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Boss Uncaged Podcast Overview

I keep three words at the top of my screen. It says REAL, NOT “RIGHT.” I think to translate that for the rest of the world, that’s not inside my head. But, man, it doesn’t have to be RIGHT, and there’s a reason the word RIGHT is in quotes. It doesn’t have to be RIGHT. It just has to be real. People spend a great deal of time, effort, energy, and heart trying to do it right, trying to do what they should, living the should life sucks.

In Season 2, Episode 28 of the Boss Uncaged Podcast, S.A. Grant sits down with Entrepreneur & Executive Coach Of DTK Coaching: David Taylor-Klaus. It’s one of the most profound deep dive into the mindset, to date.

David Taylor-Klaus is a speaker, author, and leadership coach on a mission to unearth and unleash the personal mastery of entrepreneurs and senior executives. Since 2008, DTK has empowered his tribe to take an active, intentional, and dynamic role in their development and create the kind of life rhythm that enables them to build profitable businesses, raise thriving families, and live wildly fulfilling lives.

His best-selling new book “Mindset Mondays with DTK: 52 Ways to REWIRE Your Thinking and Transform Your Life” is available on Amazon worldwide.

#mindset #millionairemindset #growthmindset #successmindset #entrepreneurmindset #positivemindset #mindsetiseverything #mindsetcoach #businessmindset #mindsetmatters #mindsetshift #changeyourmindset #moneymindset #successfulmindset #bossladymindset #mindsetofgreatness #mindsetquotes #entrepreneurialmindset #billionairemindset #abundancemindset #believe #happiness #inspiration #inspirationalquotes #lifestyle #loveyourself #motivation #positivevibes #selflove

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Boss Uncaged Podcast Transcript

S2E28 – David Taylor-Klaus – powered by Happy Scribe

All right, that’s recording. All right, we are live. All right. Looks like your mike is muted.

Yeah, I try to keep it muted when I’m not talking.

Perfect. Cool, right. Three, two, one. Welcome welcome back to Boss Uncage podcast. So today’s episode is kind of like like a special episode for me, because this guy that we’re about to interview. Right, I remember when I first met him and I was as green as you could possibly be coming out of college and, you know, you come out of college and you think you know everything. And then this guy walks in the room and he actually did know everything in comparison to where I was.

So without further ado, I mean, David, I’m going to deem you the mind set boss. Give our audience a little shout out of who you are.

Thank you, man. That’s that’s a great introduction. I want to know if I can get my wife to start using it as well. Mindset, boss. Yes. So back when I met you, man, when I got out of college, I thought I knew everything. And then I spent the next 20 years realizing how little I actually knew and what an ugly wake up call. It was like the world definitely wanted to make sure that I got visibly and actively humbled along the way, which is why.

I know about mindset and what I realize is, so who am I? So I’m a coach and I, I almost never say it like that because people here coach and they’re like, oh, loincloth and drum circles in the woods. Not for me. Right. And and, you know, there are people in the crystal and candle set and there are people that are, you know, lace collar, high tie or whatever. And I don’t I don’t care about that stuff.

My work, the stuff that I love to do is reintroducing successful entrepreneurs and senior executives to their families. Nice. You know, I get to work with the folks that are over calibrated, right, that are so talked up about the work they do, whether it’s because of some crazy unwritten rule that working long and working hard is what you’re supposed to do, or it’s because they love what they do so much, they get totally imbalanced when it comes to personal fulfillment and family and community and kids or like me, they’re incredibly 8D and they dove in hyper focused and forget everything else until somebody pokes at them to remind them that they’re screwing up.

Yeah, those are the cool folks get to work with and help them reconnect to what’s critically important to their heart, their world.

So, I mean, that’s a solid a step back. Right. Let’s make this a visual thing. Right. So now you’re pretty much a mindset. Coach, when I first met you, you were more into, like, the branding. Let’s step back and we a further like what did your journey begin? Like, how did you even get into, like, the creative space and into like the growth strategies and the mindset? Like, how did that even happen?

When did it start?

You got to go back a whole career. Even before I met you, I spent 12 years, 11, 12 years in hospitality. Right. I got caught up into restaurants and hotels and restaurants and worked, you know, Atlanta, Philadelphia, in D.C. I was up and down the eastern seaboard and I loved that because of the energy. And then I had this weird twist of fate where I’m sort of a tech nerd. And they said, wow, so this restaurant has a retail shop.

How do we get those systems to talk to each other? I said, Oh, I can do that. I couldn’t. But I figured it out and I got totally turned on by the systems because what I realized is everybody is trying to make the machines talk to each other. But you first had to figure out how the people that those machines were supposed to be supporting were working together and then make the system to support and accelerate and amplify that.

They were just trying to make the silicon talk and the silicon was driving the carbon, the humans. And I wanted it to be the other way. And when I got turned on by technology, I shifted gears altogether. So I started I joined a firm that was doing network spec and implementation and support for ad agencies, maqam firms and PR agencies, PR firms and commercial printers. Right. Remember when we to put stuff on paper. Yeah. And.

