Stop Chasing Success - Start Chasing THIS Instead

Stop waiting to break down before you level up. Daniel Mangina was already winning money, freedom, peace, but he walked away to answer a deeper call. Most people wait for pain. He moved from purpose. His message: purpose means nothing without action. Meditating won't move mountains. You have to. Abundance isn't out there. It's already in you, but it shows up when your choices match your calling. Own your life. And move now. Special thanks to Jeff Hayes for partnering with me to release this content exclusively here on my YouTube channel. And if you make it all the way to the end of this video, leave a believe in the comments below and we might feature you here in a future video.

Dan, I'm excited for this conversation. I appreciate you taking the time.

No, no, really happy to be here and honored at the opportunity.

Well, let's start with your, um, with your background. Tell me about how you got into doing the type of work you do today.

So my journey into the exact kind of work that I do today was quite a funny one because a lot of people that come to the work that I do, you know, they had an unfulfilled life, they were feeling empty and missing their purpose. And I was actually living my best life at the time. I was actually running away from the invitation to do the work that I do now. And I had very much a Jonah and the whale experience where I was kind of dragged kicking and screaming. But I'm glad for it because I'm really I really love that I get to do what I get to do every day.

So tell me about what that was. What were you doing that you got dragged away from?

So I actually made and lost two multi-million pound fortunes by the age of 23. So by the time I got to my late 20s and the invitation to do this work came up, I was a bit apprehensive because I built back a life that I really loved. I had a great circle of friends. My business that I was operating in, in project management and project funding, didn't require much time and energy and was giving me the life that I was enjoying. And so the thought of being what I thought was going to be a poor teacher at the expense of the lifestyle that I built. And the life that I built really didn't interest me that much, but the calls got louder and louder and louder. And ultimately, I had a very profound meditation experience. And so the 13th of February, 2018, was about 6:30 in the morning. I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And for those of you who know where that is, it was very cold at 6:30 in the morning in February. And I had almost like a three-dimensional virtual reality experience of exactly what my life would look like if I said yes to the call, and I walked away from the business that I had and, and committed fully to the path I'm on today.

So let's, let's dig into that a little bit. A lot of people have different inflection points. Yours is kind of unique. Did you— I have to imagine if you're up early in Santa Fe, a great place incidentally, I've been there many times, that you had a strong meditation practice already. Like, were you somebody who practiced a lot of mindfulness type things? Can you talk about that?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So my journey into the mindset, mindfulness space actually began quite early. I was reading books like Think and Grow Rich when I was about 16 years old. I read Psycho-Cybernetics when I was 18, studied the Master Key System and the work of Wallace D. Wattles very early, and that actually contributed to my early success. Um, but what's come with time, with age and experience, and the wisdom that follows from listening on that journey, is that mindset alone wasn't going to save me. And so as I then made the the move over to more mindfulness and spirituality on my journey, I was able to do so understanding that that alone wasn't going to save me either, and developed a very comprehensive combination of the two, which includes a very rigorous spiritual practice, but also taking care of my mind, and also making sure that I get the right guidance, mentorship, and coaching so that my strategies and actions are aligned with that also.

Where did you grow up?

East London in the UK.

And then where do you live now?

I live in, uh, primarily in Los Cabos, Mexico. Primarily.

Wow. Okay, so you're a long way from home.

I left the UK in 2018. Incidentally, I've not been back. Um, family prefer to come and visit me here rather than me go back to the cold, so it all works out.

I, uh, I can't blame them, so having been to both places. So this is very interesting. So describe the kind of work you're doing right now.

So essentially, the work that I get to do now is bringing people back to a very core truth that I often bring people to an understanding of by asking a simple question, which is this: when you look at nature, do you ever see anything other than abundance? And people might pause for a moment, but they always come back to the same answer: no. Nature is inherently abundant. All that happens is sometimes humans get involved and we kind of create this illusionary experience of lack. But even in that, nature still seeks to move back into homeostasis of abundance. And we as humans, in our great wisdom, I feel, have lost touch with that natural state and often move into this kill-or-be-killed mentality that there's not enough. Look at the war that's going on in the world right now. People saying that they have to go and get from others rather than understanding that abundance is our natural state. So whether it's through my podcast, whether it's through my writing for Entrepreneur Magazine, my blog, making films, interviews such as this. It's having the opportunity to reconnect people to their natural state of abundance.

And you do this by like just working kind of in a mentorship type way or coaching type way, one-on-one? What's, what's the way that you get this done?

I actually focus more on a one-to-many. I'm quite blessed in that my situation means that I don't need to focus on depending on coaching and such for income. And so I get the opportunity to, to reach through social media, through film like I said, through my podcast, through books, and through blogs to reach the many. And I've got an amazing team of coaches that work with people that desire to have that more hands-on experience with coaching and mentorship.

So digging in a little bit deeper, there's sort of this intersection you're describing between maybe spirituality and philosophy and psychology, you know, that sort of comes together. And I would say that where humanity is right now, this is probably more important than ever. I think a lot of people are trying to figure out or trying to find some sort of meaning in their life, even if they're maybe financially successful. Are you finding that to be your perspective also? How do you see it?

100%. 100%. What we're finding is that there are kind of two distinct groups that gravitate to the work that me and the team are sharing. And there are people that have one side of the abundance coin and people that have the other side of the abundance coin. And what we're doing is bringing people to amid the middle where they can have both parts of it. Because you have people that they've got money, but they're not very abundant at all. No connections and relationships, no vitality. And emptiness, even in the face of having great resources. And then you've got people who have got great connections, they've got great health, they've got meaning in what they do, but they don't have the resources to live life on their own terms. And my contention is that both can exist in the same space, and it's bringing people to an understanding that you don't have to choose either or. You can have it all.

What are the practices that you, you teach so that people can follow this path that you're describing?

So I actually prefer frameworks because one of the key things I teach is something that I call money DNA. And what money DNA really looks to is the fact that we're all unique individuals. No two people are the same. We've all had our own journeys, our own traumas, our own experiences. We have our own attitudes, skills, and areas that we need to work on. And that's why the cookie-cutter approach to success and, and abundance very rarely works for everybody. You have some people that will approach, for example, a course or a program or a piece of information, and they've seen it, they've seen with their own eyes that it works for other people. We're not talking about snake oil here, but it doesn't appear to work for them. And it's not because there's something wrong with them or even something wrong with the material, it's because they don't go together. And so what I tend to do instead is go through core frameworks that allow the, the insertion of people's unique, unique flow, if you will, into that framework so they can have success. One is my Beyond Intention Paradigm, which is great for making choices and moving through stuck states. Another is the Flow Funnel, which looks at the dissection of how reality is framed and looks at how these thoughts, these ideas, these goals, these objectives that we have start to move from that pure thing of a thought and into our physical reality. And then of course, Money DNA and some other minor concepts as well that we throw in.

So maybe we'll dig into those a little bit, but before we do, just one more question. Your perspective on purpose, you know, when you look at the role of purpose in somebody's life and how that impacts the work you do. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Um, you'll probably find I'm a little bit contrarian with some things, so you may get some backlash from some of the things I'm going to say. I actually had, uh, I've got a catchphrase, 'Stop meditating,' that people get really upset about. And another one, which is actually the title of one of my keynotes, is the pointlessness of purpose. And people get very upset without actually digging into what I mean when I say the pointlessness of purpose, because Purpose in and of itself, A, without the will to actually move on it, or B, without a direction from which it comes or where it's going to, doesn't really mean much. You know, someone could understand that their purpose is to feed the homeless, but if they don't actually move and take action to do that, then what was the point? And if the pursuit of purpose actually pulls them away from having a living experience in their life, then what was the point too? So for me, purpose isn't something that I feel we only have one of. Because to say we only have one purpose that lasts for the entirety of our life is to limit infinite possibility, which, you know, when we think about it, what's the catchphrase? The only thing that God cannot do is be less than itself, because then it's no longer God. The only thing that infinite possibility can't be is constrained into one thing. And so what I often inspire people to do is to ask themselves a simple two-question combination. Number one, what feels good to me to do right now? What do I feel called to do right now in this moment? And number 2, which of those options do not impact or infringe other people doing the same thing? And if you continue to live life asking yourself those 2 questions, how can you not be on purpose? It doesn't require you going off to the mountains and, and smoking this and disappearing off into the jungle to do something else. We can simply ask ourselves that question and follow the thread of where that leads us and live a very purposeful, purposeful life.

You used the phrase money DNA. What do you mean by that?

So, um, I've got this little story that I use to explain MoneyDNA. So, um, my son is about to be 2 years old. I'm brown-skinned, brown-eyed, black-haired. His mum's Russian, so of course she's got blonde hair and blue eyes. So aside from the combination of, um, physical traits, we also didn't know what gender the baby's going to be. And there's nothing that we could have done after the point of inception to actually dictate what that's going to be. I didn't spend the entirety of Olga's pregnancy poking her belly and saying, yeah, you know, just making sure that that hair color's coming along or that eye color's coming along. When he was born, he was already playing out the exact combination of features that happened to, to be the result of my sperm and her egg. Now, when we look at people's current situation in their life, in this instance particularly financially, I found that there are 5 core areas, 5 things that if we look at it can be used to predict the level of flow that somebody has with money or with abundance. And so we take those 5 areas and we use them to dial in someone's alignment to flow so they can have a lot more flow moving into more financial abundance in their life.

And how different can this be from person to person? Is it radically different or just different degree?

It can be. So the 5 areas, if I just quickly whip through them, are the, the vehicle that we use. So many people are chasing after the latest fad as to how they're going to get to their end goal. And this doesn't just apply with finances either. It's how they get to their relationships, how they get in shape. And yet we all have things that we're going to be more aligned with. Then there's the role of the execution. If we do this for business, for example, some people might find that podcasting is exactly the thing for them to do. But even the role that they're going to use in terms of how to execute podcasting as a successful formula for their business is going to vary from person to person. In my instance, for example, I don't do any of the technical stuff. No, I don't. I show up for the interview, I do the interview, my team take care of everything because that's where I find the most flow. The other thing that we do as well is we look at how we communicate with ourselves internally. It doesn't matter how big and grand my goal is, if I can't bring the parts of my mind together to execute movement towards that goal in a harmonious way, I'm not going to be able to get to the end goal. What does this look like in real terms? So for example, we use a series of personality profiles to identify this, and the one we use for internal communication is Love Languages. And people get very confused when they see me using Love Language in this way, but what we do is we actually use it to understand how does your unconscious mind receive communication in a clear and coherent way. Love Language shows us the, the unconscious way that we process inputs and receive the emotional experience of love. So when we actually ride on the back of that, we can use it to communicate messages of change to communicate a new goal to the unconscious, which is a very powerful tool that we can use to help us towards our goals. We also look at how we make decisions and stay in flow. But most importantly, I would say pillar 5, how do we take action? Because we can have all the philosophical ideas, we can pray, meditate, or head to the temple every single day, but if we're not taking new actions, we're not going to get new outcomes.

So if I'm interpreting correctly, Money DNA is really a pretty deep reflection of who you are, or at least who you're being in a particular moment in time. And if you find contradictions in some of the areas that you're talking about, like lack of action, etc., these are things, I guess, with a framework that you can, you can remedy pretty readily, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's a big part of some of the work that we do with people, specifically entrepreneurs. Money DNA, we normally reserve for entrepreneurs. Because we find that people that have got an actual vehicle for creating wealth that they either have or want to move into, we can more readily apply these concepts. It works for other things, like I said, but in terms of having a measurable way to track the success of it, this is a really powerful tool to use for entrepreneurs.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of having these types of frameworks, you know, having some models of reality. I'm a philosopher, you know, before anything else, so I always have to create some sort of philosophical framework to operate from. Otherwise, I don't know what I'm doing. At least that's That's the experience I have. And so I'm loving how you've, you've organized these frameworks, you know, based on certain premises and then, you know, have it be practical, you know, something that's actionable. There are other frameworks you talked about. What are some of the other ones that maybe you can describe for us?

