse performance coach, serial entrepreneur and a trailblazer in both the world of elite sports and business. From nhl locker rooms to real estate boardrooms, she's built empires where no paths existed before and helped countless others do the same. Welcome, stephanie Henlin.
Speaker 3:Stephanie welcome to the show today. Thank you. Thank you, what a great intro, mario. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:The concept of the podcast real simple. I ask five questions about business or real estate, and we get straight to the point you ready, love it, let's go. Business or real estate. And we get straight to the point you ready, love it, let's go. So in your bio you mentioned openly that you never really had a real job. You built your first business in 1988. And what I want to ask you, what sparked that entrepreneurial spirit so early on? Entrepreneurial uh spirit so early on uh, especially in such a a male dominated space?
Speaker 3:Great question. Um, I think the biggest thing was I was never really exceptional at anything, but I was good at a lot of things and I think, because of the spaces I was invited into in terms of sports or business or real estate, for example I always had the right questions. So when you ask the right questions, I think you get a lot of answers that, instead of going in as an expert or thinking I knew anything about whether it was hockey, business, real estate I always asked a lot of questions and that early on, coming out of university, high school and university, that quality I got, I believe from my parents, is that the quality of your life is based on the quality of the questions that you asked. I was raised that way, so sometimes it was me hiding behind the fact that I didn't know anything, but I know that if I could ask the right questions it might lead me and direct me to the people I needed to meet. So that entrepreneurial side of me came from understanding that a lot of very successful people that I was meeting also had a spark of curiosity in them and it led them to an entrepreneurial journey.
Speaker 3:So not having a real job was actually a gift. I worked part-time at Eaton's department store during high school and I always taught skating to put a little bit of money in my jeans and pay for my rent. But ultimately I knew that on some level I didn't want to have a boss and I didn't really want to be anyone's boss. I just wanted to lead and do what I love to do, which is to skate and to ask questions.
Speaker 1:I love your answer. First of all, the spirit of an entrepreneur is something else that only entrepreneurs have. It's hard to get that if you're, let's say, an employee profile, but I agree with you asking questions, Somebody said once I don't remember who it was but successful people ask better questions. That's why they get better results.
Speaker 3:Good, I like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I totally agree with you, and that's where it led you today to be a successful entrepreneur.
Speaker 3:And I still ask a ton of questions. It drives people crazy, especially my husband.
Speaker 1:We won't talk about that on today's show.
Speaker 3:Not on this show, that's a different show Leads us to our second question.
Speaker 1:And you didn't, you didn't just coach skating you. I would call it revolutionized how it was done. What mindset helped you build quantum speed and later skating success from the ground up?
Speaker 3:Great question, because it really was a mindset. What I noticed with hockey players is that when I entered the game quite young and realized that I wanted to work at the highest level, I stepped in at the NHL level only because I was prepared by asking questions but also being an observer. What I observed with the players I was working with is that it wasn't just about their skating. I could teach skating all day long, but what I was teaching was human beings. I was teaching young men to skate faster, and young men who wanted to skate faster, to play hockey and have a great career also had a bunch of issues that were going on in their life. So what I realized is that I could be the observer and I could teach skating, or I could teach people. And when I realized that is when I broke it down into the component parts and I realized, oh, I need to systematize this in order to scale it. And when I realized I wanted to scale meaning I wanted to take it to another level and really grow it as a business, not just skate around and sell my time by the hour I wanted to empower other instructors.
Speaker 3:I wanted to empower hockey players to understand that in order to skate faster, they had to break their stuff down. You don't go to the gym and all of a sudden it's pushing 200 pounds. You go down and you start with the technique. So I used the same qualities when it came to building programs off the ice for athletes and athletic development, et cetera. To the skating I said, well, why don't we start with technique, and then we'll add the power, a little bit of resistance and then speed will be the result. And then, boom, what happened was they opened up to me as to what was going on in their lives and what was in their way. So we'd be on the ice or in the gym and they'd be telling me stories and I'm like, oh, I need to understand the human side, the mental and emotional resilience piece that an athlete needs. So I decided to take that and systematize that and bake it in. So every program I do has a mental and an emotional resilience piece to it.
