Are you ready to take control and play a bigger game in life? In this episode, Penny Zenker interviews serial entrepreneur Markus Kaulius, who has built multiple 8- and 9-figure businesses and helped millions transform their lives. Markus shares the key principle that changed everything for him: the power of choice. From mindset shifts to setting big goals, he reveals actionable steps anyone can take to regain control, elevate their thinking, and create the life they truly desire. Get ready to challenge yourself, change your perspective, and start playing a bigger game.

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Playing A Bigger Game: Practical Mindset Shifts For Success With Markus Kaulius

Welcome to the show. On this show, we want you to succeed, and we want you to succeed big. That’s why our guest, Markus Kaulius, is here to help you play a bigger game. He’s a serial entrepreneur and the founder of multiple 8 and 9-figure businesses. Over his 25-plus career, he’s grown his supplement company from a startup to $170 million and has helped clients worldwide lose over 3 million pounds. That’s pretty cool.

He has impacted the lives of over ten million people, but he says he is getting started. His debut book, which was released in July 2024, Play a Bigger Game and Seven Universal Principles to Experience True Fulfillment and Win in Life, was in the top 10 selling books in America within 3 weeks of release. Without further ado, welcome to the show, Markus.

Thank you so much. I’m psyched to be here. We’re going to have a great conversation, but most importantly, people are going to walk away with some actionable items, actionable tips, and actionable advice to start living that bigger, better life.

Key Principle Of Success

I love that because there’s all this talk. It’s a high level where we can do this, but there’s nothing that we can sink our teeth into that we can start doing right away. I love that. You’ve achieved some incredible results. If you had to boil it down to the secret of your success, are there 1 or 2 things that you say, “I focused on this,” or are there some fundamentals that you can share? This might not be the practical thing of what to do exactly, but we’ll get there. What do you feel are those key areas?

I feel like we’re diving deep right from the get-go, which I really respect. Choice is one of my key principles. What I mean by choice is that you have more control over your life than you realize. It’s the choice to take the reins of your life. I see the most unhappy people, including myself for so many years before I accepted that choice and the reins, as those who believe that their life is out of their control. They’re like, “There’s nothing I can do. My family is making me do this. My history says I’m going to end up here. The government is doing this to me. Life is happening to me, not for me.” When you make a choice to say, “I’m in control. Everything boils down to a choice I can make,” when you have that control or that power in your hands, you can change and accomplish anything.

I believe that too. When you say choice, we could go into so much around that. What I hear you saying, too, and correct me if I’m wrong, is this is where our mindset is. Our mindset is the number one limiter to where we’re going, keeping us from deeper relationships, greater successes, and so forth. Tell me more about that. Do you agree with that or disagree with that?

I am 100% a mindset guy. The more I learn about how our minds work, and most people have the same answer, we know so little of how our minds work. If you learn a little bit, the power that comes from this stuff is wild. Two people can be looking at the exact same thing, the exact same situation, or the same event and one person could be overjoyed with what happened and the other feels like, “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.” Truly, what this stuff boils down to is perspective mindset. When you learn how to tap into this, take control, and make the choices to see the world in a specific way, anything you want to do and anything you want to accomplish is yours.

Bigger Game

I talk in my new book that’s coming out about the reset mindset. It is how we can be conscious of that choice and reset. We get on autopilot, but how do we rein in and realign on that? From your perspective, I’d like to hear how choice allows us to play a bigger game. I haven’t made the connection yet. If I’m wearing the hat of the audience, they’re like, “I get what you’re saying, but I don’t understand how that helps me to play a bigger game.”

If you don’t mind, I’m going to take the smallest detour really quick. If I answer this question where I might separate myself further from the audience, I want to make sure that the audience realizes and knows that for the first fifteen years of my life, I was a victim in every way. I had such a sad life. I had no confidence and no self-worth. I was stuck.

I respect and have so much mercy, love, and patience for anybody who feels stuck. At the same time, as being stuck, you might be saying, “I know there is more to life than this. I know I could be playing a bigger game in life. I should be playing a bigger game. I know I could do more with this life.” I was there for so long and I hated living in that space. I want people to know that I was once there and I made the choice one day to break free.

I also don’t want to make it sound like, “The very next day, my life was a billion times better.” Once you make a choice, you’re going to start to accept, understand, and open up your mind to the fact that you haven’t got it all figured out and that there are answers out there, including ones on this very show, that can start changing your life radically.