So my Beyond Intention Paradigm, which is the topic of my book, Stepping Beyond Intention, that's a 4-step system that allows us to actually move through stuck states because so often we lose sight of the fact that what we want actually wants us to. When there's a desire burning up inside of you, it didn't come from from nowhere. It's a living, conscious, breathing experience that wants to be a part of your world. And so it's not so much we need to make things happen, it's to be in the flow of allowing it to happen. But more times, our unconscious programs, our limiting beliefs, our stories, our narratives, our perspective on our current reality stop us having that movement forward. And so Beyond Intention is a very powerful 4-step system you can use to move through those stuck states and get to the end goal.

This is— and you sort of said this in the beginning, you know, this maybe the intention or the law of attraction, but as you said, your experience was it's not enough. I mean, I can remember when The Secret came out and it was very hot and people were talking about this law of attraction, but in the entrepreneurial circles where I ran, people are like, if you sit around just thinking about what you want with no action attached to it, it doesn't seem to go anywhere. So what was your experience of all this?

I love to share a funny story about that. I'll dovetail that into that. It's that I was on Instagram, scrolling on Instagram, and there was an ad on Instagram that said, 'How to get your ideal clients without using Instagram.' So they were trying to use Instagram to tell me that I don't need to use Instagram. And what I always invite people to, to, to, to, to kind of just ponder on, to noodle on, is the person who told you that all you need to do is sit around and think happy thoughts to find success, how did you hear about them, right? They ran an ad to target you. They had a book. They had a podcast. They moved through time and space to create a vehicle to sell you on the lie that you don't need to do anything. And even when we look at the, um, the, the, the, the, the popcorn culture that we're in today, a lot of people are looking for a cheap, easy way out. And I think that's just kind of symptomatic of the world that we're living in today. People don't want to put the work in to get to the end goal. Now, I think one of the things that sits behind that is we confuse work with suffering or struggling, right? Where actually it can be a joy to put the work in to create change. And what sits on the other side of that, the transformation, the change, the meaning, the purpose, the abundant experience of life is worth every drop of sweat that you will have to put in if you want to get to a new outcome. That's not sexy. It's probably not going to sell me courses on Instagram. But it's the truth, and the more people that actually come into alignment with that truth and realize that's the way forward, the more people are actually going to get something different rather than the same old same old they've been experiencing up until now.

Yeah, somewhere in that there's a formula, right, that basically says there's this kind of non-time-bound thing called your intention, or, you know, what it is that's in your consciousness that you're looking to attract, and then there's this thing called action in this 3D world that you have to take, and these two things sort of have to equate somewhere to an outcome. And one of the things I've noticed, and maybe you can speak to this, is that with time, having now been at this for decades, my own experience is I can get more done with less action, not no action, but I'm just finding that as I've developed my mindfulness, if you will, my practices in meditation and other such things, my energy I can put behind that, that I'm able to manifest things through action with less effort as I could say 10 or 20 years ago. Do you find that to be true of people who practice the type of work you do? And what do you think is going on in that particular experience?

It's questions like this actually led me to, to produce my first film, which we're at the point of speaking to you today. The guys are just doing the final cut and we're getting the score done, but it's called Manifest Nation. And we've actually got a tenured neuroscientist, one of the team who worked on the MRI machine, and a medical biochemist. And we've actually gone in and scientifically interrogated these very ideas that you're saying from the point of the brain, right? Point of the mind. Something tangible that we can track and measure from a real scientific perspective. And one of the things that we've seen from the scientific side that starts to create an overlap with some of this philosophy philosophy, sorry, is that ultimately our mind is deciding what needs to happen in order for us to manifest an outcome. There's a part of the brain called the reticular activating system that literally filters out what we take in and experience sensorially in our, in our world, and it's predicated completely on the belief systems that we hold about what needs to be there. So what does this mean in real terms? As you went deeper into certain practices you lost your attachment to the need to take certain actions, and therefore your brain allowed you to witness outcomes without the plethora of actions that were required before.

Right.

Someone who's at the beginning of their journey, who's had a lifetime where all they understand is hard work, determination, and grafting, that person's going to need to go through a process of unlearning the mental attachment to those thoughts and ideas and beliefs before they can start to have an experience of it being less than. So ultimately what we're looking at, and the way I describe it, is the mind being the gatekeeper to experience. And when we use the communication method that our mind understands, which in Money DNA we use in Pillar 3, internal communication, you can start to train the brain to not have the same ideas and philosophies about what needs to happen and give it a new program of more flow, of less action being required. But there will still need to be some movement through time and space Even if you win the lottery ticket, you're still going to need to go to the shop or even go on your phone and buy a ticket. And even when you get the money, you're still going to move through time and space to enjoy it. So it's losing this attachment to no movement through time and space, but also losing the attachment to there needing to be an amassing of movement through time and space in order to get to the end goal.

It's interesting when you start getting into the neuroscience of success, right? Because there's sort of, to your point, you know, I've got a background and I hold patents in in some neurodiagnostic technologies I developed, and that was in a previous entrepreneurial life of mine. And I always had a fascination with this, especially as you get from kind of the hard Western science and then you start looking at more of the Eastern philosophies and mindfulness, et cetera, and trying to reconcile all these things into some form of a perspective. But I love the fact that you went in and said, I want to understand how this is working. I kind of want to unpack this and say what's going on neurobiologically, you know, in the brain, and simultaneously how does this apply to what I teach and these models and how it all comes together. I guess my question is this: how important is it to gain some sort of context or understanding on that level of things for you to be able to advance your effectiveness in your life?

I really think it depends on whether you're looking for an overstanding or an understanding. So in, in my case, I don't just read a piece of content for me. I'm also honoring the responsibility that I believe I've been given by the divine to share these principles with others and to empower them. And I believe there are many teachers and, and guides and leaders out there that are doing the same thing. And so I go to a particular depth because I'm very, very passionate about being in integrity to what I'm saying. I remember once I held a workshop in Seattle, Washington in 2018, and I didn't know that there was a physicist in the audience who pulled me up on some of the phrasing and terminology that I'd used during the course of the presentation and held me accountable so that I could be correct in how I was actually disseminating this information. And I think it's important that we are open to the level of alignment to integrity-driven communication of ideas because a lot of the snake oil and popcorn culture that we're experiencing now is because people have been, I feel, very slapdash in throwing around ideas that just aren't true, and that can have dire effects. I lost a very dear friend of mine recently. She had an initial battle with cancer that she won. She had— she came out of remission, and instead of approaching it the way that she'd approached it before, she went and saw a lot of these people that told her, oh, you haven't got cancer, you haven't got this, you haven't got that. It took her 9 or 10 months before she had to accept the fact that she did have cancer. By then it was too late and she unfortunately passed away. Now, I was already very, very militant in my— I want to say fight against false information and misinformation in this field because there is a beauty, there's a power here that really can change lives. But if we're not looking at it through the lens of truth, people are going to get lost on the wayside and there can be really detrimental results in people's lives.

Yeah, yeah. My mentor was the most precise human being with words I ever met, and he was His dedication and what he instilled in me as far as being as precise with language as you possibly can be and to make sure you understand the words you're saying. Because I think to your point, there's a lot of people who've gotten very lazy around these types of issues and they can weave certain excitements or dazzle you with maybe talk about physics or quantum physics, etc., but they really don't understand the words or concepts they're saying. And that could become dangerous as compared to helpful. Uh, and to your point, especially when it comes to somebody's health, um, and it's in this whole concept, the truth is a very difficult thing, right? You know, how much do we create our reality? How much is that reality independent of us? What's true? You know, there's, there's an entire separate, a separate interview we can have around those, those particular conversations. But, uh, but I totally get what you're saying. And I think, um, taking some of these things seriously is important. Important. Um, I want to circle back, if I can, to something you said earlier in your own story, uh, just to get your, your own perspective on this, uh, where you talked about being in Santa Fe and having that particular meditation and that profound experience. How do you, how do you interpret that? What do you think actually happened for you there?

This kind of dovetails onto what we're just talking about, and that's that I'm very very, very, very happy to say when I don't know. There's the whole 'is the world round, is the world flat' conversation at the moment, right? And one of my friends asked me the other day, he says, you know, 'Dan, what camp are you in?' I said, 'Well, I've booked a flight on a hot air balloon that's going up in 2024 that's going to take me up to space. I'm on the waitlist for Virgin Galactic. When I've gone up, I'll be able to answer that question.' And up until then, there's two sets of arguments, both of which I cannot know the answer to. I may have a leaning, I may have a particular pot of evidence that says that one is, is true and one is not. But I don't know until I've actually had a firsthand experience of my own. Up until then, I'm either believing the evidence or measuring the evidence or believing someone else's experience. Now, when it comes to some of these profound experiences, there are many schools of thought as to what it could be. It could be that it's my higher self leading me forward. It could be that God touched me and gave me this wonderful vision. The fact is, I don't know where it came from. All I know is how I felt and how grateful I am for that experience, and that I get to actually embody the emotions I felt in that meditation every day now, doing what I get to do. And I focus on that rather than trying to understand something that I'm not going to be able to understand. One of my— one of the favorite texts growing up in a very conservative Christian household that pastors would love to throw at me when I got annoying with my questions was Deuteronomy 29:29, which is that the secret things are of God. Now, whilst it was used to shut me up when I asked questions that could have been answered, I think there's a beauty to allowing some things to be mysterious and wonderful, so long as we lean on those to create something meaningful and real in the life that we live every day.

I have to tell you, I've had that category of question I've asked, you know, many people over time. That's the best answer I've ever gotten. Oh, thank you. In my mind, My wife, she's fallen in love with the unknown. The mystery is the whole point as far as she's concerned. She lives with me who's always trying to figure things out. She's the good counterbalance to remind me of how much fun the unknown is and how it can be. But to be able to be someone who is a thought leader like yourself and to say, "I don't know," is to me real enlightenment. In the sense that, you know, that you're very comfortable being able to make that statement and actually enjoy the fact that you don't know.

And there's something to that as well. Even on my journey as a leader and a speaker and a teacher, you know, I don't pretend to be perfect. And sometimes people get upset by that because they're so used to people that stand on the stages that I stand on who pretend that they've got everything worked out. I don't have everything worked out. But the human experience for me is going through that journey of working out what I can and enjoying the experience of doing my best with the things I haven't worked out yet. That's part and parcel of being human. Like I said, we've had people that said, well, you know, you haven't got your life worked out, how could you tell me how to live mine? And I say, I'm not trying to tell you how to live mine. I'm giving you my experiences. I'm giving you what I've learned and giving you the opportunity to glean from that so that you can maybe work some things out for you. But we're probably never going to have it all worked out. I haven't ascended into the ethereal planes and moved through, moved through the physical form just yet. And whilst I'm here, there's going to be tension, there's going to be contrast, there's going to be things I don't know, and there's going to be things I just haven't worked out yet, which I think, again, extremely admirable.

I think the world is starving for that type of a leader, quite frankly, you know, that it's not a bunch of fakeness, you know, with social media. What is everybody doing but, you know, posting pictures and giving impressions that pretty much are lies? You know, it's not true, but they're making— they're misrepresenting what their life really is. And pretending. And I think people have finally gotten to a point where they, you know, somebody who says, I don't know, or I don't have it all worked out, or I'm not perfect, is refreshing. And what's the get-to? You know, can someone say, yeah, I'm not perfect, I make mistakes, but at least I'm mostly fulfilled or mostly happy? That's to me the achievement. We're not meant to be perfect. Quite the opposite, right? So, so I'm finding so much of this extremely refreshing. So you've spoken about, you know, your activities to date. You've got a film coming out. Do you have a sense of what, what you're looking at as far as your own activities in the next few years?

