Dan Sullivan strategic coach: The Hidden Weapon Against Stagnation: The Freedom Cycle Explained!

If I was on a stranded island and I needed someone to keep me in a constant state of thinking accurately and teaching me stuff and just having amazing conversations, insights about the world, the planet, progress, achievement, it would certainly be Dan Sullivan. I just love the way he thinks. He's amazing. So for those of you that are new to genius, Dan and his wife Babs are the founders of Strategic Coach. Dan's been coaching entrepreneurs for 40 years, so he is really the world's leading coach for the most successful entrepreneurs. I don't think anyone even has a track record that even compares to Dan's. So I've been a member of Strategic coach for over 17 years. It is awesome. It's probably the best money I've ever spent on growth and progress, and it's changed my life. I don't think this would even exist had I not been a member of Strategic Coach. It's elevated my business, my thinking, all kinds of stuff. And so Dan provides Strategic Coach members and Genius Network members with tools to exponentially increase all areas of your life. So today, Dan is going to focus his message on how you can transform your entire past, present and future with three diagrams. And his message is entitled the Freedom Cycle. Give it up for my good friend, Dan Zoltan.

Okay. All right. So the basis for my three diagrams is an ability that everybody is born with. And most people don't look at this as an ability. They don't actually look at this as a skill. But it's three time senses. And the three time senses are called past, present, and future. So how many of you are familiar with past, present, present? How many of you are sh. About one of them or the other and future? And what I find from coaching entrepreneurs is that there tends to be frustration with the future and impatience with the present and a lot of regret about the past. Okay, so there's a weirdness that I notice that everybody has with these three time senses. And my feeling is that the number one problem why people have trouble with past, present and future is they don't see them as capabilities. So if you think when a baby is born, there are some built in potential capabilities that come with just being human. And for example, we now know that children are wired for mathematics, that in a very, very short time, children begin to be mathematical in relationship to their surroundings. And it actually shows up very early, like three or four months. Children can start to distinguish and actually start differentiating things in terms of numbers. And so we have that build in ability. And of course, how many of you have discovered that Some people are better at math than others. I mean, you're probably better at math than some people, but there's people who are way better than you are at math. The other one is language. We have a hard wiring to be able to speak, okay? And so language comes to it, we don't have it right away. And it makes a huge difference, the environment that you grow up with, whether you get language or not. And for example, they find children who are born in very, very disadvantaged neighborhoods in the United States. Inner city neighborhoods never develop the future tense of the verb. They only speak in terms of the present. And so if you don't have a word, you also don't have the idea, okay? So words are actually ideas. And so children who are very disadvantaged and, you know, do not have people talking about the future, actually don't develop a sense of the future. On the other hand, children who are born into very educated families of goal setting parents tend to develop that future sense very, very powerfully, okay? And they start thinking powerfully and it's a reinforcement. And if it doesn't happen early, it's very, very hard for it to happen at all. Spatial recognition, three dimensionality were born with that. The one I would like to talk to you about though, has to do with looking at the past as a skill and a capability, looking at the present as a skill and a cap. Future as a skill and a capability. And I say that if you get these three capabilities right, then all the other capabilities that you develop are right also. And so what we're going to do is we'll just put these up on the screen so we have past, present and future. And what I'm going to show you is three diagrams. So the three diagrams, one of them is called the Freedom cycle, the second one is called the captivity cycle. And then I have a really neat one at the end, which is called the four Cs. And I'm going to show you the Freedom cycle first because this is the right way of actually arranging the time senses of past, present and future so that these three time senses really work for you. They're always on your side. And then I'm going to show you the captivity cycle, which is, I would say that the vast majority of people on the planet are actually have a relationship to time that I call the captivity cycle. And you will know people personally who are involved in the captivity cycle. And when I give you the conditions, you will immediately have dozens and dozens of examples of individuals and groups and organizations and even countries that are in the captivity cycle. And then I'm going to show you the four conditions for actually creating a really great future. And this is also a capability. And so that more and more you have the ability to actually use the past, present, and future in a way that constantly creates a bigger and better future. So the right way to proceed with the