To go back to your question about choice and playing a bigger game, the vast majority of people in life, if you ask them, would say to you, “I feel like I should be playing a bigger game. There’s more that I should be experiencing. There’s more that I should be doing. I have so many blessings and so many talents that aren’t being utilized, and yet I’m stuck. I don’t even know where to start.” There’s so much about what you are sharing that I love. This is the chance to say, “What if I haven’t got it all figured out? What these two are talking about right now, what if there’s something to it? What could I do?” Let’s talk about some of those first.

Number one is to say, “What if I was in control? What would that look like? What if every time I say, “I’m not in control of that. The government’s in control of that,” what if what’s holding me back the most is this feeling, this thought, and this understanding that I’m not in control?” Let’s even take taxes. Taxes are the ones that everybody loves to complain about. We’ve all been there. We all hate taxes. What if I told you taxes are a choice? You’re like, “I have to pay tax or I’m going to go to jail.” You don’t have to pay the tax. You could make that choice. You are in control. You don’t have to pay.

With every choice, there are consequences, but we need to be aware of whether we want to deal with those consequences.

I want to be clear with people. It’s not just one choice. It’s pay or go to jail. That’s not the only consequence. What about another idea? What about moving to a country that doesn’t have taxes?

That’s true

There’s the option.

There are states that don’t have a state tax, so you can drop that.

Exactly. You can’t say, “I am not in control.” You are in control. You’re like, “I have my job here and my family here.” You are making the choice to stay even though the taxes are what they are where you live. It feels so much better to your brain than you realize once you say, “It is my choice.” The exact same goes for anything you’ve got going on in life.

If you’re like, “I have to go to work today. I’m being forced,” are you? Does someone come to your house, hold a gun to your head, and say, “You have to go to work.” You could not go to work. You could go to a different work. You could stop working altogether. These are choices. If you’re like, “I have to eat,” there are consequences, but these are all your choices.

When you start to say, “I get to. These are my choices. I’m going to choose to go to this work,” and you start opening up your mind this way, you’re going to start recognizing there are other choices. You’re like, “What if I changed where I went to work? What if going to work doesn’t have to be a sentence in prison? What if I could  enjoy the things I do?”

Both can be true at the same time that you have work. There are things at work you don’t enjoy, but maybe there are also parts of work you enjoy. We delete, distort, and generalize things. We delete the things that are good about it because we’re so focused on the things that aren’t. We’re in line there. To get back to concretely what someone can do, what I’m hearing you say is, “What if?” Your core question is to get them connected to, “What if I looked at this differently? What if I focused on what I enjoy about the work, the job, and the people versus what I don’t enjoy?” Is that correct?

I love it. Let’s quickly throw in something small and tangible to go along with this, and that is using the right language that our brains will appreciate more. What if you didn’t have to go to work? Do you know how many people out there would love your job? Do you know how many unemployed people are out there? Do you know how many people in different countries would die for your job and your income? When people say this about the gym, this is my favorite. When you say, “I have to go to the gym,” what you’re saying to your brain is, “I know we don’t want to but let’s go.” Think about what happens in the gym. You’re like, “ I knew I hated this. I told myself I hated this,” and this feeling and that feeling.

We prove ourselves right.

You get to go to the gym. What if you got to use those words and you get to go, and then when you’re there, you’re like, “It feels good to get my body moving. I like the endorphins. I like how much clarity I get from the gym. I like how much my metabolism is sped up. I like hanging out with these people at the gym.”

It’s what Penny said, which I love. You start recognizing more of the things that you do like as opposed to putting on these blinders of, “Let’s find what I don’t like.” When you use those words or that language, you’re telling your brain, “Find me all the ways I’m right about this. What do we dislike about the gym? Look at the lighting in this gym. Look at this. This machine is broken again,” versus, “I get to go to the gym. There’s the people I like. This machine doesn’t work, but that’s okay. It’s going to give me a chance to go on the elliptical. I don’t even use the elliptical.”

Do you know what that leads to? I talk about the same thing. We’re two sides of the same brain. I talk about this as well. The point that you’re making for people who are reading is how important language is. Language has energy, intensity, and direction. If you say, “I have to,” you’re making yourself the victim of your own life. I talk about that as well. “I get to,” I love that. Make a little bit of a tweak on top of that, which is, “I’m grateful to.”