Those were all the same issue during the early 90s, which was people were focused on how do we get the mainframes, the PCs and these funny little things called Macs to all talk to each other. But the people weren’t talking to each other. They weren’t working together. So we would go in and half of it was playing therapist to get these three groups to talk to each other. And and then we could figure out what the networks had to do.

Well, all of a sudden, the ad agencies were like, our clients are asking about this weird thing called the interweb. What is it? So I said, well, I can help you figure that out. So we would teach them what this new Internet thing was. Then they say we need a website. And I said, I can do that. So I sold somebody a website. Then I spent the next three days at our digital learning how to code so I could build the website that I had just sold.

And in fourth quarter 95, that’s when my partner and I both started a Internet strategy and Web development company that we ran together for 14 years. Well, and that’s how I met you somewhere about halfway through that run. And that became a great exercise in. Getting out of the tech silo, right, that that’s what I figured out, that every time we just worked with the person driving the digital initiative. Somebody would come in at the end and say, wait, why isn’t it blue or why doesn’t it do that so well, because that’s not what you’re hired to do.

So we started working with making sure we always had time with the C Suite so that we we dropped that late stakeholder nightmare. And we got to ask we got to understand what the stuff we were being hired to do, how those digital initiatives fit into the broader corporate initiatives. And I started asking questions of man at the time. They were usually just a roomful of pudgy white guys and we’d ask them, why is this company special? And they would start pulling out the vision mission values stuff they had carved on the walls.

Like, no, not that because you’ll you’ll have to read it to tell me none of you know what it is. So why are you here? Why are you special? What’s the shift. This company is trying to create and they were saying, I know. So I would get crickets or I would get more than one answer. Both are bad. And I say they’re bad because the reason they didn’t know why the company was special or what the shift was they were here to create or why people wanted to use them.

Is because they didn’t know why they were here. Well, these leaders didn’t know what shift they were trying to create. And when you bring that to the organization. You know, I’ve worked for these companies, right, you get flat growth, flat revenue, flat culture, it’s just blah. But when they take that home, that lack of self-awareness, that lack of knowing why they’re here and what’s important, when they bring that home, it’s toxic.

And I realized that wasn’t OK. And part of the reason I realized it wasn’t OK is I was doing that at home. So that’s what shifted for me and the work that I did became for myself, became the work I’m now doing in the world, I shift shifted gears. In 2008, I went deep into coaching, coached for a year and a half while I ran this company until my partner said, I want to run this company and I want to run it without you.

And I said, awesome. And I was out in six weeks and have been full time coaching leaders since then. So, I mean, that’s the whole story in like three minutes.

Yeah, that’s an epic journey. And I mean, to your point, I mean, it’s all about going into the mindset and you were able to pinpoint exactly when there was a mindset shift in yourself and then capitalize on that and an understanding that other CEOs are doing the same thing. So let’s just go into like like into this mindset stuff a little bit like what’s the worst experience that you’ve encountered while coaching someone?

Oh, the let me see if I can make it anonymous, the worst experience. Well, you mean besides my own?

Yeah, yeah. Because I want the listeners to understand, like, you know, coaching is to find multiple different things. Right. So in that journey of coaching, you’ve hit hurdles not just with your coaching, which you could curdle hurdles with your clients. You’ve hit hurdles which strategies. So it has to be one that probably stands out that kind of makes you want to pull your hair out as you’re thinking about it.

What frazzles me the most. Well. Still.

So just to recap, what was the worst experience you’ve ever encounter as a coach?

Yeah, it. So a friend of mine who does a ton of embodiment work taught me something recently, she said that you can pay attention when the universe whispers in your ear or you can wait until it hits in the forehead with a bat. It’s your call, like, damn. And so some of it is the hard part is that. Some of those negative epiphanies, like when a client says, oh, fuck, and I saw this coming and I ignored it and I ignored it and I ignored it and.

We have a tendency in our culture to be super uncomfortable with people being sad or upset or crying and. Like we hand him a tissue box or put a hand on their shoulder or you tell your kid, oh, don’t cry, that’s the worst thing you can do, because the message it gives your kids and the message it gives adults is it’s not OK to be raw. It’s not OK to be real. It’s not OK to be emotional. Bottle it up, suck it up, man up.

Do your get your shit done. And and that kind of stuff is crushing. And we end up as coaches and therapists undoing that core damage and helping people undo that damage as adults. And so some of the hardest things are being with people when they’re feeling deep, raw emotion and when they’re feeling stuff that you’ve been through, it amplifies it. And the hardest thing is to stay with them. Over there with them 100 percent for them and not get sucked into your own emotion and not short circuit the process that they’ve got to go through, and I have so many folks who come.

I want to be careful how I say this, who come too late? Well, like one of my early clients going a family business in the U.K. that was dominating a market in, one of the guys came here to open up North America and South America. And he brought his young kids and his wife. And he busted ass for six years. Totally over, calibrated towards work, you know, slay it, kill it, get it done.