Yeah, I mean, I'm really, really focused on being a full-time philanthropist over the next 3 to 5 years. And so a lot of what I'm doing right now is setting the field up for me to be able to do that. I'm very passionate about entrepreneurial philanthropy, which for me is empowering people to create value in perpetuity in and of themselves rather than being dependent on a source to feed them on a daily basis and carrying that into different communities. So I've got a lot of pilot projects we've got in the developing world that I'm going to continue to work on. And then focusing on film, filmmaking, I believe that right now there's an opportunity for me to take my message out in a way that differentiates me from other people because I do have the resources to be able to go out and get a film crew and put things together to do things quality of the film basis. I love podcasting. I'm going to continue doing that. My book, Stepping Beyond Intention, is being re-released in the new year. Once we get with that, I may go off and write another book, but certainly film to get the message out and full-time philanthropy in the next 3 to 5 years are my goals.

Why full-time philanthropy? What, what called you there?

I've kind of always wanted to have resources to empower people to have their own resources. It's something that I've always been passionate about. Even the way that I've created wealth myself has always been in a way that connects with other people being empowered to do so also, whether it's empowering my team so that they can go off and do things by themselves, partnering up on projects that are going to have more impact. Very rarely do I get involved in a project that's just for money's sake. So I don't know if that's the value system that was instilled with me by my parents. I don't know if it's part and parcel of my calling. All I know is that being able to dedicate my life every day to empowering people to create change in their lives that's going to impact others is something that really, really fires me up. And I'm really, really excited to have the resourcefulness and the relationships and everything set up in my life so that that's all I have to do every day.

You know, this, this is sort of this really, I think, magical recurring theme where you're saying, you know, I don't know what maybe the levers are getting pulled, but what I do know is how I feel, right? That's the one thing you can say, this fires me up, or this makes me feel a certain way. So is the feeling you have as you contemplate— and I'm not saying you personally, but a person in general has, you know, this— I'm asking for your view on this— as a feeling a person has, is that a good guidepost to say this is aligned for me or not aligned for me? Or do people have a certain amount of self-awareness to develop to understand how they feel and let that try to guide them through, you know, what choices they make.

So one of my Danisms is that reality wraps around how you feel, and where that Danism comes from is recognizing what feelings are at a vibrational level. I mentioned one of the frameworks I work with is something called the flow funnel, which cross-sections reality. And what that does is it looks at how dense matter emerges, and it emerges because everything slows down to the point where we can start to have a contacting relationship to it. We can engage it with, with it, with our senses. But at the very beginning of that journey is pure thought taking on vibration, and that vibration can be measured. It's not something you have to go and buy another course on to understand on, on the internet. It is literally a vibration that can be measured, and the way that we experience that vibrating frequency is how we feel. So how we feel is actually an indication of what we're frequent— where we are frequently. When we look— you mentioned the law of attraction earlier— when we look at the primary law that actually is above the law of attraction, the law of vibration, we understand that the universal law states that everything is vibrating, and only things that are vibrating at the same bandwidth of frequency can exist in the same space. So when I look at what I'm experiencing in my life, I'm seeing the product of my vibration, which has slowed down enough for me to experience it with my senses. So when I follow an emotional state or a feeling that leads me to an outcome that I actually want, I'm setting up the landscape for me to develop the thinking and to take the action that's going to lead me to the outcome that I want, versus being in an emotional experience over here, having a mental experience over here, and action or inaction over here. All of this discombobulation not leading me to a coherent journey. So when I can start to deliberately connect an intention with a feeling that relates to that intention, a series of beliefs that support it, and a series of actions that bring it into form, I can always get to where I want to get to.

Yeah, I love the flow funnel concept and really, really brilliant. And I guess for many people, the challenge is taking a step back enough to be able to experience things and say, okay, here's what's happening, because it's sort of like I think there's so many people are in survival that their frequency is such that they can't really feel or experience their life because they're, they're so concerned with having just to survive from moment to moment. Is there ideas that you have for them as far as saying, how can I interrupt this pattern long enough to take a step back and maybe really understand what's happening here?

And this is actually where the different frameworks start to fit together because this is where Beyond Intention comes in. Because the first step of Beyond Intention, the first of the 4 steps, is accept. And what I'm actually accepting is 2 key ideas. Number 1, I'm the author and creator of my life. Everything that has shown up is a product of what I put out, and everything that is going to show up is going to follow on from what I'm putting out. But also, what I have to accept is where I am now in relationship to what I desire to experience. And when I can start to accept that right now I'm in overwhelm, right now I'm in fear, Right now I'm anxious. Right now I don't know how it's going to work out. In the moment of me accepting that truth, I can begin the process of one, freeing myself of unconscious slavery to the emotional reaction to that experience. And then number two, I can actually start to build up the resourcefulness and get everything that I need to actually move through that state. So let's say someone's in a state of anxiety right now. Finances are a mess. We've got inflation going up through the roof. Regardless of what you say is the reason for that. And a lot of people in a space where they're like, I don't know what's going to happen if the interest rates keep going up, am I going to be able to make my mortgage? If the economy goes into the tank, what's going to happen to my, my retirement fund? What's going to happen to my job? The second that I accept that that's the case, instead of me reacting to what may or may not happen, I can actually start to plot a proper course to deal with what's the best that can happen, what's the worst that can happen, and based on historical data, what's the most likely thing that can happen? But I have to be able to accept the truth of what is now in order for me to be able to move through that situation, disagreeable or agreeable, into something different.

What occurs to me as you're talking about these things, which are extremely, I believe, extremely impactful, it's not, it's not just abstract, but literally it can change your life pretty quickly if you're listening and wanting to actually engage in some of this conversation for your life. And so often entrepreneurs are sitting to watch an interview, well, give me, you know, what's hot in marketing right now? What's, you know, what's the best cold traffic strategy? How do I convert this traffic when it could, you know, they want all this how stuff, you know, the tactical stuff. And they think that the step or the next step to their higher level of success is learning, you know, the latest best marketing thing, or maybe it's an HR thing, depending on where they are in the flow of their business. Business and the evolution of it, this whole conversation has been about who you are and how you experience life. It's always been my contention that who you are, it's the who before the do. It's who you are is going to decide how well what you do works. Do you see it that way and is that why you spend so much time in this particular part part of the conversation?

I mean, if we go to the flow funnel again, we've got the 3 core areas that the flow funnel looks at. We've got 3-dimensional physical reality where we take action. We've got mind, which has impact on matter. We've got mind over matter. And then the law even recognizes crimes of passion, that when we're in particular emotional states, we can think differently because we can only think to the level of our current emotional state. Well, 2/3 of those are an inner game— what we're thinking and what we're feeling. And what we find time and time again is that when what we're thinking and what we're feeling are so deeply aligned with a particular outcome, the amount of action that needs to be taken, even the quality of action that needs to be taken, shifts. And here's another point: it doesn't matter how great my strategy is. If I'm operating on a limiting belief of lack, I'm operating on a limiting belief of unworthiness, I'm not going to take the actions that are going to lead me to my goal. Or even if the opportunity or action presents itself, I'm going to find myself procrastinating or self-sabotaging. The unconscious mind moves at 10,000 to 10 million times the speed of the conscious. For every conscious thought I've got about using the latest hack, I've got 10,000 to 10 million other thoughts which are playing out the same program that's giving me the same results I've had up until now anyway. So if I don't change the precursor of those thoughts and feelings, the action is never going to lead me to a new outcome because everything that's happening on the inside is moving at a pace I can't keep up with physically anyway.

Yeah, it's brilliant. So how do we start to, I guess, either deprogram or clean the slate on the unconscious mind? Do you have some comments on how somebody would say, hey, you know, I really feel like I self-sabotage over and over again. I don't know why. You know, my conscious thoughts are X and somehow I keep on this merry-go-round of, you know, failure and then back up and then failure and back up. What advice do you have for them?

So one of the things I explored in the TED Talk that unfortunately didn't meet the— didn't get past the cutting floor, shall we say. They weren't very happy with my title and I refused to change it. But one of the things I actually approached in that through the lens of my own journey and experience was this: the thoughts are moving faster than the actions, the right— the unconscious faster than the conscious. But then we've got this emotional landscape that dictates what we can think anyway. So if we change the emotional landscape, we're actually setting a much tighter network, a much tighter field for us to have thoughts in. But when we look at the emotions that we're experiencing, we'll actually see that most of the time that's being triggered by a combination of playing out the programs we've been in already and also the environment that we're in at the time. As an example, if you're watching a funny film a film that you generally find to be funny, what's your emotional state going to be? And do you have to think about that emotional state changing? No, the form changes the emotional state. If you're in a sad place, it doesn't matter how much you want to be happy, the sad environment is going to shift what's going on with you vibrationally. When you find yourself with, with positive people and in an environment where they're only positive people, it becomes increasingly more difficult for you to hold a frequency of the opposite of positive, you being a Negative Nancy. And so what I actually advocate and what we speak about all the time with the work that we share with our people is ruthlessly curate your environment to support the emotions that will lead to the thinking that will lead to the action of what you want. And if there is anything in your environment right now that's disrupting or stopping you leading towards your goal, get rid of it or find a way to be at peace with it so that it doesn't have the same power and impact over you, and watch your life change in a very short period period of time.

Yeah, I'm so glad you, you said that. I believe environments really do impact you more significantly than people understand. And, um, and setting up— I mean, I'm— again, another thing to put a lot of attention on, just setting up the environment, you know, that you exist in every day, especially the routine ones. You know, it's— you know, my wife created, for example, this thing called the, the Wake Up Lounge in our house. You know, so when you wake up in the morning, it's not racing and, you know, into, you know, these sort of fight-flight state, especially for kids as they're being brought up. But there's a fire burning, there's incense burning, there's Zen music on, and there's a warm drink, and people are just entering the day together in our house in a calm state, in a loving state. And you create that environment to start the day as compared to the hectic running around like a chicken with your head cut off. And it has, I think, extraordinary impact on how the rest of your day is going to go. And I think a lot of people, especially when they're preoccupied, they're not paying enough attention to their environment, right? But an environment isn't just what's the room like that you're sitting in, you know, environments, you know, who's hanging around with you, you know, what you're reading, what you're listening to, what you're watching, all of that is being taken in, processed, and generating a frequency that's leading to thoughts, that's leading to behaviors. But I love what you just said, you know, to put a highlight on it is very difficult to have negative thoughts if you're around very positive, high-frequency people. Right? So, uh, so yeah, and that's what you do have control over. You know, you can choose your environment, you can choose the people you want to be around, and those are important choices. So this, this is all, I think, uh, profoundly, uh, high-impact conversations that we're having here. And your, your frameworks, you know, that you shared very generously— so thank you for doing that— um, I, I believe can have extremely— I, I believe somebody can finish, you know, the person watching right now can literally pause or shut off this video and they can go to work immediately on the things that you talked about and they could find impact right away in their life. I think they can see things shift right away. So this is, you know, I've had many, many entrepreneurial conversations for the varying series that we've done with varied people, but this is one of my favorites, you know, to really get back into step back and taking a look at life, taking a look at existence, what it means to be a human being, and having that type of a foundation to work forward from as compared to, you know, the next best strategy for, you know, for your marketing. I think this is really an important conversation. So I just want to say thank you so much for showing up the way you have and for generously sharing what you shared.

Thank you. It's been an honor. I love every opportunity that I get to remind people that abundance is our natural state. And when we take care of that inner environment and curate the environment externally to support that, we'll always get to the end goal. It can be a predictable journey.

That's amazing. Thank you so much, Dan.

Thank you.

Alex, looking forward to this conversation. So thanks for taking the time to come in and have it.

Yeah, thanks for having us, Patrick.

So every entrepreneur has got a story, you know, and of course, you know, the stories are told in many different ways. And of course, It's the times of trial that have defined us. So you have a pretty dramatic story in your past. So let's just start with going back there and what got you started into being an entrepreneur and kind of that trajectory through time.