Once you tap into, “I get to,” you can move to another level and it changes the way that you look at everything. Importantly, it’s not just those words that I hear you saying. It’s any words. We’re conscious of the words that we’re using, the energy that they have, and how they might impact the experience that we’re having. You gave a great example of how that can shift. What you see at the gym and what you experience is different. We’ve got the, “What if?” and we’ve got the language as concrete things that they can do.

There is one last thing I want to say to wrap all of these little pieces up in a bow. You could be reading this and going, “It’s nice what these guys are saying, but I don’t know if I can do this. That sounds like a lot of work,” or whatever.

It sounds like toxic positivity. I’m going to put that hat on. There are a lot of people who say, “I don’t want to like to go to the gym. You’re not going to tell me that I can like to go to the gym. I’m not going to do that.” What do you say to that person?

Those are excellent points. If you’ve already figured it out, you are happy with your results in life, and you like the fulfillment that you’re experiencing, I’m not trying to change a thing for you. You keep living that life. That’s awesome. That’s not coming from a place of judgment either, like, “Good luck in your life.” If you don’t think anything’s broken, then it’s not. Keep going. If you’re somebody who’s reading this and saying, “Maybe my life could be a little bit better,” why not try these things? Try these things for one day and look and go, “Were there any wins in that? Did I see anything I liked a little bit better today than I did yesterday?”

What I’ve found is that every time I try one of these perspective shifts and every time I try one of these new mindset techniques, I can find so many little wins, and that’s in one day. Imagine if I did this every day for 30 days or 1 year? You don’t have to commit to this for a lifetime, but the compounding effect of trying these things is that you become a different person for the positive in 1 month, 1 year, or 10 years. Your life can be radically different if you want it to be.

There’s such a ripple effect, don’t you think? As you show up differently, the people around you start to show up differently. If you’re a leader, your people are having a better experience in the workplace. If you’re a parent, you’re having a better relationship with your children. It is such a ripple effect because it changes other people’s behaviors because energy is contagious.

I love that we’re going here. Let’s go a little bit further with this. I want to give people two examples here. If you’re reading this and you’re like, “I don’t know. Is that really true?” Let me show you how true that is. Let’s stay at the gym for a second. If you walk in with the attitude of, “I have to be here. Mondays. Ugh,” who do you attract? Do you attract the person who’s like, “I love being at the gym?” That person’s like, “I can already sense what’s going on here and I’m going the other way.” You’ve got the other people who are like, “I know. Mondays. Ugh. The gym. Ugh.”

You do that a little too.

I was there once. I know. You’ve created this dirty bathtub and invited all your friends who are comfortable with that dirty water. You could walk in and be like, “I’m so happy to be here.” I love how often I bring that into a room, and people say, “I love that answer.” You get to change. You get to spread that positivity. I don’t care if it spreads like an infection. I hope it does.

If I had brought a smile to someone’s face who might not have smiled otherwise that day, I would have felt so great about myself. You attract other people. When I’m at the gym, I attract those people who are like, “Isn’t it great to be here? I got such a crazy pump right now. Do you want to come get a set in with me?” That is where I like to be.

To anybody reading who’s like, “Those are two extremes.  I’m maybe more comfortable in the middle,” that’s great. You’ll attract the people in the middle if you want to attract the people in the middle. Maybe you don’t like this side or this side. That’s okay. We’re not trying to change you into someone you don’t want to become.

Goals

I want to play off something that you said but slightly pivot into a different direction. I want to talk about goals and how important goals are in playing a bigger game. You talked about attracting people. It made me think of what kind of people we attract based on what kind of goals we set and things like that. Let’s go and talk about goals. Why are they important? How do they influence us? Unless you want to go in a different direction, that’s what came up for me.

I love talking about this. I’m such a big believer in having big goals, big thoughts, and big ideas, and then committing to them and going after them every single day. Think about your goal every single day. What would happen if that goal is on your mind constantly? I’ll tell you exactly what happens. Your brain, specifically your reticular activating system, is constantly looking for ways to make those goals happen. It’s on your mind. I’m thinking about it so much, like, “I want this to happen.”

Your reticular activating system is so incredible that you could be in this conversation here and at another table at the restaurant. Somebody used words pertaining to your goal, and your brain said, “Are they talking about that?” That’s how wild it is. You’re hearing conversations. You’re meeting people that you wouldn’t otherwise meet. That’s how powerful our brains are and how powerful that energy is.

