Creating Real Wealth With Dame Doria (DC) Cordova

Welcome to the Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, best selling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markell. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your Conscious Pivot.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markell, and I feel incredibly blessed in this moment to be taking the breath I'm taking and to be enjoying just a beautiful day on the planet. I don't know what. You know, I haven't considered what it would be like to live somewhere else. I mean, sometimes it's just enough to sort of learn how to live within my own body and be grounded on this earth. So I keep myself in that space. Although last night, having a wonderful conversation with my soon to be son in law, we were really contemplating the cosmos and what other places there might be out there that would support life that are currently trillions of light years away from here. So I think our best bet, and I certainly believe that my best bet and the best bet for our kids and our kids kids, and I mean all of our collective family, the best bet is that we make the best place for us to live right here on Earth. And what's really cool is the guest that I have on the show today, who's also a dear friend of mine and somebody that I have just great admiration and respect for, is really committed to making this planet the best it can be in so many ways, including environmentally. And what does that look like? How do we. How do we sustain this beautiful Earth? How do we continue to care for Mother Earth? Because the options for us elsewhere are extremely limited. Or that's what it feels like anyway. So I will introduce her in just a moment. But I would love it if, wherever you are in this moment, whatever you're doing, that you can take some deep breaths and ground yourself, become present and enjoy this moment as if it was the last moment. I love this old book by a gentleman who has an interesting name, Og Mendino. And Og Mendino wrote a series of books in the 70s that were very, very popular, including one that's called the Greatest Salesman in the World. And there's a series of things that he suggests that we all do to. To live into the greatest part of ourselves. That part of ourselves that can enroll other people in our mission and our vision and enroll ourselves each and every day and living a great life. And one of those suggestions he makes is to live this day as if it were your last. And so in this moment, as you take a deep breath, take that breath as though it might be your last. Take that breath and relish that breath as something sacred and even holy, something thoroughly enjoyable. So smile and enjoy that breath as I share a little bit about our guest today who you're absolutely going to love. She is something truly special. Her name is Dame Doria, D.C. as we call her sometimes Cordova. She is a CEO and owner of Accelerated Business Schools known for the money and you'd program many of you have probably heard of. It's been around since 1979 with more than 145,000 graduates from over 85 countries. The program has inspired some of today's best known business, education and wealth experts and has touched the lives of millions and millions of people globally. Doria is a humanitarian, a philanthropist and author. She is a global business developer for the world's leading solar architect and other organizations that are in alignment with her purpose. And her purpose, which is really beautiful, is to uplift humanity's consciousness through socially responsible businesses. Doria, welcome to the show. Welcome to the program. Thank you so much for being with us today.

I love being here. Thank you so much.

Yay. It's probably a good 10 years about now that you and I first met, which was just wonderful. So I know a lot about you and maybe some people that are listening have heard your name before, have maybe read a book or studied under you and the money and you'd programs or something like that. But what's something that I didn't include in my opening description that you would love for people to know about you?

Oh, I was destined to work with world leaders and different kind of leaders to support them and leverage my purpose through them. So like in 1984, I had the opportunity to meet Fidel Castro. Later in the 2000s, I met the head of Malaysia, Tun Mahathir, who is now the prime minister again. So I'd like to go to people that have tremendous influence and personally support them and leverage my purpose.

Well, something you'd certainly want folks to know. I think about you that and I think there's a lesson in that because some of us, many people I think are wanting or they're seeking a way to play a bigger game. Like that's their part of what they tell themselves. I've got to Play a bigger game. I've got to play a bigger game. And they get stuck or stopped by the fact that maybe they don't have influence themselves, they don't have a big platform, a way to be some massive change in the world. And yet what you've done is you've been able to leverage some of the access and the celebrity and the influence of people to be able to have your purpose be bigger than it would have been if you just tried to do it all on your own. Right?