You know, now as I look back on my life at 49, um, as a kid I was always a really different kid. I was one of those kids that didn't do really well socially, didn't do really well, didn't do great in in school, adults would attenuate their voice when they saw me. It was like, oh look, there's Jeff and Sally and Alex. And I heard it, like I could tell that that was going on. So I knew that I was different than the other kids around me. And I had a really hard time figuring out any place where I belonged or felt comfortable or didn't feel like I was an outsider looking in. And I started working with my dad out of necessity at around 8 or 9 years old. And in working things, there was like rules and it was easier. And I felt comfortable in business conversations. I felt comfortable in sales conversations, even as a really little kid. And I think like, I didn't, I don't know how much I found entrepreneurship as much as it found me. It was like the only place in the world I felt comfortable.

Why do you think you felt like such an outsider? What was going on?

I think like a lot of entrepreneurs, I think completely different than the kids around me, than other people around me. I was a very sensitive kid, and when I say sensitive, I don't mean emotionally sensitive, but sensitive to everything. Sensitive to the lighting, sensitive to clothes, sensitive to the world around me. I think in a lot of ways in school, I was bored out of my mind because I couldn't keep the pace of everybody around me. It would just, it didn't really work for me. In second, I've got a weird school story. In second grade, I was in special education, like the kids who needed additional help, And at the end of second grade, we took some standardized tests, standardized testing in California. And I went from special education to gifted and talented.

So how'd that happen? I mean, what was going on there?

I think I just had trouble paying attention in class and sitting still and doing what you're supposed to. But then there was this test and the test was interesting. So I took the test and I think in second grade I, I tested it between sixth and seventh grade and everything. So they took me from a normal classroom to a gifted and talented program, back to a normal classroom. I was all over the place.

Yeah, you know, it's not an unusual thing with entrepreneurs to be very ADD.

Oh yeah.

And, you know, in previous things I've interviewed Ned Hollowell, a medical doctor who's a great expert in this area.

And yeah, I know Ned.

Yeah, yeah. And he would say ADD is neither a deficit nor disorder, it's a superpower.

100%.

But the problem is, as you said, you know, you can get bored pretty pretty easy and leads to those types of educational experiences in childhood, which could leave some trauma that has to get reconciled at some point in your adult life.

Some PTSD, if you will.

For sure. This is what you found out. You started to go to work with your dad. Where'd that lead?

Early on, I felt so separate from the world, so different than everybody else that I wanted to understand what was this thing called success. 10 or 11 years old, I started reading self-help books. It's funny 'cause now we have a 12 and a 15-year-old, and my 12-year-old is now reading self-help books. I'm like, okay, it wasn't that weird, right? But when I was reading personal development self-helps, the books started kind of arguing with each other. And so as a kid, I started reading the stories of successful people, and kind of obsessively. Like when I go down a rabbit hole, it's a deep rabbit hole, and I can stay there for a long time. And what was interesting was I started reading these stories of successful people and I started, I was assuming that I would see something completely different or like some superpower that they had that made them different than the rest of the world. And what I found over and over again was that people who were radically successful were a lot like me. You know, Einstein failed algebra, Thomas Edison got sent home because he was too slow. You know, the stories like that go over and over and over again. It's like the most extraordinary people out there also were some of the most sensitive and some of the most challenged and had other things going on. And so I found solace in, in like seeing that in, in this, like almost every story. It's, it's, it's rare that you find somebody that was just successful without that, what we now know is like traumatic childhood or sensitivities or what we would call disorders. But I agree with you, they're superpowers.

Then what was your first business that you did?

My first business was selling candy to other kids in junior high school, and it became a whole, like, crazy issue. I, I, uh, I would have my mom take me to a warehouse store, buy candy, and I was selling it before and after school. And I was doing really well, like, junior high school, making a couple hundred dollars a week. And then the school figured out that the cafeteria income and revenue was going down so much that something was going on, and It was me. And so they started passing rules like you couldn't sell anything on school unless it was part of a charity. So I started donating to charity. And so I got past that. And then they, they had another rule. They like, they kept imposing rules like you couldn't sell anything on school grounds. So I just walked over the school boundary and did it like right off school. I actually had 3 kids that were helping me do it. I didn't like all the crowd around me, so I was managing the candy vendors. And eventually I went to a school called Venato Junior High School in California. And eventually they had a school board meeting where they presented a rule called the Alex Sharfen rule. Like that was the, the, like, uh, the title that they had given it. And it was a rule that said you can't sell anything at school for any reason without explicit principal permission. So that was my first business. I got shut down. I was pretty mad at the world after that.

I don't know if I even wrote about this in my book or even talked about this publicly, but that was literally my first business. The only, the only different new one, it was, it was Mary Jane's Cheese and Twizzlers. I used to buy them in bulk and sell piecemeal. But I did it in French class and I did, I guess, probably a little bit more surreptitiously. I didn't have it out there. So I probably wasn't running the volume you were running.

Well, I had 3 people.

Yeah, I covered the front, the side, and the back of the school. But it was 7th grade and I made money through middle school doing that, which was not big money, but pocket money, you know, to go out and have fun with.

Yeah.

So you're— so that was, that was pretty remarkable. We have a lot in common anyway. So, so now you get shut down. So you had your first experience in how regulators.

Yeah.

Can interfere with your business when you're doing something that's serving your community.

Yeah.

That's probably my early libertarian roots right there where I got just frustrated, like, leave me alone.

Yeah. Well, I'm a libertarian myself, so So now that happens. What's next?

Uh, in high school I had a window washing company and, uh, had some similar problems. I started this window washing company and, um, built it out to where I had a couple of crews working. And, um, there's certain things you have to do, like get insurance and other things. And I was 17 and nobody asked me how old I was. And so I did a whole bunch of stuff and set up the company illegally because I wasn't 18. Nobody cosigned with me. And so I ended up having to give that business up and sell it to somebody who had a window washing company. And there was this whole cascade of legal issues I got myself into. I didn't, I didn't understand what I was doing. I just went out and did it. And I had like invalid insurance, invalid reporting. And so I sold it to another company to resolve all that stuff. So strike two, I was super irritated at that point, but not deterred. Not deterred, but super irritated.

Yeah. So what was the next thing you get out of high school?

Did you go to college? Yeah, I got out. I graduated high school. I went to a few colleges and kind of chased some business classes, never really with the intention of graduating, more just trying to understand if there was more than I needed there. And in college, a friend of mine and I started a billing and collections company for fraternities and sororities, and we automated it with Zebra scanners from supermarkets. Nobody was doing that at the time. Great business idea. We didn't understand scale. We didn't understand markets. We had this tiny little market. And so eventually, we sold the software and the process from that company to a company that did utility billing, which was scope and scale.

Right. That's very cool.

Yeah.

So you never graduated college.

No.

So what did you end up doing?

Well, after we sold the software for that company, I moved to Florida to work in a buyout with that organization. I had a 12-month contract. I made it 8 months. I was not a good employee. It was super challenging. And through some really fortunate events and some network people that I knew in my network, I ended up opening a consultancy called the Manufacturer's Rep Firm. And I worked with companies like Fuji and Memorex, TDK, Targus Computer Carrying Cases, Logitech, and did their marketing and sales for Florida. And for a lot of them, it was for the Florida and the Southeast and Latin America.

So you made a move into sales and marketing?

Yeah, yeah. We were an outsourced sales firm and marketing firm. And I ended up— it was really intense. I ended up working in the computer and consumer electronics industry during a ton of transitions. We were involved in the first sale of any digital cameras. We were involved in the first sale of flash memory. I'm dating myself here. But yeah, it was really a cool experience.

Wow. So what happened with that business?

It almost killed me.

How come?

So I was in my 20s. I didn't have any previous coaching or understanding of what I should do or how I should do things. Everything that I was doing was intuitive. You know, this is back almost 30 years ago. And so the resources that are available today weren't really available back then. And that company started small. It was me and in my home in South Florida. And eventually I had 13 offices in the US and Latin America. I had a team of about 40 or 50 people with contractors. And because I didn't understand how to delegate and I didn't understand how to transfer responsibility to the people that worked with me, it was like my entire team was assistants.

Wow.

And I had to show up every day or things didn't work and things didn't happen. And so I read an article about Bill Gates when I was younger, and this— Bill Gates used to be an entrepreneurial hero. He was totally different than the world impression of him now.

Understood.

And, um, It said he didn't take a day off in his 20s. So I was like, oh, okay, we want to be successful. You don't take a day off in your 20s. And I worked 7 days a week all year for years and built what most people would consider a successful company. But at the same time, I ended up almost 300 pounds. I was on 4 or 5 prescription drugs. They were about to give me another one.

In your 20s?

In—

yeah, in my 20s was when that all started. And I was on the prescriptions in my late 20s and early 30s. And then I met my wife, Katie. And she went to a doctor's appointment with me before we got married, and the doctor said— the doctor told me that out of all of his patients, I was the most likely case for a heart attack or some major, like, issue or challenge. And he had an older population in South Florida, and I was 31. Wow. And so I decided very quickly I didn't want to be in that business anymore. I was traveling 60 to 80% of the time. It was incredibly stressful. It was one of those things that it like, the level of anxiety I dealt with on a daily basis to make sure everything happened was just over the top. It was, talking about it, I kind of get like body reactions and I get back into that place where it just felt like it was relentless. And so I sold the contracts from that business and didn't do like a full exit, like would've taken a few years. I did what I could to get out of it really quick. And that was the end of that business.

What's interesting is from the outside, people would say, my goodness, you're really successful. Look at what you built. You started this from scratch and built it out to all these offices, etc. That might be defined as success for a lot of people. But for you, you were being literal when you said that business almost killed you.

Literally, yeah. The company that I owned was award-winning. We were at the top of our game. Most of them, so in that world, most of the major clients kind of float around and one of the companies gets them. We got most of the major clients. We represented most of the number one in the category. We were very profitable. I did extraordinarily well for a 20-something-year-old. But at the same time, I knew that there had to be a better way, and there had to be a different way to run a business. And in that one, I felt like I was so entrenched and so stuck in it that I just, I didn't have, it's not fair to say I didn't have the capacity to, like, do what it takes to change how I was doing that. But having met Katie and knowing that I really wanted to be able to spend more time with her and I was tired of that business, I was exhausted doing what I was doing. It was time to transition.

Did you have a concern about your identity, how it was wrapped up in that business? You're known for this and the fact that you would now not be this 20-something that's doing these big things in the world and a celebrated entrepreneur, was that a challenge?

I didn't have a concern because there was a lack of perspective. I didn't understand how dramatic the shift was going to be. Now, we coach entrepreneurs to simplify their operations, to do basically all the things that I didn't understand how to do. That became my obsession over the past 3 decades is How do you make it so you don't die running a business? And when I look back, I know that I felt like I was escaping this, like, challenge and frustration and anxiety. And it was bizarre because the day after I had sold the contracts, the day after nobody had to call me anymore, you know, I think it was like a Wednesday, I woke up and it was this feeling of freefall. It literally was this feeling of like, I can't catch my breath, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't really understand. When you ask, you know, did you struggle with identity, I don't know that I was aware that I was struggling with identity when all that happened, but I knew I was struggling like crazy. It was like to go from this feeling of significance and contribution and doing stuff with people and interaction and community and relationships to literally they're gone. I think one of the highest risks —things that we do as entrepreneurs is exit a business. I've helped tons of friends and clients exit businesses or sell or merge or take on funding or whatever it is. Any event like that, we have to understand it's going to significantly challenge who we think we are and how we feel. Like, to me, one of the most at-risk entrepreneurs is somebody who just sold a big organization.

I personally have had that experience that you're talking about. And recognized that in hindsight too, learning that people get it, stress hormones are addictive. 100%. And you get addicted to these hormones of stress and then when suddenly they're not there or don't need to be there for some reason, that withdrawal, that free fall you talked about can happen and the whole sense of self can really start to shift. So it's a pretty interesting thing. Yeah. So now, okay, you, uh, you're out. I guess you worked on regaining your health.