Loved it. The thrill of the hunt, the thrill of the kill began to build that professional management layer and hired the last last person at that layer who replaced him. You hired the chief sales officer. As I like. Now I can pay attention to my family. And he comes home and he tells his wife. And her response is to hand him divorce papers and take the two kids and go, Oh. And and being with him and supporting him and witnessing the crushing self-awareness of how far along he saw the signs and how much he ignored it and then started catastrophizing forward of what have I done to my kids?

What have I done to this co parenting relationship? What’s this going to be like? And part of me wants to go to the. I was an inch from that in my own world. Right, and I know how crushing that is and and I can feel how crushing it is for him, that’s the hardest part for me. Those are the most terrible moments. Now, on one hand, they’re also beautiful, is witnessing someone go deeper than they’ve ever gone before and to be able to create and become something they’ve never been before.

That’s like, you know, when their caterpillar turns into a chrysalis, what goes on inside that shell is it’s effectively turning to jelly before it becomes a butterfly. And it’s. Probably really ugly, painful process, and we do that and witnessing someone go to jelly. Spiritually and emotionally, everything but physically. That’s hard, yeah, hard for anyone on either side of it, so that’s those experiences are the hardest.

So I mean, I think I mean, you just went down a road and I could definitely see the passion. I can see the emotion and just reliving that right. How do you consistently do that? I would think that with every client that you deal with, you may be faced with some repercussions of your life or other clients. So you’re kind of like the ball of energy kind of having to hold back to a certain extent. How do you overcome that every single time you work with a client?

So here’s where we get to a really cool part, a coach approach. To leadership. That coach approach has now become a core leadership competency. But here’s the problem, those very leaders that we want to have those skills, they get neither the training nor do they get coaching. So these leaders are forced to reach outside the network of their organization to find it and often have to pay for it themselves. So we’re sort of at a golden age of coaching because so many more people want it than there are sponsors within the organization to pay for it or train certified kickass coaches to provide it.

So it’s a super sexy time to be in it and. Here’s why it’s such a core such a core competency, because what we see in leadership all the time is when an employee comes to them, someone of their direct reports comes to a leader and says, I’m having trouble with this. Natural tendency of leadership to respond through the lens of your experience. Worse, unconsciously and in in coaching this one of there are three levels of listening. One is let’s you say level one is you’re listening to you.

I mean, like, oh, it’s kind of cold in here or oh, I’m hungry. You know, those internal dialog, your awareness of oh, my God, that’s reminding me of my mom who said blah blah when I was seven and. Right. So that’s all level one. Level two is when you’re 100 percent focused over there. One hundred percent of your focus is on the other person, level three is more the global listening. You’re taking in everything, your intuition, what you’re hearing, what you’re not hearing, body language, room movement, everything.

That is a powerful shift for a leader even moving into level two, being 100 percent focused on what’s happening for the person who that leader is serving. Right. There are leaders who are only doing leadership where they’re super attached to how many people report to them, and they’re folks that are capital letters, leaders who understand how many people they serve. And that’s a massive distinction, so being able to be 100 percent focused on that person and listening deeply, let alone going to that global listening and really witnessing that person and being listened to feels so much like being loved that people can scarcely tell the difference.

Oh, and too many leaders don’t listen. Too many leaders don’t listen deeply to the other person. So what’s important is bringing those listening skills to leaders. So that people are being heard and witnessed and experienced and not directed through the lens of what that leaders experience has been, it turns them in, turns the the direct report into a cog in a machine.

So, I mean, I think the last statement was a hell of insightful and it kind of also gives credit to what kind of coach you are and what kind of leadership style that you’re influencing. Right. We always hear about overnight success stories that potentially take 20 years and the reality to some people, they may be perceived as an overnight success. That just happened two or three years. How long did it take you to get to where you are?

Oh, my God. I started this in 2008, so it took me forty three years now. And I don’t mean that facetiously. It’s when I started my coach training, one of the things I realized is, oh my God, I was so excited. There is language and structure and and a profession and a discipline around what I have been. I got air quotes going for listeners, what I’ve been doing my whole life, right? Yeah, I was a consultant, but I actually ask questions and I, I was willing to say to my clients when they said, oh, what’s this mean?

It’s like, I don’t know, but I can find out. Right. And and unlike the traditional consultant, which I did a lot of work with, where as long as you were one page ahead of the client, you were a rock star. I had a very coach approach to consulting and partnering with folk. And so when I learned about coaching, it fit beautifully. And so I think to a certain extent, my curiosity about humans and my interest in what was underneath the surface presentation, that made me an exceptional, you know.

What if Plato to be shaped into a coach? All right, so I think I have been doing this forever. I know that for the 14 years that Beth and I were running that tech company, we both arct towards that, you know, Beth went into education, you know, did did graduate graduate degree in instructional design and industrial psychology. I mean, we both moved in the direction of craving more understanding of how people worked and trying to unearth the best that humans can be.

You know, my work now is helping people human better. We go through life as human doings, but we’re actually human beings and we get so wrapped up in the doing, we forget the being part. And so if you want to get better at cycling or tennis, you while you’re a coach, you want to get better at humoring. Guess what? Hire a coach. Right. So it’s I’ve been doing this forever now. I just know what I’m doing.