time senses, we always have to start in the present, and you start in the present and you move to the future. And this is called choosing. So a distinction I like to make. I'm very passionate about words. And so when I was about 15 years ago, my team, not knowing what else to get me for Christmas, actually got me the Oxford English Dictionary, which consists of 20 volumes, and each volume is 1,000 pages. So the S's in the Oxford English Dictionary cover two and a half books. It's the biggest letter in the English Alphabet is 2 1/2 volumes of S. But one of the things I notice is that there's two words that people use interchangeably. One of them is choose, and the other one is decide. And I notice when people talk about choose and decide, it's like they're equal words, you know, they choose, they decide. But one of the things you have to understand about choose is that choose can only be used in relationship to the future. It's a future sense. You can't choose the past. You can only choose the future. And so the thing that's really important here is that choosing comes from the inside. It's not dictated from the outside. Okay, so people who choose the future are doing it on the basis of their imagination. They're doing it as a result of the life they've lived and capabilities they've developed. And every human choice is kind of unpredictable before it happens. And it's very, very important that the very basis of creativity, of creating new things, actually comes from a very, very strong capability of choosing the future. So people who are very creative people sort of say, well, how can. Where do the ideas come from? The ideas don't come from anywhere except an act of choosing a bigger and better future. And the reason why they create something new is because they need to create something new to satisfy a chosen future that's bigger and better what they have than what they have right now. Then what happens? When you choose the future? Now you're in a position to do something with the past. So a lot of times people will come to me because I'm really good at giving advice. And when I was six years old, I was very good at giving advice to people who were older than me. And one of. I must have got onto this time since very early. And people say I'm having a hard time making a decision. How many of you right now have a decision? And it's a bit hard. It's a bit hard right now. You're having a hard time getting your mind around it. And what I've discovered is you cannot make a good decision in the present. It's impossible to make a good decision in the present. You have to first of all choose a much bigger and better future. At a date in the future, let's say three years, we can decide. Decide is a very interesting word. It comes from a Latin word. And the C I, D, E part of decide. We have other words like that in the English language. And one of the words we have in the English language is homicide. We have suicide. We have fratricide, we have pesticide. Okay? And what it means is to kill. So the C I, D, E means to kill. So that when you decide, you're actually saying something's okay and something has to die and it's an actual killing off. So what I say, just to make it positive, is that what you actually decide is what part of the past gets to come along? What part of the past, given the new, bigger and better future that you've chosen, what part of the past gets to come along? How many of you like that sound rather than this can't come with me? That's sort of a negative. But you're actually deciding what part of the past gets to come along and how many of you have parts of the past that if you create a new, bigger and better future, there's definitely parts of your past that get to come along. Any idea what the two main things that always get to come along from the past? What would be one thing that always gets to come? Yeah, well, knowledge. Yeah, I put it down. So knowledge, learning. But I say skill. Do skills always get to come along? How many of you would develop a skill and then leave it behind? No, no, but we always bring the skills and how many of your achievements you actually bring forward. So one of the best ways to really clean up your past is just see your past in terms of skills and achievements. Just see it. And you say, well, what if my past is really worthwhile? And I said, well, any part of your past that represents a skill is a good part of your past. And any part of your past that's an achievement is a good part of your past. So once we're there now, we've done two things here we have to choose the future. Okay, so we're choosing the future. So it's being created bigger and better. And with that picture now in our mind, visualizing our mind of the bigger and better future, now and only now are we actually in a good position to make good decisions. So we often wonder, why do people make bad decisions? And it's because they're trying to decide in the present. You cannot decide in the present. You can only decide in the future. From the standpoint of the future, once you're in the past, then we can do something else. Now we can move from the past to the past to the present. And what we get to do now is utilize our past. I'm a big deal that my past is very valuable because I get to use things from the past, skills and achievements to arm myself in the present to actually take the actions to create the bigger and better future. Okay, now, so this is really, really interesting because this is innovation. So a lot of people say, well, how are these creative people creative? And I said, they choose the