100%. Yeah, that was like the first objective, was to reverse everything that was going on with me physiologically. And, um, I'm sure you've heard this too, like there was a lot of the things I was told were genetic conditions, like, oh, this is genetic and this is from your family and this is from this. And, and so my goal was, how can I get rid of all of this? How can I get off the drugs? How can I get off of everything? I successfully did that in about a 6 or 8 month period. I went back and told my doctor about it because I'm like, look, you guys are like telling people the wrong thing. You told me this was genetic. It's clearly not genetic. And here's all the steps you have to take. This is what you should share with people. And I remember it was like one of those, those times where I lost faith in, in Western medicine because he told me, it's like, Alex, I can't get people to stop smoking. You think I'm gonna be able to get them to do all this? This is why we prescribe drugs.

Yeah, that's the, the, the resignation in the medical profession is pretty disturbing. Yeah, I get that. So what was your next venture?

Well, I quote unquote retired. It was one of the longest 6 weeks of my life.

It was a whole 6 weeks brutal.

And I wasn't intentional about what I was going to do next. There's like so many things that I help entrepreneurs with now. Like when you exit, like these are the things you should be looking at. I didn't do any of that. And I had this 6-week period where Man, I was trying to do anything to stay busy. I started cutting bonsai trees. I was like going to lectures. I'm like, I need to do something to just be involved with something. And I was driving home one day and there was a house for sale by owner that had been damaged. And so I pulled over and bought the house and came home and told Katie like, I bought a house on the way home today. And she's like, you did what? And so I was gonna rehab this house on my own. I ended up painting one wall. Not even the whole wall, and realizing that wasn't gonna happen. I hired some people to paint it, started figuring out real estate, and within about 6 months, maybe 9 months, we were buying more homes than just about any organization in South Florida. So from the early 2000s up until about 2007 or '08, we built this massive real estate, 3 massive real estate businesses. We were buying and holding homes, we were advertising and marketing to distressed homeowners so that we could help them out of their homes, We were wholesaling those properties, we were rehabbing them, sometimes we were keeping them, and then we were managing a whole bunch of properties.

Wow, so— It's like foreshadowing. Yeah, right into a hairpin turn. So 2008 happens.

Well, in Florida it was 2007. Okay, yeah. You know, the market itself recognized it in 2008, but 2007, in about a 6 or 8 month period, the sales in South Florida went down like 80, 90%. And people don't realize how dramatic it was. It was literally, if there's 100 homes being sold, now there's between 10 and 20. And, you know, during the beginnings of the foreclosure crisis, the Wall Street Journal was publishing this list of the top 10 fastest depreciating zip codes in the US. And we own property in 4 of the top 6. Wow. And so we were in that, like, just eye of the storm. South Florida collapsed. We had properties that lost 90% of value. You know how people say property doesn't lose value? We had condos that were worth $150,000 to $180,000 that ended up being $15,500 at their final sale. Wow. And so we went bankrupt. Yeah, we lost everything. We went from having 8 figures in cash and equity to literally trying to figure out how we were going to pay for stuff.

Geez. Yeah, that's intense. Wow. So that's another look in the mirror, isn't it?

Yeah, it was a time that created a tremendous amount of introspection. It was frustrating. I kept replaying conversations I had with people where probably like a year earlier we had been out in California. My mom said like, hey, you know, Alex, you guys are doing a lot in real estate. Do you feel like you should diversify at all? And I remember like it was yesterday saying, Mom, if we were going to get damaged in real estate, it would be front page news, which it ended up being. And then I remember telling her, we're diversified. We have condos and and triplexes and duplexes and houses and apartments. And, you know, I just wasn't— I wasn't aware of just how bad things could get. And so the market tanked, we ended up going bankrupt. It like ignited this, this need in me to understand what happened. You know, we were doing everything right. We were even doing everything right by investor standards. We had very low loan-to-values, we put a lot of cash into properties, our portfolio wasn't upside down any way.

Were you renting most of the properties?

Like renting them out?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So wouldn't the cash flow keep carrying you? Or like, why would the equity matter if it crashes if you're still getting rents?

Or did rents shrink also? Everything was damaged in South Florida. And what, what people don't understand about that dynamic in that area was we had two hurricanes, 2005 and 2006. So we had this portfolio that was about 40 or 50% damaged. And then redamaged 40 to 60%. So like, we were claims on top of claims, paying double deductibles. We paid out over 7 figures in deductibles. And so when you have a renter in a property and the property is damaged, you have to go find them someplace else to live. That rent goes to cover that place, then you're fixing your place. So we had this cascade of events happen before the foreclosure crisis even hit.

Literal perfect storm. It was brutal. Yeah. Yeah, I had property in Port St. Lucie, so I can remember when that all happened at that time. So yeah, but to me it wasn't a big investment. It was just, you know, bought some place for my parents to live. But I can remember what happened to the property. So how'd you come out of this? Like, bankruptcy's got to be very tough, you know, with all the circumstances. And because you've done a lot of businesses already and never ended up in that position. No, no. You know, you build value, you end up getting at least some exit or some cash out of it. So I guess there's two things. Number one is the business side. How did you maneuver to your next step? How do you come out of that type of a situation and get back on your feet again? And number two, you're married. So what was happening in your relationship, you know, as you're trying to weather this together?

Yeah, we actually had a new baby. Our 15-year-old was, was I think under 1 year old when it all started. And so I got really obsessive about the crisis that we were in. And I started researching the numbers and looking at what, what was it that caused the foreclosure crisis? You know, there was all these challenging mortgages that had been written. And you could kind of tell the future because you knew when the adjustments were going to happen. And you could look at present adjustments and project project what future adjustments were going to be. And at the time, in late 2007, early 2008, the National Association of Realtors, most of the major lenders, mostly experts in the market, were saying that we were in a 6-month to a year-and-a-half correction. So 6 to 18-month correction. I looked at the numbers and built some spreadsheets and built some analysis, and I remember telling Katie, like, we're in a 10-year crisis. This— there's no way this isn't a 10-year crisis. There's no way that we're going to get past this without having to go through all of these really challenging mortgages. And so I started publishing, I started putting stuff out online, I started sending it to whoever would listen. And it was pretty intense. We— I got called Chicken Little, like that, that I was trying to damage the real estate market. What ended up happening was we wrote a product called the Certified Distressed Property Expert designation, the CDP. And in 2008, we taught about 1,500 real estate agents how to work with people in foreclosure.

So this was the new, the new business.

This was the new business. Yeah.

So what's the principle at hand here? Crisis hits, you're swept away with it, as well as many others, but create a new need that you saw.

I think one of the things that I've become absolutely resolute about is that transition creates opportunity. Yeah. And whenever you're in a transition, no matter how painful, no matter how challenging, there's an opportunity there because there's a transition. And so we wrote this course, we put it out there. It became the largest designation in the history of real estate. Well, so 2007, we were bankrupt. 2011, in our first year of eligibility, we were the 21st fastest growing company in the country. Well, 2013, Lori Maggiano, a director at the U.S. Treasury, came into our office, did a broadcast very similar to this with us, and said that we— that the agents we had trained and the product we had put out had pulled forward the recovery by 5 to 7 years. Wow. Yeah. We worked with the FHFA, with Fannie, with Freddie, with Director Lockhart's office at the US Treasury.

So tell me, how do you get past the overwhelming psychological trauma of losing everything after being an entrepreneur for all these years, building up to this point? Losing it all. How do you shake that off and build another thriving business?

There was this one phone call that I remember. There's actually two things that happened. So on the same day, I was sitting in my office and this was after Katie and I had gone to the attorney and he said we were going to go bankrupt. And from that appointment, for like the next several days, we didn't really talk a lot. I don't think I really talked to anybody a lot. I kind of sat at my desk and, and worked but didn't really get anything done. It was like processing what was going on was super challenging, right? And I was sitting at my desk and I looked over at the cabinet and— or at a bookshelf that I had, and there was a copy of Think and Grow Rich. And I went over it, I picked it up off the shelf, and I flipped it open, and it opened directly to the page that says every adversity carries with it the seed of of an equal or greater success. And I remember thinking like, okay, well, this book's been around for a long time. I've read it 50 times. You know, so many people believe in it. If this is true, then we're on to something huge because this adversity is massive. And that day, kind of thinking about that and thinking about how challenging things were for us, I reached out to a friend of mine. His name was, or his name is, Alan Waxman, and he knew me pretty well. And we hadn't come public about anything that was going on with us. And we were really well known. Like when you buy as many houses as we do, Katie was one of the top agents in the real estate world down there. We were well known. So when we went bankrupt, it was pretty big news. And we hadn't told anybody yet. And I remember calling Alan and telling him and I, and I remember how I said it, you know, I explained to him what had gone on, losing the equity, the hurricanes, losing all the cash and not having anything that, you not being able to go forward. And I said, Alan, you know, we realized we didn't have any options. So we went to an attorney and we're going bankrupt. And I was kind of looking for a shoulder to cry on, like, if I'm honest. And I remember there being kind of this long pause. And I was thinking, like, did the phone drop off? What's going on? And then finally he said, Alex, I present to you that you should look at this a different way. I'm like, what do you mean? And he said, well, you're going bankrupt. You should own it. What are you going to do next? And he said, you had choices. You could have continued to run up bills. You could have run this into the ground. You could have run away to Mexico. You could have gone back to California, lived with your family. There's all types of choices you had. You made a decision. Now own the decision and move forward. And my first thought was like, God, what a jerk. Like, I'm being attacked, right? And almost as quickly as I had the thought, I'm like, he's absolutely right. Like, what am I going to do? Just give up? And I got off the phone with Alan and I went and talked to Katie and said like, okay, so we're going bankrupt. Let's do this faster and better than anybody else has. Let's get all the paperwork together. Let's get everything that they asked for. Let's make sure that this goes through and that we don't have any issues so we can move on to whatever's next. Like, first obstacle is let's get through this bankruptcy. And I remember when we took all our paperwork into the attorney's office, we had like 5 4-inch binders with everything that they had asked for, all categorized and tabbed and indexed. And they were like, wow, nobody does this. I'm like, what do you mean nobody does this? It was the instruction sheet that you gave us. He's like, yeah, but Nobody does it. We're like, well, we did it, make this happen, like let's get this over with. As the bankruptcy was being processed, we were starting this new business called the Distressed Property Institute. It was like right at the same time.

Now, extraordinary story and to me, it exemplifies how sometimes it's not the circumstances necessarily that are going to shape you, it's your response to them. That response was everything and how you were able to be the phoenix that comes out of the ashes of this thing and create what you created, it's an inspiration. I know very few entrepreneurs that have been entrepreneurs for any length of time, 10, 20 years or more, that haven't faced— maybe it's not as extreme as what you're talking about, but they've all looked over the edge. People hear the idea about mindset or understand Think and Grow Rich, but when you're living it, it really does make the difference between saying, "I went home and lived with my parents and became whatever," as compared to saying you built what you built. So what are you doing now?

[Speaker] We run a company called Simple Operations, and we show entrepreneurs how to do all the things I did not know how to do in the companies I owned. And you know, it's interesting, Patrick, you said there's two parts to that, you know, there's the business and personal of going bankrupt. One of the things that I left out that I don't know that we would have had the same outcomes had we not done it is Katie at the time required us to every night name 3 things we were grateful for. And this was before like all the scientific research into gratitude and all like the, there's a groundswell around that. But I think that doing that every night, even on nights where I was like, I don't want to say anything, we would still make it happen. That really helped in like making this transition out of that bankruptcy place. Like focusing on what was going right helped a ton. And I think when you look at entrepreneurs who go through, who like you said, look over the edge, it's that focus on what's going right. It's focusing on what you really want. It's focusing on, on what's going well for you that gets you through those times.

Yeah. And I think that's those types of practices. They almost sound gratuitous, but the reality is they're extremely meaningful. Extremely. They're life-changing.

They're life-changing if you let them be.

Yeah. So what's your fulfillment like? Because you've got such a past and you've got so much experience and, you know, so much that takeaways, you know, we learn more from our failures many times, right?