So on that journey was one thing that you would want to do differently if you could do it all over again.

You just had this conversation yesterday with the coach, there’s not a thing, even the most cringe worthy, awful things that have happened to me along the way that I would do differently because I don’t know which sliding door that would change the kids that I have and the marriage that I have in the life that I have in the work that I’m doing. Anything that I did differently along the way would screw up this timeline. And this is not about time travel.

This is about, you know, everything that’s happened from the glorious to the shitty has made me who I am and allowed me to have the impact I’m having now. So, yeah, I wouldn’t do a thing differently.

That’s definitely an aspirational goal. I mean, when you when I asked that question, it can go one way or the other. Right. Some people could think back and be like, I did one thing differently. That way I could be where I’m at, maybe a little bit quicker. And to your point is kind of like, well, everything I’ve done has gotten me to where I am right now. It’s gotten me the kids that I have gotten me the wife that I have gotten me the practice that I have.

So I would I change anything? Yeah, definitely.

And it’s hard because it what it what that way of thinking invite’s going to do is to pull the gift and the wisdom and the power and the the the insight out of any experience because everything. Can provide a gift, and so it lets me reframe the way I look back at even the ugliest experiences that, yeah, on one hand I wish they had gone a different way, and yet what was the gift that came out of it?

So, I mean, obviously, you’re a huge entrepreneur. You sold companies, you built companies, and you’re helping other people grow their companies. Did that come from an entrepreneurial background? Was any one of your parents? Do they have the hustle? Because, I mean, you obviously have it right from being a northerner. You obviously have the hustle and bustle. What did it come from?

You know, it’s fascinating. Yes and no. Yeah, you know, my dad decided my mom and dad decided in 1970 they wanted a growing medical community, they wanted warm weather because they were done with three generations of freezing in Philadelphia and they want to be able to get home for a family weekend. So they were driving through Atlanta on the way to Dallas, where they were planning on being snowed in to Atlanta and stayed, but. You know, my dad started a practice that became.

The largest orthopedic practice in the entire southeast. It’s massive, he retired a number of years ago, but 12, 15 years ago. But here’s what’s interesting. I grew up at a time where doctors. They weren’t home. You may have a mom or dad who was a doctor, you just didn’t see him much. My dad was it every soccer game, every one of my sister’s recitals, whether he wanted to be or not, but he was there because he wanted to be there for us, and we had dinner together a lot.

And my friends who had dads that were doctors. It may come to the end of season something, but my dad was very different about it, he was very intentional about being there with the family and I have carried that lesson more than anything else. So I have a more of an awareness about the balance that keeps makes a life whole. Because I watched somebody do it differently now, he was smart, he partnered with a man who was totally into the medical, you know, the associations that play playing this role, the political piece of the practice.

And he did all that stuff. And my dad loved the patient stuff and our family. That never said anything. That’s the way he was doing it. Don’t know if he was even conscious of it. But the rocket fuel in their practice was. He was the he loved the people and getting the right people in, and he loved the practice. His partner loved all the. Political on the high profile stuff, so the people that you partner with make a business as well.

I think that also gave me insight into how you build an organization around the people. Well, but the hustle is more about. I get excited about it and I lean into that, and when it’s something that really resonates, I double down. And I think that’s what entrepreneurs tap into, that’s the positive side of it for a lot of folks, the hustle comes from all those unwritten rules, right. You know, which leads to some. Really crappy outcomes.

Right. My parents worked every day for 20 hours, so that’s the only way to make it work. Well, that’s an unwritten rule that you’re using that’s ruining your ruining you and giving you ulcers and stroking you out. And that’s. That’s crazy town, right? And so those are the people who wait for the baseball bat. Thank you, sir. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s how some people are wired. I think the more self-aware we become, the more we can learn what’s what’s driving our behavior.

And when Hussle is driven by something that’s lighting you up well, rather than an unwritten rule that you’re not even conscious to, is a different energy that you have available for it.

Yeah, I think that definitely they were before we started a podcast, we were just talking about about that, you know, you’ve got to find it’s no different in breathing, right? And you find time to breathe. You find time to find time to live your life. And if you’re on a particular hustle or particular grind and you’re completely passionate about it, and that’s your motivation and desire to bring your family with you, you’re going to find time to do it.

You’ve got to find time to execute it. So I definitely appreciate you give us some insight to that.

And I want to play with you a little bit on there, because you’re a big fan of language and you keep saying find time. And I don’t know what cabinet or draw. You’re finding time or what you’re speaking to is where the power is, which is carving out time. Oh, right. You don’t have any extra time in your day than I have in mine, but you are carving out time for these things that are important. And when we stop trying to find time or make time and we start realizing that the one thing we have control over is how we allocate it, how we carve it out, how we divide it up, it changes the way we see it.

Time as a currency. Right? When you pay attention, you are paying in time, you’re paying in energy. Right. And so when we pay attention to how we’re expending our energy or allocating or carving out our time, it changes the way we manage our day and ourselves. So I love if you just replace that when you just replace the word find with carveout everything you just said. When we play this back and listen, that’s where the meet.