bigger and better future. No, no, no. But I mean, how does it actually happen? How's it actually happen? You know, I've listened to all the CDs, I've read all the creativity manuals. I can't quite get a handle on what it is they're doing. I said, they're choosing a bigger and better future. Yeah, yeah, I know, but I'm talking about creativity. I said, they're choosing a bigger and better future. I can do this for 25 years. They're choosing a bigger and better future. No, no, but I want to be really creative. Yeah, choose a bigger and better future. It's got to be something else. Got to be something else. No, it's just choosing a bigger and better future. And I'm going to show you in my third diagram, the four Cs, how you get really good at choosing, okay? Because a lot of people are very, very bad at choosing. Very, very bad at choosing. I call this the freedom cycle, okay? And I've gotten permission from Harley Davidson to actually use this language. So it's a freedom cycle. And that is that the feeling of using your time senses to innovate gives a very powerful sense of freedom, okay? And the freedom shows up. The freedom shows up. Freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of relationship, and freedom of purpose. And this is why you became an entrepreneur. I've been coaching entrepreneurs for 40 years, and people say, you know, how can people just do that for money? And I said, well, they're not doing it for money, they're doing it for freedom, okay? It's just that in our world, freedom costs a lot of money and they have to have the money to buy their freedom for them. So that's the innovation. And what it is, it's related to abundance. Okay? So abundance is the constant feeling that you're innovating a bigger and better future and that your life is becoming more and more innovative. This is out of want. Why are you doing this? You're doing it because you want to. And why do you want to? You want to because you want to. No, no, no. I mean, but what's the reason why you want it? It's because you want it. And people say, no, no, no, there has to be a reason why you want it. And I said, the reason why you want it is you want it. Okay? And this seems like a very simple statement, but most people don't want things because they want them. They want things because. And then they tell a story about why they want it. And from the moment they start telling the story about why they want something, they're pure fiction writers. They're just making it up on the spot to justify why they want something. The only reason why we want things is because we want them. Well, this is just going to eliminate the entire psychological industry, psychiatric industry, because they're saying, yes, but why do you want it? You want it because you want it. And the truth is, it's a creative act. And you cannot psychoanalyze a creative act. It just happens and it's creative. Okay? So this is the freedom cycle. Now I'm going to do the captivity cycle. You can say boo, boos. Okay, so here's the thing. This is what happens. They still start off with the same three potential skills, but what happens is when they're in the present and they get the notion that they would like to have a bigger and better future, okay? So you take Joel's prescription, Joel Kahn's prescription, that you can have a picture of in every health indicator that you have, that you would have a higher performance. It would be a bigger, better world, okay? Or you know what Robert talked about, of people really, truly being breakthrough leaders. You know, they have a high sense of energy, okay? And, you know, they have a high sense of engagement. They have a high sense of empathy. They have a high sense of productivity and creativity. So they have these five things, and all of us can visualize it, but people who are in the captive or in the captive cycle have a hard time visualizing because the moment they even Start to visualize that it's going to be different from what they've been doing up until now, they immediately get clicked right back to the past. It's almost like they get a thought, I'm really thinking about bigger and better. And they get an email. And the email says, what are you doing? Let's come in on Monday and talk about this new, better thing and bring counsel with you. This is the justification board. In your mind, how many of you. The justification board. And the justification board says, we notice that you're thinking this thought bigger and better. What's that all about? You got a problem? I mean, is there some complaint that you have about the way things are now? And you have to understand that people who, the vast majority of people, the moment they get a new thought, a new possibility in their mind, immediately their past, which is completely unionized, their past, which is completely unanimous, says, why don't we talk about this? Why don't we look it over? Bring him in for a couple days, he'll forget about it. And every time you come to the justification board and you have to tell lies because that's what happens. See, the justification of what you want is a lie. And you get used to lying about what you want and you feel it. I mean, when you lie, you lose power. I mean, it's just one of the things about lying is that you lose power because you're removing yourself from reality. You're not telling the truth about the reality. And there's a loss of confidence, there's a loss of power in that. But not only that, that becomes the dominant experience in your life, is that if you even so much as have a glimmer of something bigger and better, you're