I think that's where we learn most.

That's where we learn the most.

So but you have to stop failing eventually. Yeah. Oh yeah. That whole fail forward, fail fast. That's a good getting started strategy. You just don't want to extend that for your whole life.

Yeah. To your point though, you have to learn something and then put it on the ground and actually say, "Okay, now I've evolved or emerged," as compared to repeating the same mistakes over and over again. What's it like for you now training other entrepreneurs and coaching them?

It's incredibly fulfilling. It's a lot of fun. I think I have this view on the world that entrepreneurs are the only consistent source of positive of human evolution, and we always will be. If you look at this room around us, everything we're using, sitting in, talking with, you know, the technology that we're surrounded by, it's all been created by one of us. And being able to support entrepreneurs, helping them understand themselves better, helping them get the help that they actually need, helping them learn how to ask for help, and then showing them how to put hardcore structure in their business so they can actually have the freedom that they want, is incredibly fulfilling. You know, I think as, as a coach, as a consultant, one of the things that we all do is we help the person we used to be. Yeah. And, you know, I look at entrepreneurs and I know what it's like to be working 20-hour days. I know what it's like to not take time off. I know what it's like to, to have responsibilities like a family and a spouse and kids and not have time for those things. And I'm of the firm belief that you can have it all. And I think as entrepreneurs, if we don't declare what we want and we're not clear on what we want, then we end up in this place where we're constantly sacrificing. And I think one of the things that, that really needs to shift in the world of entrepreneurship is this synonymous sacrifice with success. You know, I think in the early days of a business, yes, you have to sacrifice and hustle, and there's a lot of things that you have to do, but you don't have to carry those behaviors into growing a team, growing a company, having a large organization. Organization. In fact, when you let go of those behaviors, that's how you grow a team faster. That's how you grow a real business in the fastest way.

I think you're a shining example at this point. Your story is very compelling. A lot of people, I think, talk about things like this abstractly, but it's really different. The feeling that you get from you is really different because you lived it. And, uh, and in living it, you know, now you're able to create value for other people so that they don't have to live it. Yeah, which It's really, I think, a very noble purpose. So, I appreciate you taking the time. Any last thoughts before we tie up?

Yeah, I think we're at a really unique time in history right now. I think when you look at everything that's going on around us and all the challenges that we're facing and all the frustration that we're facing and there's so much conflict, it feels like conflict is at a peak, at least for my lifetime. I don't know if you feel the same way. I do. You know, I've done rigorous study on history, and when you look at any crisis that the world, any country, any organization has ever dealt with, the most likely solution to, and the consistent solution to that throughout history, has been someone just like you and I creates a solution, gets it into momentum, and takes the world with us. Yeah. And I have this massive confidence that regardless of what we're facing and what is going on in the world, that entrepreneurs are gonna get us through this. And I think for anybody who's watching this who is an entrepreneur or thinking about being an entrepreneur, if you even have the thought that you should be doing this, then the answer is absolutely yes. And the world needs us as entrepreneurs more than it ever has. And that doesn't mean you have to be out working on the solution for the world, but if you're running a business and you're employing people and you're helping people around you and you're creating progress and creating momentum, that's how we get out of it. Everything that we're dealing with today.

Really great thoughts, and I agree with you. I appreciate it. Very inspiring conversation. So, so thanks for being here, and thanks for what you do.

No, it's my pleasure, Patrick. Thanks for having me.

Gemma, you traveled a long way, so thanks for making the trip and showing up.

It's such a pleasure to be here.

Thank you. So let's start with you and your background. You know, you are a psychology expert, and you work with, I think, interesting people. People, but what got you started in all this?

Really what got me started was I had an early start to trauma in my life, and as a result of that, I spent a lot of time struggling with my mental health. I was soul-searching, trying to figure out what my sense of purpose was, what I wanted to do in the world. I ended up finding myself in Guyana. Guyana? Yeah, it was totally away from home. It was, yeah, it was, it was such an adventure. Heading down there. And it was there that I realized I, I wanted to do something to somehow make an impact on the world. And so I ended up going to university to study international development. And in that program, I had a recommendation from a professor that I go get a degree in something practical. So psychology is what I started with, and I just— I fell in love. Part of it was because I was trying to figure out my own struggle. Yeah. And then And also it just felt like I understood it. Like it was, it was like I had come home in a way. And so I found that passion and stayed in it ever since.

So you got out of school and then what did you think you wanted to do for work? I really didn't know.

So I tried a number of different things. I worked for a lot of different organizations. I was kind of trying to find the place that would feel like I belonged. And I ended up opening up a private practice. I did some consulting work for universities. Kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall. Yeah. And one of my very first clients was an entrepreneur. And it was after that session when I gave some suggestions and advice and that person took it and ran with it and came back and had results that, that was what I realized I really wanted to do, was to help the people that were out in the world innovating and becoming creative and solving problems, help them figure out their psychology so they could do their work in the world. In a way that came from a healthy place instead of some of the other reasons why we're driven to do what we do.

Well, it's an interesting connection. I mean, maybe I'm biased because I'm an entrepreneur, but I feel like entrepreneurs solve the world's problems, and the biggest problems in the world really need to be solved by entrepreneurs because I think some of our political leaders are ill-equipped. And it's interesting that you kind of landed there and said, wow, you know, this person came in At first, when you had an entrepreneur show up and kind of have a session with you, were you equating his or her performance as an entrepreneur with the session, or was it just about them as a human and just working, you know, as whatever their difficulties might be in that respect?

In the beginning, it was just the human. It was just another human that showed up on the couch, needed a little bit of help. But after time, I noticed a pattern. That there's actually a particular psychology to entrepreneurs that makes them equipped to do the remarkable work that they do in the world, but also it makes their mental health a little more complicated. And I was fascinated by that. I felt like I was actually working almost with a different type of brain than the other people that were coming in. So I do think that the results they were getting were because of how they were wired, but also the problems they were struggling with. Was because how they were wired as well. And that— I loved the intersection of that.

So at this point, with, you know, it's been some years now that you've been working in this realm, what are those differences? How are entrepreneurs wired differently?

Well, in the beginning, I think that often it does come from a place of struggle. There's some interesting research around how the adversity that we experience changes the way that our nervous system responds. It changes the the strengths that we have in our brains, the ways that we start to solve problems. So a lot of times what actually drives an entrepreneur comes from a place of challenge and of struggle.

What do you mean by challenge though? Like from their past or?

Yes. Yeah, either from their past or sometimes it's multigenerational. So we know about 3 generations back, so traumas or adversity that your grandparents experienced, they've passed that down. So sometimes it's your own childhood, sometimes it's your parents, or your grandparents, but there's these really difficult things that they go through, and as a result, their brains begin to function in a different way. So sometimes they tend to have more of an instinct rather than going into something really focused on the rational and the logical. There is an instinct that's there. So what are you saying?

Yeah, we're logical and irrational, but that's why we do what we do.

But sometimes, I mean, I think you have to be a little crazy sometimes to take the risks and to really have that sense of a vision that nobody else has seen yet, or to solve a problem in a really unique way, to be able to connect dots that don't really make sense but somehow work together. And that's where the innovation comes from. That's where the creativity comes from. But it is also more complicated, right? There tends to be more challenges with focus. They tend to be, at the same time, very distractible. But also can be incredibly laser-focused on a passion to the extent that they'll work for 12 hours and forgot that they didn't eat that day. Right. Or sometimes it's worse. Sometimes they'll be so devoted to whatever the mission is that their relationships start to fall apart or their, their health is damaged. So it's, it's that laser focus and it's that passion and determination and grit and resilience that pushes, that evolves our society forward. But at the same time, those are also the weakest links within them because it causes a great amount of challenge in their own lives.

You said something interesting that's a very contemporary thought in that there can be sort of intergenerational trauma. Yeah. So I just want to make sure that what I think you mean by that is what I— is what you do mean by that. Yes. In a sense of saying that in, I'll just say, my lineage, you know, or an entrepreneur's lineage or anybody's lineage, lineage, that maybe a couple of generations prior to them, maybe they're Holocaust survivors, maybe they are people who survived some type of a great economic scarcity or something. And you're saying that that is passed genetically vertically where the person who didn't live through it, who's in today's world, is still impacted by the experience of it? Is that what you're saying? And if so, can you maybe expound on that a little bit?

Yes, absolutely. There's— well, when I'm working with people, I like to think about what's happening for them consciously, subconsciously, and unconsciously. And when we're looking at multi-generational trauma, often entrepreneurs are driven by something unconscious. They don't always know what drives them, and often it comes from traumas that their ancestors had to try to figure out how to resolve.

Now, is that a generally agreed-upon premise that, that that, you know, traumas from previous generations impact the individual today? I mean, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago, I don't think anybody was suggesting such a thing. So, so is that new?

It's fairly new. Yeah, it's emerged recently. I would say, right, in the last 10 or 15 years, we've been studying epigenetics more, trying to understand how, how things are passed on, how much is nature and how much is nurture. And the more that we uncover, the more we start to to understand that there are, there are forces that influence us that we don't always realize influence us. Yes. I think it was Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, that said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you'll call it fate. Right. And so this is about how do we bring up those unconscious patterns so that we're not driven, for example, by fear of scarcity, which made sense for our grandparents to be afraid of, but doesn't make sense anymore for us. And sometimes we end up becoming afraid of these paper tigers. They're, they're not tigers that are chasing us in this generation, and yet they still drive us, right?

And that is really interesting as you start to try to understand motivations, I guess. Yeah. You know, I had a friend who said to me, who works with entrepreneurs and CEOs, and his premise was— and tell me if you agree with this, if this is sort of some of what you're alluding to— he said the limitation of the company is the trauma of the CEO. And that if you have unresolved trauma, if somebody's trying to lead a company, that I guess sometimes maybe the fuel that's driving them maniacally, maybe sometimes not in a healthy way, but gets them to achieve. But at the same time also is a limitation on the total organization. Do you agree with that perspective? 100%.

It's such a paradox that the things that drive entrepreneurs to do remarkable things are also the things that hold them back and that cause the most amount of struggling and suffering. It's almost— one of the things we say in this unconscious work is that we repeat what we don't repair. And so if there's a fear, let's say, in the CEO, let's say a fear of success, there's going to be this continual perpetuation of this pattern of maybe getting stuck or unconsciously making choices that are sabotaging himself or the company because there's this pattern, this trauma that hasn't been resolved yet. And it often gets passed down as well. This— whatever our core wounds are, they follow us everywhere. They follow us in our friendships and in our companies and the way that we relate to our team members, even the problems that we solve. It's all driven by these core fears and these core wounds.

So is that the kind of stuff that you get in there and try to deal with when you're working with entrepreneurs? Yes, yeah. And you do that— you say that with a smile and like— I love it. Yeah, that you love it. It's like— Wow, that's kind of like, you know, getting into people's closets and kind of, you know, emptying them out. It's got to be a special type of person that wants to do that. So tell me what that process is like and how long does it typically take for somebody to get results from the type of work you do?

The process usually looks like getting to know the psyche of whoever it is that's there. What's going on? What's driving them? What fears motivate them? What are some of the traumas from their past and from the generations before? Before them. And also, what are they aware of? Like, what are they willing to work with? A lot of times entrepreneurs are actually afraid to do this work because they are afraid they're going to lose their edge, that it's, it's those fears or it's those traumas that have driven them to do extraordinary things. And a lot of times we get results and we get accolades. We— there's sometimes there's an identity that's formed around that, and it can be really scary to begin to work through that and to evolve identity. So it's a lot of assessing what's going on, where is it coming from. It's a little bit like Sherlock Holmes, trying to figure out how do all these dots connect and what are the clues. And also, where are we willing to begin? Where is there some, some sense of, I really want this to change? And unfortunately, it's usually when something terrible has happened. Maybe they're on the edge of divorce, or they've just got a diagnosis, or I've worked with, with executives and leaders before where their company is like if you don't fix this, you're out. And so it's this being taken to an edge where there's not really a lot more choice, and there's a willingness to go into some of those places that feel a little bit more shadowy.