Correct. And I am not famous in many circles, not like my old partner, Robert Kiyosaki, of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. He was my business partner for nine years. So a lot of people know his name, know the book, but this is something else to be learned, that there are people like myself behind pulling, you know, all the different strings and making sure that everything happens. So you always want to find out who's the power behind the power. And that's what I've done. And that is actually one of the things that I look for when I meet somebody very influential or very successful. I said, can you tell me who is the person that's really running their lives? And I go to them and learn from them or have them introduce me or, you know, or do the work that has been one of my keys to success.

Wow. You know, it's interesting. It's reminding me of something that I wanted to talk to you about today. Anyway, so this is. This is one of those divine interventions, I suppose, when I'm keynote speaking, which is something I do quite a bit these days, is stand on a stage with a corporate audience and share a message, usually about creating resilience and how people within those organizations can not only be resilient for themselves, but how they can help the company build resilience as well and how they can really make a difference. And typically, what I'll do is I'll share a story of a gentleman by the name of Buckminster Fuller who many people have never heard of. And it's interesting to me when I mentioned him, how many people have not heard of him. And I'll say, well, you know, he's the. He's also known as the creator of the Geodesic Dome. And then they look at me and go, okay, I still don't know who the guy is. I go, you know the dome at Epcot Center?

Oh, that guy. He created that.

Wow, that's incredible. I said, so it's a way to sort of introduce his name. But, I mean, he was a genius. He was a futurist.

He was.

Was a philanthropist. He was a person that just really was thinking so far outside of his time or the restrictions of the technology and what was available and that he had access to it in that time. And I know that you spent a lot of time speaking with and working with and being mentored in proximity to Bucky Fuller. I want to get into that. I want to find out about that because. Because I typically tell this story about how he was studying how big ships turn and how the big ships had this big problem, which was that they weren't able to turn very easily. They weren't very agile, right. And so they had a big, giant rudder that would be turning these big ships, but it was slow until someone created this little rudder that sits on the big rudder. And when they had the little rudder turn the big rudder, the big rudder would more easily turn the. Turn the big ship. And that little rudder is called a trim tab. And Bucky talked about the trim tab factor and how sometimes little things in life, the little things can have a big difference. You can call it the law of small differences or the butterfly effect. And in pivot language, we just talk about a small change in direction can create transformation over time. So what can you share with us about your relationship and. And what you learned from Bucky Fuller?

Well, Buckminster Fuller was also a mathematician and he was a thinker and an author. And he was one of the most. The men that was named as one of the top 100 by Time magazine. And he will become. He was known as the Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th century. And the reason why a lot of people haven't heard about him is because we haven't caught up to him yet. But he was the type of Jack that made over 50 predictions over 80 years ago. Now, I keep saying 70 years, but the years just go by and 49 of them have come true. And most of them are mathematical. So there are millions of people to be highly influenced and literally had a transformation in front of them when I was only 27 years old when the Hunger project was being launched. Launched. And so he was the gentleman that really tapped into the aspects of me of understanding sufficiency. So we live in a world that really experiences scarcity. And we have. Our economic engine of the world is still run from scarcity. Literally still that we're trying to manage, having scarce resources, when that is so not true. That changed in the 70s. So that was his big conversation. So you really, once you really understand how to live in a world of sufficiency. Then there is a simplicity to life and an experience of tremendous wealth. Because you get very present to what is in front of you. And then from there we can have abundance. So I had the opportunity to sit in front of them with a thousand people behind me in 1977. And I was so. He said so many things that I had never heard before. And that was when I committed my life. And I was so young. You know, we had the Hunger Project, and I had my business that I was. I was a court reporter at the time. I was growing up to be an attorney like you. And then I had an opportunity to kind of pivot into a whole other life. And I ended up retiring. And I was very good with money because I had been in the legal system by then for nearly eight years. And I had learned from masters of money and business without knowing any of that. And then when I began to learn more and more from Buckminster Fuller and attended the first business school for entrepreneurs of his kind, which I ended up inheriting, he also.