right back to the justification for it in the past. Okay, and so what happens then is that the past. So you're choosing the past, you're not choosing the future. And then the past decides what you get to do in the present. So your past gets to decide what you do in the present. And the only acceptable thing to do in the present is to utilize your time to reinforce the past. How's that feel? No, no, no, no, no. I mean, so how many have you. How many of you have done this? I do it. I do it. I mean, I'm, you know, I teach this stuff, but I still do it. But in the major parts of my life, not so much. I do it with minor things, you know, I mean, we all, where none of us are 100% anything, we're all doing this. But how Many of you know people around you who do this. That the moment you would suggest a new idea, what happens? What's that all about? What are we doing here? So the big thing is that the vast now, the freedom cycle really requires a lot of individual effort. This is totally supported by society. This one is totally supported because society basically wants to stay the way it is. That's why that's a stable society. So all of you here are change agents in one part of human life. I mean, this is really what Genius Network is about. You would not come into Genius Network, you would not be a member of Genius Network if you weren't a change agent in some part of human life related to individuals, related to organizations and everything. But it's going to require people to have a vision of themselves that's bigger and better than it is right now. Okay? So the thing is that if you're going to be better and better as a change agent, you better really, really get the freedom cycle down as a very powerful skill inside yourself because you will not be able to help people. When they say, I can't meet tomorrow. I'm at the justification board, I'm at the justification board. Can we make it Thursday, 10 years from today? Anyway, so this is repetition, it's repetition and it's a constant repetition. Now here's. It has some very, very interesting, has some very interesting connections in this society. I believe that the lifetime experience of not being able to get out of the repetition cycle is the basis of all addictions, especially drug addictions. And the reason is that people really, really want to have this sense of innovation. They're really passionate. I mean, it's something that people. It's such a powerful idea of the ability to feel that you're creating something really new and really different and really better is such a powerful feeling. And people have had this feeling. I mean, you know, it may have been accidental and it may be when you were five years old, but you have that feeling of innovation. And your circumstances as you become an adult doesn't allow you to have that. But drugs will give you the experience for a short period of time that you're actually in that innovative mode, that you're actually in that innovative existence. And there's all sorts of addictions, but it's an artificial way of actually creating the sense that you're innovating. But then of course, it doesn't last. And then it's destructive, it's self destructive. So what happens here is this ability to actually engage with the future for people who are in the repetition cycle is actually cut off and after a while they just can't really, really do it. Okay. And you can say, well, anybody can turn them around. And I said, well, no, you can rearrange the wiring in your brain so much over such a long period of time that, you know, you might have a religious conversion and you know, you might have deep psychotherapy shock treatment or that you might get a chance to do it, but it's not going to be self created. You're probably not going to make it. And a lot of people are in that, they're in that degree. Okay. So this is the captivity cycle and it's spoon freedom cycle. Captivity cycle. Okay, okay. And this is about scarcity. And what it is is the scarcity of being able to create greater freedom for yourself. It's a profound scarcity that a lot of people have. It's time. They have a scarcity of time, they have a scarcity of money, they have a scarcity of relationship and they have a scarcity of purpose. And so they're driven strictly from their past. And it's about need. Okay, so very, very interesting. One of the most dominant models of the last 50 years has been Maslow. And I disagree with Maslow totally. The first time I saw Maslow I totally disagreed. It because it's about needs. And needs are dictated from the outside. They're not dictated, they're not created on the inside. So you've got survival, you've got safety, you've got belonging, you've got achievement and you've got self actualization. But notice the structure that Maslow used. It was a pyramid. And when I was born in 1944, society was pyramids, government was a pyramid, big unions were a pyramid, corporations were a pyramid. And it was kind of like this pyramid. Society was created as a reaction to the Great Depression and the second World War, which, you know, my parents lived through that, some of your parents lived through that. And just to have the basic things that you needed to live was a real win. And so everybody thought about needs. You know, you got to satisfy your needs. We don't live in that world. Okay. And it's probably why things are kind of confusing today because we've switched over to a world where wanting is possible. As a matter of fact, wanting more and more things. Okay, yeah, but why do you need that? Well, I don't need it, I want it. Okay, why, you