That’s where it is. That’s where the power is. Yeah. You’re carving out time for what’s important.

We coach on the show and he’s coaching me on the show. You got to love it like so I mean, I definitely appreciate that. And to your point, I’m going to replace finding woodcarving. So anybody who hears me say finding time anymore. Make sure you slap me on the back of the head to remind me to use carving moving forward. What do you like? Just talking about carving times. You did it there. How do you juggle your work life with your family life?

Well, I’d love to say brilliantly and flawlessly, I don’t what what I love is that we’ve we really taught. Our kids and our team to be vocal, right, if somebody is not getting what they need, they’re not just going to be pissy and grouse and not say anything. They’re going to say, hey, this is what I need. So so part of the way I manage it is with intention from my side and with openness to people asking for what they need, which also means empowering myself to say yes or no.

I mean, I think the answer is with two tools. Attention and intention, and that’s the way we all. Manage our day and manage our time and try to find and I’m going to use the word balance, but I’m going to say it with a nasty tone and in air quotes balance, that’s how we manage our lives. Is how we create a rhythm. In our lives between work and family and community and self and the other things that are important to us, whether that’s travel, fitness, whatever, we find a rhythm in those through attention and intention, we have to set the intention of what it is that we want and we have to pay attention to how we’re doing at navigating according to that intention and adjusting based on what’s happening real time around us, but without intention of what we want to create, what the conditions for our success look like and without attention to how we’re doing, everything else is just faffing about unconsciously.

And I promise you, it doesn’t work. Well.

So with that. You’re a very intentional person. What does your morning habits or morning routines look like?

I am not a model. No, I’m honest. I mean, I love, you know, some folks. Do you have an artist way based routine every morning and are doing morning pages and meditation and. I’m a little less rigid, I listen to what my body and my brain and. Whatever higher power it is that we attach to are giving me now in the mornings, I always have time in some capacity for me and I always feed my brain and my system.

And there are different ways that I do it. I know which three days of the week I’m going to ride and I know what I’m going to listen to or read before I ever check my email. By the way, protip for every human being out there that has any digital access to anything digital, do not check your email first thing that is absolutely, unequivocally making everybody else’s needs a higher priority than your own. Don’t do it if you stop doing that until you plan out your day and figure out with intention what your what is important to get done that day.

If you make just that one change in every second you spent on this podcast is worth gold. Stop checking your email first. Cut it out. And turn off the email alerts on your phone, those two things change your life.

So are you a big believer in. I think I forgot where I heard this before, but somebody was giving an interview and they were saying that not only do they do what you’re what you’re asking them to do, but they physically remove like they’re charging docs and they’re charging stations and their cell phones and everything and moved it into another room lobby near the coffee maker or in the bathroom. But it’s nowhere near their bed. So when they first wake up, the first thing they have to focus on is actually waking up before they actually grab their phone.

That’s something that you do as well.

I do. There’s something I do every single morning. And it’s it’s I focus energy around. I get out of my head and I do some box breathing, which is just, you know, four seconds in for a second hold four out for hold and just repeat that. And I do it. I get five or six good cycles focusing energy on my heart, getting still and centered a little more awake than I open my eyes and get out of bed.

The I love the idea of keeping the phone away. I get to sleep after I use I don’t check email until I’m done with. My morning, I’ll check my calendar so I know what my day holds, but I usually do that night as well, so I wake up knowing. But the more you can keep separate from the temptation until you’re in a better rhythm, the better. There’s a guy named Ivy League, oh, my favorite stories, this goes back to the 20s.

He’s actually from Oglethorpe, Georgia. He’s considered the father of modern public relations. But this part of the story is about when he was an efficiency expert in the 20s and Charles Schwab not related to the one we have now. I used to run U.S. Steel. And Schwabe wanted for himself and his management team to get better at time management. So he brought Ebele in for a day to shadow him, shadow him, and he wanted and he was going to pay him for the day and he wanted a proposal from him of what he could do to make Schwabe and his team better.

And and Ivy League did something pretty ballsy at the end of the day. He said, first of all, you’re not going to pay me for the day. Second of all, I’m going to give you one thing to do. You can do it every day for 30 days. And then at the end of its 30 days, you’re going to send me a check for what you think it’s worth. Oh. Now, twenty five thousand dollars check in the mid 1920s, even though he probably didn’t have it for long, given the stock market crash, but that equates to depends on whose calculations you use between three hundred and fifty and five hundred thousand in today’s dollars.

Well, the big guys check. Talking do, he said, at the end of every single day, this is when we actually left the office and didn’t think about work till the next day. So adapt it at the end of your workday, whatever that is, right down the five most important things for you to get done the next day. And in the morning. Work on those five things and those five things only until they’re either A done or B, you’ve had a logical stopping point, like you need somebody else’s involvement or there’s a next step and you do those five things in those five things only before you check your email.

Before you go on to anything else on your list that. It stretches when I’m bulletproof on that, I think my most productive by far because success breeds success. So you’ve got things that you are not showing off your list. You’ve also got the largest, most important, highest priority things before you move to the rest of your list. That one behavior pattern is made more of a change in my productivity than anything else but demetz.