Speaker 1:It's true that mindset, our mindset, has a lot of effect on what we do, our results that we have in life, in our business or personal life. And your approach. I love your approach, how you realized it and you shifted. And it's not just about, like you say, skating per se. It's yeah, you need the techniques per se. It's yeah, you need the techniques, but the mind is so powerful that once you overcome the barriers, the technique becomes second, totally so.
Speaker 1:I love that. So, um, now third question for you. You are not only worked with beginners. You did, uh, your experience with top athletes. Well, I should rephrase this how did your experience with top athletes shape your approach to performance on and off the ice, and maybe how does that now translate into your business coaching?
Speaker 3:Brilliant question. Well, because I teach and coach people, I don't, you know, I can go into any industry, whether it's real estate business. I coached people who owned a flower shop, you know. I have people who are building businesses from the ground up entrepreneurs and I'm helping people scale and transition their business into having a successful exit strategy. So in order to do that, I had to look at them holistically, you know, looking at the seven areas successful exit strategy. So in order to do that, I had to look at them holistically, you know, looking at the seven areas of their life. So I thought, well, if it works in skating with athletes at the highest level I mean, I'm going into my fourth Olympics now using these exact same techniques that I use when I work with small business owners, entrepreneurs, real estate investors. So I enter the conversation basically where they're at, and I learned a lot of that from Rain, from the real estate investment network training that I did back in the day. So what we were doing is we were, yes, investing in real estate, but we were learning strategies that really helped the mindset.
Speaker 3:So how do you make choices based on your values? How do you include your health and fitness in how you're building your job, how do you build in family, if you like the word balance, how do you work that in when you're building a business or you're an entrepreneur? Yeah, so what I would do is I would take the physical side of what they were doing and their goals and I would connect it to what they wanted their life to feel like. And that was very rare back in the day is people didn't want to talk about feelings, they didn't want to talk about mindset, they just wanted to talk about how to. How do I invest in real estate? Well, chances are you're not going to be a very successful real estate investor if you've got all this other stuff going on in your life. That's in the way and I call those energy leaks. And when I can help people close their energy leaks physically, emotionally, spiritually, socially, financially, in whatever area of their life then the velocity of their decision-making happens.
Speaker 1:Yeah, again, it's. You know I don't want to repeat all the time, but it all. It comes to mindset. Like a lot of things we do, comes to the way we view things, the way we understand, and it's true that generations, the last few generations, changed in the way we see things, the way we understand, and it's true that generations, the last few generations, changed in the way we see things, the way we accept things, and now a holistic views mindset. You know it's much more accepted and you see a lot of, a lot more successful people, average people that are able to to go to the next level and live the life that they really want. We see that more now than what we used to see. 100% All right. Fourth question for you You're also, as we mentioned, a real estate investor, a retail business owner. How do you approach starting new ventures with so much already on your plate? Because, like you said, you're going to the Olympics? You're a real estate investor, you got your businesses. I don't know where you find the time.
Speaker 3:Well, it's funny because I actually don't believe in time management. You know, back in the day there was all these things about managing your time and habits and all the seven tips to this and the 14 steps to that, and I realized, well, if I just can focus my energy, I don't have to manage my time. So there's times where I'm focused only on the performance coaching with my Olympic athlete clients no-transcript and then I schedule times to meet new clients and I always do a discovery call Mario. This has been a game changer for me Because, to your point, juggling the retail, we have a strong team in Edmonton. We have a very strong team with great leadership in the real estate investment network piece of it. Then we have our own real estate and then I have my performance coaching and then, guess what, we also have a house and a yard and two dogs and grandkids.
Speaker 3:So it really is about looking at our life holistically and because I don't believe that life is linear, I don't think it's well, this equals, this equals this. In a sense, I look at it holistically as a circle. So I'm in the center of the circle and what I'm working on right now is being really present to you on this podcast. For example, an hour ago, I was really present to a client in France because there was issues going on, and then an hour before that, I was working on our real estate portfolio. So I look at it as management of my focus and management of my energy, because if I tried to work within a 10 hour day or, like some entrepreneurs, they just work 24 seven and I just don't have the capacity for that, because I like to have fun and I like to drink wine on the weekends that I like to walk my dogs, so I help people do the same thing is remove the clutter, focus on what you can control in the moment and notice what your highest priorities are.
