For the first two years Zach Arend climbed into a bucking chute, he never once made it to the eight second buzzer. He broke his hand, his ankle, and his collarbone trying to ride saddle broncs. Then something clicked, and he went on to become a two time state champion. Years later, as a vice president of sales getting demoted over bourbon at a country club, he found himself back at the bottom of a new arena. The saddle bronc lessons are what carried him into leadership coaching.
What You'll Hear
- Why Zach's first two years of saddle bronc riding ended with twenty faceplants per Saturday and a broken hand, ankle, and collarbone
- The Rob Jolles book that taught a self described small town kid how to talk to CEOs
- How a failed UPS promotion pushed him into a logistics sales job in Parkville, Missouri
- The country club bourbon conversation where he got demoted out of a VP of sales role he had held for years
- The solar panel trade show in Los Angeles where he finally admitted he was done with sales
- Why he thinks following your passion is bad advice, and what Cal Newport's 'So Good They Can't Ignore You' got right
- How Steven Pressfield's concept of capital R Resistance reframed his relationship with fear
- What 'raise high and lift' actually means on the back of a bronc, and why it's his metaphor for leadership
Learning to talk to business owners at twenty two
Zach's first sales job was with a logistics company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He was twenty two, fresh out of business school, and trying to get in front of CEOs and chief operating officers who had no reason to take him seriously. He says the honest truth was that he didn't know how to talk to these people. Business school hadn't translated. So he started spending hours at Barnes and Noble, pulling books off the shelf like 'The Toyota Way' and finance primers for entrepreneurs, trying to learn the language business owners actually used.
The book that cracked it open was Rob Jolles' 'Customer Centered Selling.' His copy is dog eared with yellow orange pages. The idea that stuck with him is that roughly seventy percent of buyers are in what Jolles calls the awareness phase. They know they have a problem. They haven't decided it's painful enough to act on yet. A good salesperson helps them see the real cost of not acting, through questions, not pitches.
Zach stopped following the script. He'd walk into a meeting, skip his introduction, and just start asking how the business actually worked. He credits that curiosity, plus what he now calls beginner's mind, for earning him meetings that more polished reps couldn't get. Today he coaches salespeople who freeze up because they're afraid a prospect will answer with something they don't know. His answer: that's the gift. Lean into the not knowing. Ask the next honest question.
Twenty faceplants a Saturday
Before the sales career, there was the bronc. Zach grew up around horses in a small Midwest town where his parents ran a grocery store. He wasn't a ranch kid, and he says he always felt a little like an outsider in the rodeo arena. At fourteen he watched a friend named Travis ride saddle bronc at a rodeo and decided that was what he wanted to do. His mom called Travis's dad Bruce and asked if he'd train him.
The first Saturday at Bruce's ranch, Zach hit the ground twenty times. The next Saturday, twenty more. He broke his hand, his ankle, and his collarbone over the next two years. He never once made it to the eight second buzzer in that stretch. Every horse, he hit the dirt. He kept showing up anyway. By his last two years of high school something clicked, he found his rhythm, and he became a two time state champion.
The lesson he pulled out of those two losing years isn't about grit for its own sake. It's that real growth requires being willing to be bad at something in public for a long time. He points to Steve Martin's memoir as the business world equivalent. Martin was terrible on stage for years and just kept showing up. Zach ties it to Cal Newport's 'So Good They Can't Ignore You,' which argues that chasing your passion is the wrong frame when you're young. Passion comes after the reps, not before. You commit to the craft, you hit the ground enough times, and eventually the passion catches up with you.
Demoted at the country club
After UPS passed him over for a promotion in Lenexa, Zach cold applied to a thirty person logistics company in Parkville, Missouri. They called him back within five minutes. When they asked why he thought he could sell, he told them he could convince people to load twelve hundred boxes into a UPS trailer when the inside hit a hundred and fifteen degrees, so sales couldn't be worse. They hired him. He spent a decade there, climbed to vice president of sales, and tied a lot of his identity to the company.
The day it ended was over a glass of bourbon at a country club. He was told, plainly, that he was a good soldier but not the level of leadership the company needed. A newer hire took the VP seat. Zach was dropped back down to a sales rep role and handed an early Phantom stock payout as a softener. He was angry, then defensive, then, eventually, honest with himself.
A friend told him to chill out, keep the sales job, take his foot off the gas, and let whatever wanted to happen actually happen. That advice is what unlocked the next chapter. Zach started coaching executives one on one in the evenings while doing logistics sales during the day. The break came at a solar panel trade show in Los Angeles. Walking back to his hotel after a full day of booth to booth conversations, he felt his throat tighten and he started to cry. He called his wife from the room and said out loud that he didn't want to do this anymore. He didn't quit the next morning. But something in how he showed up shifted, and he started attracting the work he actually wanted.
Resistance, self reliance, and the question behind the question
A lot of the conversation lives in the territory of inner voice work. Zach quotes Steven Pressfield's 'The War of Art' on the character Pressfield calls capital R Resistance. The bigger the dream, the bigger the shadow Resistance casts. Zach has gotten to the point where an absence of resistance actually worries him. When he feels it, he knows he's pointed at something that matters.
He pairs that with Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay on self reliance, which he says is routinely misread as rugged individualism. Zach reads it as an argument for trusting your own internal voice and refusing to outsource your direction to what other people think you should want. He also flags the trap on the other side: the inner critic. The voice that says you're not ready, you don't have the experience, you're not good enough. Most of his executive coaching work is helping leaders notice that voice, ask what actual evidence supports it, and realize nine times out of ten the evidence points the other direction.
He also reframes the classic question. Instead of 'what do I want,' he's been asking 'what is life asking of me.' Not as passive surrender. As a way to factor in the people and commitments already in your life, instead of chasing a want that was really just peer pressure in disguise. Sam pushes back in places, and the two land on a shared idea: real growth doesn't require suffering for its own sake. If you're not enjoying more of the journey than you're hating, that's information worth listening to.
Raise high and lift
The phrase that gives the episode its title is a saddle bronc cue. When a horse is kicking hard, everything in your body wants to curl in. Pull your free arm tight, grab for the saddle, make yourself small. In rodeo you have to do the opposite. You lift the rein with your weaker hand, throw your free arm up into the air, and reach your feet over the horse's shoulders. Every instinct says contract. The ride demands expansion.
Zach uses it as his metaphor for leadership and for life outside the arena. The pattern repeats. Starting a business, speaking on stage, firing a client, having the honest conversation with a spouse, all of it triggers the same curl up response. The work is learning to lift anyway. He wants his three daughters to grow up knowing how to do that on purpose, not by accident.
He also pushes back on the wellness framing that treats struggle as something to manage away. He's stopped using the word burnout on himself and replaced it with bored. Same coin, different side. Life, in his telling, happens in the arena, not the grandstands. At the end of the conversation, he gives credit to the two people who kept putting him in arenas he wasn't ready for: his mom, who bought him his first Shetland pony, Princess, and kept signing him up, and his coach Bruce, who taught him to rope and to ride. Zach hosts a full day live event called Saddle Up Live in Kansas City for leaders and their teams. He can be found on LinkedIn, where he writes regularly about this work.
About Zach Arend
At the time of recording, Zach Arend was a Kansas City based keynote speaker and leadership coach. He grew up in a small Midwest town around horses and rodeo, became a two time state champion saddle bronc rider in high school, then spent roughly a decade in logistics sales, rising to vice president of sales before transitioning into executive coaching. He writes a weekly reflective email called Saddle Up Digest and hosts Saddle Up Live, a full day event for leaders and their teams.