There’s definitely interesting recapping it in my brain and just recapping what you were saying, so it’s definitely that’s something I definitely want to go back and look at that a couple of different times to kind of piecemeal the different information that you gave multiple different nuggets in that that statement. Moving onto the next bit of questioning. Right. So part of the morning routines and realizing that everybody that’s successful, they may or they may not read books. They may or may not read audiobooks, but if nothing else, they’re always collecting information.

So because of that, I decided to create this new Boston College book club. And do you have any books? And obviously I know you’re an author, so I want to start off first with your book and any of the books that you would want to recommend to help entrepreneurs on a journey.

I’m going to flip it, though. I want to give you some of the books first. OK, do it. I think a powerful book for any boss or leader, anybody who’s leading anybody else, frankly, for anybody, we’re all leaders because we’re all leading ourselves. First, we should be. The first one is the four agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. And it’s it captures Toltec wisdom like 2500 year old concepts, and you’ll find it buried, that kind of information is laced into all three of the Abrahamic religions and many other faiths.

And this isn’t a faith thing. The four agreements plays with one of the things he talks about at the very beginning of the book. Is the idea of domestication, the idea that through our acculturation and education processes, wherever we live, we are inheriting? Or having placed upon US agreements. Values, unwritten rules and so on, that may or may not be ours, right? And it’s an opportunity for you to check in with what those agreements are that you’re living by and determine consciously and with intention.

As to whether they’re yours or not, whether they align with your values or not, and letting us be conscious stewards of ourselves, and then he goes on to unpack the four agreements, which are a powerful framework for living. It’s a it’s a short book, maybe 120 pages, six bucks on Amazon. Just go get it. Go read it. Well, it. It invites you to a powerful shift in the way you see the world. Well.

Next one is a complete departure. It’s one called Sapiens by Yuval Harari, and it’s a brilliant book. It can take a while to move through, but it really talks about how are humans and societies evolved over time and how are. Our cultures and our societies and our agreed upon fictions all came to be. It gives you another lens to see the world through to again, I guess, offset some of those unwritten rules by understanding how who we are societally came to be.

And it’s neither red nor blue. It’s just fascinating understanding of history. So as folks who move through this world, it’s a brilliant book. All right, those are the first two first now mine. Yes, I had a coach who challenged me to write the book I needed to read. So I did and this book is the book I needed to read when I was 14, when I was when I started the technology company in my thirties and when I hit my emotional spiritual bottom at 40, this is a book that I wrapped around a concept.

There’s a quote at the very beginning that says, We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are and. There’s so much power in that because. If we see it as we are, then merely by changing the lens through which we see the world. Changed the way we experience. So what’s powerful about the book for me is the the unpacking, the idea that we are in complete control of the way we experience the world because we’re in complete control of the lens through which we see it.

Well, change your lens. Change your world. And what I want for the people who read it and what I want for your listeners is to play with the idea that. You are in control. Of the world that you’re experiencing and what the book does is OK. So I did a live broadcast series every Monday morning. I’m on Facebook live on You Tube for 10 to 15 minutes, playing with a quote from anywhere for current day all the way back to the Stoics religious text, you name.

And I have quotes that I source from all over the place. And it’s a riff on leadership and mindset every Monday. It’s a great way to start a week and to give you something else to noodle on. I just hit three years last week and this book is really taking those first 52 broadcasts and taking what I’ve learned along the way about mindset and leadership and what I learned from the community of folks who showed up for these broadcasts and who have started a group together on Facebook and on LinkedIn and talking about these things, what I’ve learned from them and how the experience is deep.

And that’s what I used to create this book. And I gave it to my Laurie Shiers, the woman I worked with to create this book. We created a Rewire framework because. You know, your listeners can’t see it, you and I are on video, but you can see the books that are behind my desk, you can’t read the whole other wall of them on the other side. And I’m embarrassed by how many of the books on here I haven’t read yet.

Well, shelf self-aware. Like, there are three on here that I bought because I love and support the author and they haven’t made it to the top of the list to read yet. Right. And. Their books that. I won’t tell you how many I’ve owned for a while that I want to get to, but other things have made it the top first. But I didn’t want to book the people are going to use. So the rewire framework is a way to cure Kube Nazia.

Your whole team goes to an offsite and it’s this brilliant experience and everybody’s motivated and everybody’s got the same idea, the strategy. And they come back to the office Monday morning pumped. Then the phone starts ringing in the email, start flooding in and everybody forgets everything, nothing changes. So the rewire framework is a structure to help folk actually embed learning. It’s a structured approach to integrate and reinforce new ways of thinking, being and doing and rewires an acronym.

And by the way, I’ll make sure I give you the link. Anybody who’s listening can download the Rewire framework directly from my website and play with it. You can use it with anything that you’re working on. Yes, it’s designed for the book, but it’s adapted for you to be able to use on stuff in your world outside of this. Right. And and the piece that they’re going to download has a simple one page breakdown of how to use it.