Do the majority of people that come to you, are they up against something that kind of— they're coming to you out of more desperation than inspiration, you know, as compared to people who show up and say, hey, I, you know, I want to try to improve So what's the, what's the ratio for you as far as those who come for one reason versus the other?

I would say about 30% are up against something really challenging. They realize that everything they've been doing up into this point isn't working anymore and they need to do something different. But thankfully psychology and mental health is becoming hotter in culture, and so it's almost like everybody wants to have their own shrink now.

As compared to having to hide the fact that they saw one, right?

Exactly, exactly. Like, it's not a liability anymore. In fact, if you don't work on your mind, it's a liability now in this world. Yeah, true. So I love that more and more people are not waiting until things are really broken. And that's to answer your other question around how long— it depends. If they're waiting until things are really broken, often it's longer because we have to repair and we have to stabilize, and then we have to go and figure out where did the problem come from and what are the patterns, and then we need to do that work.

Do you call it therapy or something else nowadays?

Yeah, there's a lot of different things. Some people do call it therapy. I do a lot of coaching and mentoring with people and some consulting for different organizations. Yes, it's kind of all the above.

Yes. So how does something like this— so let's say you have an entrepreneur, business leader, CEO, what have you, shows up. What's the process look like as far as working with someone like you in order to look at past traumas or behaviors that are deleterious to the goals of the individual. What kind of a process is it? Because I heard you say earlier about them being on the couch. And is it literally that? They come in, you kind of get a little background on them, put them on the couch, and start having a conversation? What's it like?

For some people, it's very much that. We give them some tea. Help them feel comfortable, ask them a lot of questions, and start. Yeah, for some people we work online, for other people I come to them. But really my, my whole focus is what's going on in the external world, and then what does that reflect in the internal world? So what's happening consciously, subconsciously, unconsciously that's creating the results that they don't want anymore? And then once we've assessed that, figuring out what do we do at all three levels of the mind to create alignment, because when there's when there's mis— just like in a company, if there's misalignment in the company, there's energy leaks and there's distractions and there's struggles. It's the same thing in our internal system. When there's misalignment between the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious, it feels like we're battling ourselves. Yeah. And so I love figuring out how do we align that so that the inner world is aligned and the outer world can therefore align as well.

Can you, of course, without disclosing who a person might be, Give me like a, you know, a case study. Like, here's an entrepreneur came in, this was his or her circumstances, this is the kind of stuff we work through, and this was a result. Just so we go from kind of this abstract conversation to looking like, how does this really work in the world?

Yes, yeah, for sure. One of them that just comes to mind is a really simple and obvious one, is an entrepreneur, and she was doing fairly well in the world, but she was really burning out, and she was burning out everybody she worked with. So when we went in, we started to do some of this work around where the perfectionism was coming from, where the, like, the never enoughness, that drive to just continue working and working and working. What we discovered is that when she was really little, she had this experience where she came home from school all day, and one day she was just like bright-eyed and excited and this sense of like pride beaming, and she gave her 95% test to her father, and her father's face fell, and he was— just looked utterly disappointed in her and said, "Where's the other 5%?" So from that, that moment, she had the sense of, "I have to be perfect in order to be loved." So not only was she driven towards perfectionism, and anything less than absolutely exceptional, 100%, was not good enough, she had that same expectation for everybody in her life. So her partner could never be good enough, her children were never good enough, The people she worked with were never good enough. The ideas were never good enough. This sort of like, she was haunted really by this feeling of not enoughness. And she was driving herself so hard to try to repair something she could never repair. She could never go back to the past and change that moment. But that little one inside of her was making all the decisions.

So it's interesting when she came to you, did she, recognize that she was a perfectionist, or was it just saying, "Hey, people around me are burning out. I'm feeling burned out, and maybe I'm the problem. I want to find that out." Like, what was point A? Was point A saying, "I've got a problem," or point A saying, "I don't know what's going on here. I can't understand it"? Because a lot of people, I think, have blind spots, but they're showing up saying, "Okay, I'm trying to figure this out. In this particular example, was it a complete blind spot, or did she know at least that she was a perfectionist and driving people crazy?

It was a blind spot for her. She didn't understand why everybody around her was so discontent. And when they would try to offer her feedback, it would go through a filter that would say, but I need to do this, like, we need to be this good in order to succeed. So when we're little, success looks like securing safety, love, and belonging. And when we're older, success looks like whatever that is— building, building a great company or innovating a wonderful idea or having a healthy family. Like, success is different. But when we're little, these experiences that we have where we don't have safety, love, and belonging, those are the places where the wounds live. And then it just gets translated into an adult problem as we grow up.

But by identifying, like, okay, so she went through a certain amount of therapy with you. She remembered this thing happening in her childhood. How old was she?

She would have been 5 when this happened.

Wow. So was she able to actually remember that, or was there hypnosis or something involved? How did you get to that point of time, 5 years old? Oh, that happened.

Yes, that's a very good question. It depends on the person. So for this person in particular, it was connecting dots because that pattern had been persistent throughout her whole childhood. It was— there was one particular memory which was the core wound, the original core wound, but that feeling of, I'll only give you love and attention if you're perfect, had been there her whole time, the whole time she would have been growing up.

Well, was her father still alive at this point? Yes. So did she have to go back and have a conversation about that? How did she heal this? How did she finally say— like, is it enough to say, oh my god, that's what happened, okay, I'm okay now? Or, I mean, because How does it change the actual experience in her body that she identified a moment that, you know, that inflicted a wound?

There's a lot of layers to it. So the first one is always we, we can heal it ourselves. We don't, we don't need anybody else to. So she had to go back to her own little self and, and, and bring that little one safety, love, and belonging. So it's almost like some inner child work, going and understanding what that was actually like for for her when she was growing up and offering that little one compassion. When we have these, these parts of us when we're little that kind of get split off, they can come in and they can run the show. So it's like a 5-year-old is running a multi-million dollar company. It's not a good scene. So we need to like go in and work with these parts of ourselves that have been wounded and bring integration and healing. Sometimes it can also involve looking at like going to other people and having conversations about what it was like. But more so, I find it's interesting to look at, yeah, but why was he like that? Like, what happened to him, right? And really going back through the generations where somehow— where he learned that he needed to be perfect in order to secure safety, love, and belonging. Because all parents are doing the best they can, right? Really, we just— we repeat again what we don't repair. So he was just repeating what he had been taught. And at some point in his history, likely he had been taught that he had to be perfect in order to survive.

So you said she had kids also, right? Yes. So then she had to correct her behavior with her children also. Was she repeating the pattern?

Exactly. Yeah, so she had to go to her children. She identified it and she named it for them and she apologized and she repaired and she talked about how she was going to do things differently. And also when we heal these traumas and we bring that unconscious up to consciousness, we have more freedom. There's more of that, like Viktor Frankl talked about, It's the stimulus and the response, and if we can create more space between that because we have more awareness of, "This is my 5-year-old reacting rather than my wise, present parenting self in this moment," we can choose something different. So she was over time able to choose different things for herself and how she related to herself and also with her organization and her family too.

What was the timeline, at least in this particular case, between the time she came in to see you and the time that she kind of got this thing handled? For her, it was 7 months.

That's pretty fast. It's fast. This is one of the things I love too about entrepreneurs. Like, that's part of this instinct, this driven personality. Entrepreneurs move fast. They have to. They have to be innovating and they have to be flexible and they have to be able to move really quickly. It's based on some really interesting philosophy around having a hunter brain versus a farmer brain. So that hunter brain is the one that is going after. Things. So they go after their healing with as much enthusiasm as they go after their projects and their vision and their dream and their ambitions.

That's interesting. So basically entrepreneurs are hunters, not, not farmers.

Exactly. It sounds like. Yeah, exactly.

And I guess though, when a hunter's got to work with a bunch of farmers, it can become problematic.

Very, yes, because the brains actually really do operate in different ways. And so there's a different way of seeing the world. And so I think that's some of the things that I'm really interested in as well, is how do we build bridges of communication and understanding in organizations but also in the world? Because the world doesn't often understand that entrepreneurial mind. It's not set up to support it. Most of our systems and our education system certainly, as well as a lot of our employment systems, they're just not set up for that kind of brain because we don't always understand it. But if there's understanding, then I think it can really be valued and appreciated for the engine of evolution that it is.

Well, it's interesting you say that because I imagine too is that regulators and people who are bureaucrats in essence, they have a very different brain. A government employee who's trying to regulate the brain of an entrepreneur or the spirit of an entrepreneur, those are— talk about mismatch. Incompatible things, which can breed a lot of frustration also, you know, for an entrepreneur, right? So in many respects, I'm wondering, I guess here's the question that I'm aiming at, is we have this sort of past childhood trauma, etc., all of which, you know, is impacting performance and experience day to day. But I, at least for me personally, also I have found in my adult life as an entrepreneur having to do battle against, you know, regulators, you know, and bureaucrats who literally, you know, want to— want you to go out and fight with your hands tied behind your back. Is that something that you have to work with people on to say, hey, you know, there's— that frustration can boil over, I guess, in other parts of your life or maybe into the business that you're running. So is that something that you also address? Yes, absolutely.

Well, the interesting thing about the entrepreneurial mind is it's, it's set up to disrupt and to innovate and to be creative and to solve problems, all these remarkable things. But you put that brain in a systematized world that has regulations and rules that need to be followed, and sit at your desk for this amount of time or sign this number of papers, like, it just doesn't work. And so when you're— when you have that mismatch, that's where a lot of the entrepreneurial mental health struggle comes in, because the environment doesn't support that brain. And so that's where we see a lot of, a lot more addiction. There's also a lot more depression and anxiety, a lot more stress and burnout. And it's 78% of entrepreneurs are impacted by mental health, whereas only 48% of the general population is. Oh wow. So it's remarkable how much more they have to deal with, part of because of how their brain is, and the other part is because the system, this, and the society really just doesn't understand it and celebrate it.

It's interesting that you kind of have this macro data, you —you know, to kind of say entrepreneurs versus, you know, general population. What about divorce rates in entrepreneurs versus general population? Are they different or similar?

That's a very good question. I know that they're different and they're higher. I don't know the exact numbers.

Exactly how much, but it is impacted for sure. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it wouldn't be a surprise, I guess, you know, based on everything that you're saying. Right. Any things that you see as a concern consistency as far as when you're making recommendations for these entrepreneurs that you see as— do you call them clients or patients? Clients. So these clients that you see, is there standardized or maybe use the word typical recommendations that somebody who's watching right now could say, yeah, you know, pretty much in general, this is something that maybe you can do, this is this is something you can do and this is something you could do.

The first one I would say is learn how to regulate your nervous system. So entrepreneurs are generally very resilient. They can put themselves into remarkably challenging situations and they can be dysregulated for long periods of time. If you imagine—

dysregulated meaning kind of sympathetically biased, or— yes.

Okay. Yeah. So they're in that, they're in that fight-or-flight response. They're going, they're going, they're going so hard, and so they can easily burn out. So understanding Am I regulated? Am I dysregulated? And how do I get myself back into regulation? So there are some people that enjoy breathing techniques more so, or walking in nature. Entrepreneurs, because they tend to be more occipital lobe dominant, things that are forward moving in nature tend to be more soothing than doing like a closed-eye meditation, for example. So really understanding how does your brain work and what works well for you in terms of getting your nervous system regulated. I think is the beginning. The next step I would say is try to understand what drives you. Are you driven by fear or by love? I think those are the sort of the categories of what we're driven by. And so if you're driven by fear, where? Where did this fear come from and who does it belong to? Is it you in the present? Is it you when you're 5? Was it your grandfather? What are you driven by and how can you begin to shift your orientation from fear to love? Because if we're driven by fear, we'll sacrifice what really matters most.