Speaker 3:Right now. We have seven areas of life that we're always juggling, but there's only two or three that are really up at a time. It feels like we're juggling seven plates or more all the time when we're entrepreneurs, but what I've been able to do is really distill it down and help people understand that what their priority. If you've got little kids right now and your focus is on homeschooling or getting them into the best schools, or whatever chances are, you may not have the time and energy to be building a billion dollar business. So how do we bring the qualities of this human being and then experiences they're at in the current life and help them up-level where they're at so that when they are ready to look about you know, look outside themselves, into the real world or whatever they want to call it? Then they have the skill set and they don't have a bunch of undone or incompletes around them that they have to clean up.
Speaker 1:I agree with you again. You know the focus. I juggle a couple of different businesses too and sometimes it could be overwhelming. But the approach that you just mentioned if you focus on the task at hand, you give it your all and then there'll be another task that's going to line up after that and then you focus on this and sometimes I mean I don't know if I, if it's, if I can talk for everybody, but I've done it myself where I felt overwhelmed because I had so many projects and then deadlines, and you know you get sometimes discouraged, you, you I'm looking for for a word here, but when you put it in your head that, okay, you know what, maybe I'm not going to accomplish everything, let me take one piece and focus on that. There's a weight that get lifted off your shoulders and you're much more efficient after that.
Speaker 3:So true. And when you think that, how many people think that they have to multitask and I realized that I'm an expert in monotasking- and another thing that you said was you see yourself in a circle, not a linear line, and you have a team.
Speaker 1:That is key. This is for our listeners. Guys, do not try to do everything yourself. You're going to fail. Hire or partner with the best people. Maybe that compliments you and then you'll be way ahead of the competition, because successful people they don't do everything themselves. They hire the best people for the job.
Speaker 3:That's so true.
Speaker 1:Well, we're at our fifth and final question, stephanie. We have one more question. Okay, question number five. I lost my spot for a second here. What's one lesson or mindset shift from your journey that you believe? Every listeners if it's an athlete, an entrepreneur, a dreamer that needs to hear today.
Speaker 3:The biggest one for me, mario, and is know thyself, know thyself, know thy limits. The lesson for me was when I realized that I couldn't be all things to all people. Things would show up. I blew my knee apart, I got in a car accident, things would show up and the universe would knock louder, as they say, and I had to step back. I had to do some inner work and I had to go.
Speaker 3:What is it that I truly want and who am I being? Because I was acting in a way that I thought entrepreneurs acted and how business owners should act and how I mean, but I didn't have any role models, other than I had great parents, but there was no female power skating coaches that were willing to mentor me. So I had to figure it out and if I could give one piece of advice is to slow down long enough, do some introspective work, understand what drives you, know thyself, know thy values, and then live from that place. The minute you compromise your values, or especially if you don't know your values and you you're getting results that you don't know where they're coming from, all of that can be tested and all of that can be shattered in an instant if you don't know and understand who you are.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Know who you are and I'm going to push it one place further and let me know what you think and also know who you are, and do not compare yourself to others. I've done it and every time I've done that, I failed me too.
Speaker 3:Me too, they. There's a saying that you know. My mama always said you know you got to be the best. Stephanie hanlon, you can be because there is no other, so you have to be the best in the world. So why not start there? There's nobody there out there like you. There's nobody no other Mario out there. So we're really ripping the world off if we're not figuring out who we are and busy trying to please other people or, to your point, to compare ourselves, because it just rips the world off of our gifts.
Speaker 1:And you know, as an entrepreneur, sometimes we want to please all our clients, or all or everybody Guess what people. There's 8 billion people on the planet. There's no way you're going to please everybody. So just have it in your mind that it's going to happen and just be ready to deal with it.
Speaker 3:That's awesome.
Speaker 1:Stephanie, thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast today. I hope that every listener will take a piece of your wisdom, your knowledge, with them on their journey, and we'll definitely do another podcast together, maybe after the Olympics, and you'll have plenty of stories to tell us.
Speaker 3:I certainly will. Thank you, Mario. This was fun.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. We'll talk soon. We will. Thanks for tuning into the 5 Questions Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, like and hit the notification bell on our YouTube channel so you never miss an episode. Stay tuned for more insights and tips to transform your real estate and business game. See you next time.