But reflect is so rewire is reflect, experiment, write, investigate, revise and expand. So reflect is to give yourself time and space to reflect on your experience with in this in the case of the book of the mindset, we’re playing within that chapter. And then we give a prompt that gives an experiment for you to take out into your world and play with see what works, what doesn’t work, what resonates with what has dissonance, what turns you on what you’re indifferent about.

And so you’re going to apply this to your world right now. This is rewire, not retire. This is not type. This is right. Pen, paper, whatever. And by the way, I try to eliminate excuses. If you’ve got the print copy of the book, there is a page at the end of every chapter for you to journal. So all you need is a pen. I don’t send those with the book. Right and write down.

They’re props to help you. Capture it all, capture the experience, capture what’s come up for you through that experiment, investigate is then using the prompts, you’ve got to dig deeper, explore what worked and what didn’t. We revise the experiment and send you back out in the world to use it again in a different way and then expand is where it really becomes meaningful. You then adapt that learning and that experiment to a different area of your world.

You know, when we were coming up in school. The first week of math class, you learned, I say chapter one. No test, second week you learn chapter two, which presumably had you applying what you learned in chapter one. At the end of chapter two, they tested you on chapter one. So that you were tested after using what you had learned, integrated into something else, that’s what expand is based on the brain science. The more you use something more, you adapt it to more applications, the more likely the learning is to stick.

And the book builds on itself so that you’re actually making meaningful, lasting change. So if you do the work, you’ll create the shift.

Do you mind grabbing the book so we can kind of get a close up of that and cite that title?

Yeah, it’s mind set Mon’s with Detec 52 ways to rewire your thinking and transform your life.

Right, right. So it seems like you’re a big systems guy, you’re big into like rules and strategizing Step-By-Step processes, what do you use that help you in your business on a day to day that you would not be able to do what you do without.

Oh, God. Well, you remember from the early stories, I like technology as an accelerator or an amplifier, not as technology for technology sake. And I love platforms that are open and built for integration. There are very few tools that are I have been pitched. To review every bloody practice management application or platform that comes out for coaching and the reason they all suck is because they’re trying to do everything and they’re not open to other things linking in drastically over.

I mean, generalizing and oversimplifying. But the eye can do everything means you can master you can do nothing. Right. So what I love about using G suite is the applications that we use that are best in breed. We use one of our companies we use and report another one. We use active campaign because they called for different things. Right. So what I love is when the carbon is served by the silicon, when you look at what the business needs in the humans need and pick the platform to go with it.

So love active campaign, you know, after all these years of building websites and owning a company that did that, we use WordPress and Xabier to link all of these best of breed platforms together. And I got a. A company called Orange Star that I’ve been working with since nineteen ninety six, who helps us stitch all these things together without throwing custom code that will blow up as soon as there’s an upgrade. The most effective systems are the ones that get used.

Not the most powerful as an example, we were on confusion. I’m sorry, Infusionsoft for years. And sending millions of emails a year and Infusionsoft was a nightmare, we didn’t know that a year after we left, they were mothballing it and they were launching a new product behind it, a new product called KEEP. But we suffered through a platform that was designed to do everything and therefore mastered nothing because it was the most powerful system. Well, it wasn’t the easiest to use.

It wasn’t the easiest to integrate. It wasn’t the most effective. It wasn’t the most intuitive. So we retooled again and we started using those cowardly, brilliant company from here in Atlanta. There are other others like it, but scheduling tools that we can weave together and allow my clients to self serve in different areas. I look for the things that are simple and intuitive for my team to use, and that’s what we pick.

That’s. So this is the point where I think that whatever you’re about to say, I want everybody to pay very close attention, because obviously I think he’s going to drop some some serious nuggets right now. Pressure is on putting the weight on your back a little bit. Right. Final words of wisdom for an entrepreneur. Imagine yourself back when you were in your early 20s and you’re going to take over the world. What inside would you give to yourself if you could travel back in time?

I keep three words at the top of my screen. I believe the camera, it says real not right. And I think to translate that for the rest of the world, that’s not inside my head. Man, it doesn’t have to be right and there’s a reason the word right is in quotes on that little piece of paper. It doesn’t have to be right. It just has to be real. People spend a great deal of time, effort, energy and heart trying to do it right, trying to do what they should, living the good life sucks.

And yet so much of so many of us have done it, are doing it. It has to be real. It has to be what authentically comes from you. Here’s the essence of my work now. When Michelangelo talked about sculpture, he said he didn’t carve the figures, he freed them from the stone. The work that we do as coaches is helping our clients chip away everything that isn’t them, that isn’t true, that isn’t real. And getting down to the essence of who they are, who they be at their core, who they are authentically, that’s real.

When you live from there, when you love from there, when you lead from there. That’s what works. It’s not about right. It’s about real.

No, as I predicted, you definitely made it rain golden nuggets. But definitely appreciate that, and if you missed anything, I would definitely say this is one of these episodes that you kind of have to rewind parts more than once, the kind of really in take in exactly what David is delivering. So what can people find you online? I mean, obviously, you pretty much have a handle, probably every platform, which is the key platform you want to send out.