You’re looking for ways. You’re looking for clues. You’re looking for evidence. You’re looking for ways to support you in getting to that goal. The more time you spend on that, the more you will funnel your way towards that goal. There’s a reason why people who have big goals and think about them constantly are way more likely and way more often to attain those goals.

Activate Your Reticular Activating System

We’ve come to the end of our time, so I want to wrap up this piece. Give people another concrete, tangible thing that they can do, and then I want to find out where they can find out more information about you and where they can get your book, Play a Bigger Game.

Thank you. I can’t believe our time is already up. Hasn’t it been five minutes? What’s going on?

I know.

Let’s talk about the tangible. Let me give you something small to activate your reticular activating system. What I want you to try to do is use very positive language. Choose a goal that you have and ask your brain constantly in a positive manner how you’ll accomplish this goal. Let me give you something very tangible. The way our reticular activating system works is if you ask it a negative question, for example, “Why am I going to lose? If I do this, will I lose?” your reticular activating system or your subconscious is going to come back with a whole bunch of negative answers. It’s like, “Let me prove you right. You asked why you’re going to lose. Do you remember when you were in grade two? Do you remember when you got rejected? Do you remember all this failure?”

If you ask it in a positive way and say, “Why am I going to win? Why am I going to accomplish this today?” it will come back with positive answers. It’s like, “Do you remember when you accomplished this? Do you remember nailing this goal? Here is why you are a winner.” That’s what I would love to hear that you took out of this episode. Why are you a winner? It is as readily available to you as, “Why am I a loser?” For the first fifteen years of my life, I constantly asked the question and got the answer of why I was a loser. I had nothing to show for those fifteen years. As soon as I made the change, I had everything to show for it. I win a lot in life. I’m not saying that, so it’s like, “Look at my awesome life.”

I want to tell you that if you take nothing else away, you are so much closer to the wins that I experienced than you realize. It is one decision to put you on a slightly different path and then do it again tomorrow and try to add one more thing. Listen to one more podcast. Try out one of these techniques, do it consistently, and watch how great your life can become.

Thank you so much. Before I wrap it up, tell people where they can reach you and where they can get access to Play a Bigger Game.

Thank you so much. First of all, Play a Bigger Game is available everywhere. It is on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and anywhere where great books are sold. If you go where bad books are sold, they won’t be there.

Play a Bigger Game and Seven Universal Principles to Experience True Fulfillment and Win in Life

They won’t have it.

I spend time on PlayABiggerGame.com. Everybody, I would love to hear from you. If anything I said in this episode resonated with you, if you want more information about one of the principles, or if you want to talk something through, I’m available for that stuff. I love doing this. I’m not trying to sell you anything. I want to see you live a better life. That’s what I’ve been commissioned to do with my life.

Reach out to me. Did something resonate with you? What stood out to you? What changes are you going to make? What new goals have you set for yourself? Find me at PlayABiggerGame.com. Find me on Instagram. Leave me a message and you will get a response. I’m so grateful for what you’re doing. I’m so excited about your book lunch. Put me down for some pre-orders. Anything I can do to support you, I’m going to be in your corner.

Thank you so much. Thank you for being here.

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Thank you all for being here. You heard it. We want to support you in living a better and bigger life, being bolder, and getting more out of life. We’ve learned a couple of resets. If we use my language here, we want to reset the language that we’re using so that it’s positive in supporting you and purposeful. It’s not just positive but purposeful in supporting you.

You’re going to reset the questions that you’re asking yourself to make sure that you’re asking yourself the questions that are going to put your brain in motion for you and look for the right things. We talked about the, “What if?” and being able to reset your focus on what you do want and not what you don’t want, and being in that place where you are making better choices. You are showing up and being conscious of those choices.  In those goals, it is setting bigger goals to allow your brain to go after it and go get it.

A little thing for me is wherever your goals are, think about how you can make them bigger. Go bigger and then go one step bigger again until it feels a little scary and then you’re there. Let your brain go for that. What a great episode. Thank you all for being here and making sure that you are leaving here with those concrete items. We’ll see you in the next episode.

Important Links

• Markus Kaulius
• Instagram – Markus Kaulius
• Play a Bigger Game and Seven Universal Principles to Experience True Fulfillment and Win in Life

About Markus Kaulius

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