It's interesting trying to get to the root of what drives you. I imagine many times it's probably not an easy thing to do, right?

No, no, it's not. I think it requires introspection and sometimes slowing down, which can be hard, but also really understanding what's the why that's there. Because if your why is I want, I want to innovate. I want to have a meaningful impact on the world. I want to be a healthy and vibrant human. I want to have a thriving relationship. If your why is strong enough, you'll figure out what the problem is. That's, that's what entrepreneurs are brilliant at, right? And so just taking that brilliant problem-solving and turning it inwards instead of outwards.

Is there a common difficulty? And so I think those were great suggestions. Is there a common difficulty where somebody may say, well, what do you want? And them saying, "You know, I'm really not sure." You know, because a lot of people think, "Oh, well, yeah, I want this or I want that." But when it really comes down to it, I have found that, you know, people many times aren't really very sure what they want. And that's why they kind of don't have, I guess, right action or aligned actions with trying to get to a certain outcome because they're not really clear on it. Is that something you work on?

One of the things I find is that I talk about there being a difference between your true self and your constructed self. So your true self is like the home of your soul. It's your aliveness, your alignment, your values. That's your true self. And then as we go through the world, we experience trauma because everybody is traumatized by being human. We all have hard things that we need to go through and difficult experiences. But as a result of that, we develop a constructed self. So the constructed self is often where people people get muddled. They maybe don't really know who they are, but they know what their father expected of them. And they don't know who they are, but they know they wanted to try to help their mother, or they know that they wanted to make their coach proud. Or there's all these stories about things that we're trying to do to survive in the world.

That conjures up a phrase I keep hearing nowadays, and, you know, maybe tell me if you're familiar with it and, and what your thoughts are. But I keep hearing people talk about imposter syndrome.

What is that? Yes. So imposter syndrome is a feeling of, I'm going to be found out. I'm not good enough. I don't really belong here. Eventually somebody is going to connect the dots and I'm going to be kicked out or I'm going to be humiliated. Basically, I fooled them all.

They all think I'm this great corporate CEO or entrepreneur, but when they— yeah, but you're— so basically there's a gap between how you think people socially see you versus how you really feel or who you really feel you are. How common is that?

How common is it? I think it's incredibly common when there's not an anchoring in your authentic self and when you're not living in alignment with that, because it's almost like we're going through the world with all these masks on. We know that people are not loving us or approving of us or appreciating us for who we really are. It's the mask. And so there's this fear of what happens when the mask false and then they see the real me, which is actually why I think there's been such a drive for authenticity and integrity and congruence in the entrepreneurial world because it's not sustainable to keep running at a pace and wearing these masks and trying to perform in order to secure safety or love or belonging or a sense of purpose or fulfillment. I think there's a knowing, there's a deeper knowing that we need to be generating this creativity and this problem solving from a place of authenticity and knowing who we are.

Well, you used a phrase that got my attention. You talked about the constructive— constructed self.

So what does that mean? Well, I'll give you a personal example. So when I came into the world, I had a lot of interpersonal trauma really early in my life. And so from that, I learned that in order to be safe, I need to please others. I need to sacrifice myself. It doesn't really matter what I need or want, as long as the people outside of me are okay, then I'm gonna be okay. So what that meant for me in business in early days is that I was just, I was like a yes for everything. I was always trying to make other people happy. I really didn't know what I wanted. I would just sort of do the next thing and it ended up feeling like I was this ship that was constantly off course and having to course correct because I would be tugged in whatever direction of the next person that I was either working with or, or being inspired by or taught by. So it's this process of trying to understand how did you cope What were your defense mechanisms and survival strategies, and how do you heal whatever the wound was that took you there and come back to yourself so that you can make aligned decisions? You know what's a yes and you know what's a no for you.

It's really interesting, and I find the subject of identity to be probably one of the most complex things I could think about over time. And this whole idea of identity, and it's a deep rabbit hole, let's just say that. But the conscious, maybe I'm creating a persona, but it's, you know, and you know it's not you. It's like, you know, an actor getting on the stage saying, hey, I'm supposed to play this role, I'm gonna play the role, but you know, I'm really just the actor. Then how many times do people, you know, because I get the sense that when we were talking about the things you talk about, like imposter syndrome or the constructed you, that the person maybe is not so much aware that they're just playing a role because they're not in touch with their true identity. Is that sort of accurate? It's very accurate. You know, I used to say to people, if you have contradictions, the way to know it is if your sense of life is, "Where I am is not who I am." When you feel that experience, that's telling you that you have some contradictions in the way that you're living versus what your true values are. So how do you work with someone to try to understand who they really are? Because that's not an easy thing to do.

Not an easy thing to do at all. A lot of it comes into, I think, actually body awareness. I think our body holds a lot of truth. And again, often entrepreneurs, in order to survive, they just sort of almost cut off from the body and they work a lot with the mind and pushing through. So a lot of it is coming back to What makes your body feel alive? There's gonna be times where you go into a conversation and maybe you leave that conversation feeling absolutely exhausted. Chances are pretty good you were in a persona. You're in a role during that conversation, which is why you feel so drained, because it's a performance, right? Versus just a natural expression. That's just you radiating your energy rather than trying to create a specific experience for another person. It's a lot more work. So noticing what's happening in your body, what's happening in your breath. Do you feel more or less alive or energized? Sometimes it's also about going back to times in your life when you could easily access that state of flow or when you were little, those things you were naturally drawn to before the world told you what you should be drawn to. Those, I think, those are kind of like the secret vaults that I like to begin to open and see what comes out.

The concept of body awareness is brilliant as far as for identifying, which is something I haven't heard before. It's not a typical response to that particular question as far as how do you get— there's maybe all these exercises that someone can do to write down their values and sort these things out and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there's, I guess, the book by the name, and I think the title says it all, but the body really does keep score. Yes. Right? Yes. In some way, your body knows the real you.

Your body does know the real you, and I believe especially for entrepreneurs, 'cause they tend to have more of that intuitive, instinctual connection. Like if you imagine a hunter going into a forest, they're analyzing a little, but they're sensing. They're noticing, like, what are they feeling? And it's often quite difficult to describe it, but the more connection we have to the body, I think the more clarity we have about who we really are, the places that we really belong, the experiences that feel aligned. It's like your body will give you your yes and your no if you spend enough time taking care of it and listening to it.

Well, one entrepreneur friend of mine who's quite successful said that his gut has never been wrong. Yes. He said when I've denied my gut and overrode it by thinking, he said it's always been a bad decision. Yes. And so my gut feeling, like I'm meeting this person, I'm interviewing them, they look great on paper, I want to hire them, I think I should, but my gut's telling me not to do it. Right. And every time I've said no, you know, I'm going to ignore that, it ends up being a bad hire. Yes. That's just one type of a scenario. So I think that's part and parcel to what you're talking about here. Pay attention to what your body's telling you. Yeah. And I like what you're saying as far as the energy side of it, because I always thought that energy management is more important than time management. At least it always has been for me. And finding what drains you, and that probably tells you a little bit about who you are. And you have to pay attention that if things are draining your energy, it's not in alignment with who you are. Exactly. It makes so much sense, but I don't think enough people are really talking about it.

I don't think so either. And I believe that when we can look at that idea of there are different people in the world— so if we take that hunter-farmer example, farmers, it works well to let the mind lead, to observe what happens to the crops when you plant these seeds, and at this time of year, what do we need to do at this specific time? Like, that works well for a farmer. It doesn't work so well for a hunter because we can't predict it. It's not as easy to control for those things that hunters are really good at. Hunters need to go in knowing that their biggest asset is their body, is their intuition, is their instinct, and trusting that even if there's a battle between body and mind, that the body probably knows what the right move is.

Yeah, you know, because emotions, what's their role? You know, I'm feeling awkward, I'm feeling stressed, I'm feeling unhappy, I'm feeling depressed. It's all telling us things too, right? Even if I don't know the source of it, it's got to tell me something is off, right? And again, I think entrepreneurs are very clever, right? And they can weave all kinds of rationalizations for things to justify a certain thing they want to do. So do you find that to be typical? And how do you cure them of that?

It takes a lot of patience. Yes, because a lot of times there's been this conditioning to go up to the head. I remember the first time I asked an entrepreneur, he was a very successful entrepreneur, had multiple businesses and was a high-performance athlete. The first time I asked him to connect to his body, he looked at me sideways and he was like, "What?" And then I found out a year later that he just was like answering my question even though he didn't know what I was talking about. So patience and persistence and also being able to touch into what matters. Like again, the why is so important. If I understand why you're here, I can describe why this particular thing is going to be powerful for what motivates you.

So you're drawing me into your fascination with all this. I love it. Which is great. It's because I'm following where you're going, and it's like, wow, this is really, really pretty fascinating. So I could see why— what an unusual choice of focus for a career as a psychologist. I suspect you don't get bored very often. No, it's—

I mean, it's always an adventure. That's the thing too about this brain, is it's like adventurous and risk-taking, always searching for something new. I think I have this brain as well, so it works well for me to be paired up with this person, this particular type of challenge, because it's so stimulating and everything is a mystery. And also the impact is extraordinary. So if you can, like you mentioned before, if you get a leader's mind right the entire system changes. And so the impact is exponential when we can allow an entrepreneur to have aligned psychology and then go out into the world and work their magic. Extraordinary things happen. The reverse is true too. If you have a leader that is in fear and has toxic communication patterns or is maybe repeating traumas from the past with everybody in their life, their ripple effect is massive as well.

Yeah, I've seen leaders who could be great leaders who, when they get unhealthy, they become tyrants. Yes, yes. And it's a tragic thing, really, to observe. And I guess, you know, going full circle here all the way back to the beginning, you've got the entrepreneur who's got the wound, who's driven to success, who has now a bunch of people working in an organization, has a bunch of customers who depend on the organization, but because of their wounds and whatever some of the maniacal drive might be, they end up now going through a divorce or losing their children. And next thing you know, they start getting angry, they get depressed, they get all those things. And instead of being this great visionary person who's driven and built this whole thing, they become a tyrant that starts to basically take all the light away from everything they've been shining on, right? So I, so now I'm, I'm, I guess I'm seeing life, uh, you know, through your eyes, recognizing what the impact could be if you could prevent such a thing.

It really is extraordinary. And the tragedy about that is I think that that population, the entrepreneurial population, is underserved in the world of psychology because I don't think we've spent enough time understanding the unique psychology of it. A lot of times because they're the ones that are branded as ADHD or neurodivergent, and they do have unique brains, but it's not a pathology. Any human who's misunderstood or misdiagnosed or not supported is going to go down that spiral. If we can intervene earlier, if we can help the world understand this unique personality and this unique brain and why we need it to thrive, we need it for them, we need it for their organizations, but we need it for the world. Better problems come from better entrepreneurs that are in a better place psychologically.

Yeah, well, Gemma, you convinced me that, that this needs to be a, you know, a field of service. So are there many people out there like you, or are there— is there peer groups of psychologists who say, hey, we want to specialize in this area with these types of brains and these types of people, or are you kind of like a trailblazer blazing here?

I, I think there's a few of us that are trailblazing. There's a couple people that I know that have that same passion and curiosity that I have, but I think this is one of the opportunities that we have as a world, really, is to figure out how do we bring people together that can understand and support this, this really unique kind of human that I think we really need to protect.

Yeah, well, it's, it's a great specialty, and You know, you said you're entrepreneurial, so maybe you'll create the organization and the curriculum. Of course, that's where my brain goes. That's a great idea. Of course it is.

I love it.

But this has been a really stimulating conversation, and I know you're on to something that's really important here. So I appreciate you coming and sharing it all and spending your time here.

Thank you. I'm so grateful for the opportunity and for the work you're doing to get this this word out into the world.

To learn more about how to get your entrepreneurial brain working for you, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it.

Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. It's better to be different than it is to be better.

Well, I want to be the best artist in the world.

Well, I'll never get there, but how can I be a different artist? And when I'm different, I stand out.