So I like to make it easy in terms of the Rewire framework in the book. If you got a mindset, Mon’s with a dotcom, you get information on the book, you’ll be able to download the Rewire framework for free. Definitely invite you. Yes, I would love you to buy the book. More importantly, I want you to download the Rewire framework and start playing with it. You can also find me if you look for Detec or coaching either one of them on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook, you will find me.

I’m out there and I’m active. Same with on LinkedIn. I’m one of the things I’ve just done. Is reopened, the mind set Monday’s accelerator. I am an impatient human being. This book would be fabulous to do a year long program of every week, doing live coaching with a group of folk about, oh, week six, Chapter six, awesome, I would lose my mind. So I’ve got 52 weeks in 52 days. Dotcom or Mindset Mondays Accelerator.

It’s a live coaching program that we’re going to go through the 52 weeks of mindset shift in just 52 days. We’re going to really like through live coaching and some interaction in between. We’re going to help people power through creating that shift so they can shift their world. So that’s open right now. Mindset, Mon’s Accelerator, Dotcom, we’ll get you there. You can see the information, explore it, see if it’s right for you. Maybe you’re impatient like I am.

Yes. So going into the bonus round. All right, we could start off with something simple and we’ll warm up a little bit more difficult bonus from questions, right. What’s your most significant achievement to date?

I as of the end of this month, I have been married. Twenty nine years. I got three kids that are healthy, love each other and are still active parts of our world and are contributing to the world around them. That my most significant achievement by far.

Right. Now, the big question, right?

That wasn’t the big one.

No, that wasn’t a big one. I mean, the big question for you is kind of like, I got no, there’s going to be a story behind it. So if you could spend 24 hours in a day with anyone dead or alive, uninterrupted, who would it be and why?

Some listeners I’m showing a photo of who. That’s me at age three. I need to know more of what he knows and who he was. And I want him. To know how loved he was and how loved he is. And as much as I say, I don’t want to change anything. I’d love to spend a day with him. Well.

I’m just sitting here just trying to visualize that concept. You can spend 24 hours anybody you’d want to go back in time, spent 24 hours with your younger self at age three.

Why we are. Perfect beings at that age, the essence of who we are is pure and unfettered by the world around us and we lose a lot of that. And we spent a long time as grown ups trying to get back to that purity, that essence of who we be, who we are at our core. And I want more of him in me now and I want more of that. Love and that strength, if you save energy in my world and I want.

What I want for him is to know how loved he is and was. And I want to bring that into my world. Well, and I want that for all of us, I see so much of who we are being right now is shaped by what we’ve experienced and we lose touch with that. Pureness. Well, I want it.

Well, definitely, I definitely appreciate that, I mean, it’s funny because I brought you on here because I know that you’ve had business insight and I know that you are a great strategist. I also know that you’re one hell of a mindset, coach. And, you know, I deemed you to be the mindset boss. But in all reality, after listening and replaying things that you said on this entire episode, you’re more of a like a philosopher.

And that philosophy, I can definitely see you using your philosophies and your training other people to let go of the insecurities, let let go of what they’re holding on and to become who they’re going to be versus who they think they should be. So I definitely appreciate, like what you brought to the table, because, again, I thought one thing and you’ve opened me up to an entire another state of being. So I definitely appreciate that.

That’s why I’ve got that quote behind me. And I see it every day in the back of the zoom image of me. And it says achieving more requires becoming more. And. As long as all the strategy and the growth hacks and the life hacks and the systems and structures. Are tied to who you are. And how it works in your world and how it resonates for you. Those are the ones that are real. That’s the stuff to pay attention to, as long as you’re filtering it through the lens of who you are and what’s important to you and what your world is, everything else is you shitting all over yourself.

Well. And yes, thank you, because what’s underneath all of it, all of the growth strategy, everything is getting clear on who the human is. Making decisions from there, definitely.

Well, I mean, going into closing, I always give opportunities for my guests to take the microphone and ask me any questions that may have come up during this episode. You have any questions for me? This will be a good time.

Yeah, more of an acknowledgment for you on. Your willingness to. To be raw and touch what’s real and important is why. This podcast is as powerful it is and why you have the listeners you have and why you’re making the impact you’re having. I don’t know. How aware you are that your impact is coming from who you’re being? Please, God, keep doing it. We need more of this, you’re helping people do what your logo speaks to.

It’s finding they are inside and live and love and lead from there, so. And we need a whole nother podcast to talk about what inspired you to do this and what’s going to inspire you to do the next hundred episodes and we’ll do that one over a bottle of wine or maybe and record it. But I really want to acknowledge you for doing the important work and not staying surface.

I love it, I definitely appreciate it, and I think this is a very, very powerful episode going to that again, the listeners of this, what you said affected me in a way that I didn’t think it was going to affect me. And I’m hoping that they get the same insightful feeling and the same definition and the same clarity and purpose that you deliver it. So, again, I mean, I appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule.

I appreciate you, you know, being more than willing to be on a guest on my show and to deliver everything that you delivered today. I definitely appreciate it, David.

Listen, it’s my pleasure. I will. I come back any time you want to play, really enjoyed the time together.

Definitely. I appreciate it as they go over now.