A former detective turned life coach makes the case that your mindset is an operating system, and it's overdue for an update.
GROWTH PILLAR: Leadership & Ops
WHO THIS IS FOR: SMB owners / Solopreneurs / Corporate escapees / Leaders building systems
WHAT THEY'LL GAIN: A simple, honest framework for recognising when your thinking is the thing holding you back — and one shift that can change everything.
Willie Nicol spent 31 years as a police detective. Then redundancy hit, and with it came the stress, fear, and overwhelm that most people don't talk about out loud.
That experience is what makes him different. Willie is now a life coach, NLP practitioner, and hypnotherapist, and he works specifically with men who feel stuck, lost, or like they've run out of drive.
In this East Trade Winds session, Willie brings one idea to the table: if you want different results, you have to change the way you think. Not your habits. Not your schedule. Your thinking.
He uses the analogy of a smartphone operating system update to frame the human mindset — something that can be consciously upgraded when it stops serving you. He draws on Henry Ford and Benjamin Franklin to make the case that our thinking patterns create our reality. Same thinking, same results. New thinking, new outcomes.
Topics covered in this session:
Willie coaches men through major life transitions — job loss, retirement, career burnout, and the kind of stuck that doesn't have an obvious name. His free Get Your Mojo Back in 3 Days Challenge is a clean, low-stakes entry point.
Connect with Willie:
Co-hosts: Percy Barr and Wayne Pratt
Browse all episodes — K4B / ETW / CGN
— PARTNERS ON THIS EPISODE —
East Trade Winds — Free weekly networking every Tuesday 8–9 AM EST. Bring one challenge, bring one introduction.
Gentry Learning — Real estate education that builds real wealth, with Fred Crouch.
WebIndexer — Turn your website into a 24/7 sales assistant. See it live on knack4business.com.
Next Steps
Willie (00:05)
It's a great pleasure to be here. good morning and good afternoon, wherever you are in the world. I'm going to be talking today about change. And that was the reason for the question. If you could change one thing in your life, what would it be? I really I don't want to know because I'm not that nosy, but it was designed to stimulate some thought processes. What would it change? So I like a quote, like a good quote.
So Benjamin Franklin said, and I paraphrase here, there are only two things certain in life: death and taxes With all due respect to Mr. Franklin, there are many, many more certainties in life. One of which is uncertainty. But the one I'm to focus on today is change. Change is inevitable. We all know that. People change, you change.
Circumstances change, situations change, governments change, blah blah blah. Change is always going to be there. And unless we embrace it, we're going to stay stuck. So another quote from a certain Mr Henry Ford. If you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.
So if you think you can do something, there's a possibility you'll get there. If you think you can't, nothing's gonna happen.
Another quote from Mr Ford is If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got.
And I like both of these quotes. So if you continue to do the same things in the same way, you'll get the same results.
If you extrapolate that towards thinking, so if you think the same way as you've always done, you'll still get what you've always got.
So I'm going from change to thinking and specifically changing your thinking. How to do that? How often do we stop and think about the way we think?
Thinking about a thinking has a fancy name called a metacognition. And I'm not a big fan of fancy names of psychobabble. But stop and consider how do I think? Is the way I think serving me? Is it getting me to where I want to be? And if not, why not? And if not, what am I going to do about it?
That's the sixty four thousand dollar question, folks. So I'm going to jump over to something else. I'm prepared to place a small wager that you all have a mobile phone or a cell phone. A nod, yeah. It's an electronic device. And you probably also have other electronic devices like a laptop, an iPad, a PC, whatever.
And they all have one thing in common. They have an operating system. And the operating system makes the device operate, function, perform. Without the operating system, it's just a piece of plastic or metal. And periodically, I will take your cell phone as an example. It will emit a ping, and you look at the screen and you'll see.
Operating system update available.
And you think, okay, fair enough. And then it'll probably list all the benefits of updating the operating system.
Greater download speed, better security, solution to previous glitches, yada yada yada. And you think to yourself, That's all well very well and good. Yeah, yeah, that sounds good. And you click the button, install now. And your device, your electronic device, is now a better version of what it was before, because the operating system has been updated. Okay, Percy, go with me here.
Right now I've mentioned do we stop to think about our thinking? Because I would contend that we are like a device and we have an operating system and it's up here. So what do we call that operating system? Is it your brain, your consciousness, your intuition? What is it? And for the sake of this argument or this exposition, I'm going to call it your mindset.
Your mindset dictates how you think, how you behave, how you act.
And that dictates in turn the results you get, the outcomes you get in life.
So your thinking and some would say argue the tossing your thinking creates your reality. The way you think will determine what happens to you.
So let's imagine that we had the facility to remind ourselves, to update our own operating system, our own mindset. That's one morning we wake up, bing, a reminder would appear in our heads to say, Time to ever think about the way you think, really. Because if you're not happy with what's happening in your life,
What are you to do about it? And the answer for me is change your thinking. I'm not going to go into the how's and why's the warehouse here. I'm just putting it out there. That one way to make your life better, more productive, more efficient, happier, more contented, whatever, is to have a long hard look at the way you think. The metagognition thing. And if your thinking is not creating what you want.
To me as an ex detective, I deduce that you've got to change your thinking. So how about we consider having a mindset operating system update in here? Just a thought.
Stop, think about how things are going and what can I do to change it? Well one of the things is change your thinking. One thing I would leave you with is you'll only ever one positive thought away from being absolutely fine.
That's all it takes. One positive thought and you're fine. So I hope that has generated some thinking, some consultation, some I don't know, reassessment perhaps. That if you want to change your life, you can change your thinking. Thank you for listening, and if you want to know more, please do get in touch. Very happy to set up a a chat on Zoom and we can take this further.
And I'll probably give you more quotes and more references to old music and things like that. Thank you very much.