know, why does Stefan need to be on a boat for six months? He doesn't. He wants to be on a Boat for six months. Why does he want it? Because he wants it. See the distinction? How many of you are really grasping the distinction here between needing and wine? Now, I'm going to tell you something. I gave this talk at JJ Virgin's Mindshare in August. And afterwards, after I gave this speech, I had about 20 entrepreneurs come up to me to tell me how much of an impact they had that my talk had on them. And they were all female, everyone was a female. There were men there. But all the women came up and talked to me about and they said, I can't tell you how much this wanting just because you want it is liberating. And I asked them, this started happening, I had three or four of them because we have ever since the beginning. Whereas there's just as many successful women entrepreneurs in the marketplace as their are men entrepreneurs. Our percentage in Strategic Coach has always been between 15 and 20% women. Okay, so I started asking him this question. I said, I'm going to say something and see if you agree. Me, agree with me. Really successful women are as successful as they need to be. Really successful entrepreneurial women are as successful as they need to be. But really successful men entrepreneurs are as successful as they want to be. So you ask a woman, well, why do you need to do that? And what happens? They say, well, I've got a family to feed, I've got this. It's a justification of why they're ambitious. So I just want to say that, and my feeling is that this is culturally induced, that women are really forced far, far more than men to justify their success and standing out as an individual. But if you get this wanting thing straight, you immediately get relieved. You won't need a justification because wanting requires no justification. So this is really the big difference about need. Okay, so diagram number one is the freedom cycle. Diagram number two, sbus captivity cycle. Now I'm going to show you how to really get good at wanting. And the way you get really good at wanting, if you turn the sheet over. The sheet over this sheet right here. Turn the sheet over. So I'm going to just take the present and I'm going to do the future. And we're going to choose the future. Now how do you get good at choosing? So I'm going to tell you a story. August 15, 1978. I was both bankrupt and divorced on the same day. August 15, 1978. Okay? Divorced in the morning, bankrupt in the afternoon. I arranged that way so I could keep my credit card and have a really good lunch. Celebration. Then I had to give in my credit card. And you know, I mean, you laugh about it, but it wasn't laughing time back then because you just got really two very, very bad report cards, you know, and you had really screwed up in two areas. So I began thinking about that for about three months after my experience. And I came to two decisions that I was, number one, going to relieve everybody else of responsibility for what had happened to me because I had to get my power back. And you can't get your power back if someone else is responsible. So one of the things, if you want to free yourself up in a situation, a bad situation, you've got to relieve everybody else of responsibility and take it on 100%. So that was number one. But number two is I came to the conclusion that I had had the relationship failure and the business failure because I wasn't really telling myself what I wanted. I was expecting that I could get married, I would be told what I wanted, and that if I just started a business, I'd be told what I wanted. But it's not that I didn't have the wanting skill. So I came to one goal at the end of 1978, and that was for 25 years. Every day for 25 years, I was going to keep a journal. And in that journal I would write at least a sentence about something I wanted every day. I could write a paragraph if I wanted, I could write several pages if I wanted, but I had to write at least one sentence. And it was about something going on in my life right at that point. Fast forward, it's 2003. It's January 31st. Babs and I are out with some close friends of ours. We're having dinner and I said, I just want to let you know I'm finishing a project, a 25 year project. And over the last 25 years, every day except 12 days out of, it's 9131 days. So 9119 days I wrote in my journal. And you know what? Something I really became a muscle bound wanter. And I'm like wanting on steroids. I really want things. Don't need much, want lots. Okay. And wanting, we're talking about keeping young, needing ages. You wanting makes you very, very young. So it's a skill that makes you young because no matter what you've wanted in the past, you want more in the future. Bigger and better. Okay, so how do we get to be a really good wanter? Okay. So that we can constantly stay in the freedom cycle and not in the Captivity cycle. Well, people say, how many, how often have you heard this with what you sell? I would do what you're telling me to do. If I had the confidence, I would become an entrepreneur if Obama would subsidize me the department of free stuff. Do that. So you say, well, no, no. So the weird thing about this is that people always want to get what is essentially confidence, which is the fourth thing you get in becoming a good wanter. You get confidence. And I said, so that's number four. And they said, no, no, no, no. I know what you're saying. Not confidence. I want the capability. And I say, that's really unfortunate because capability is number three. Okay? And they say, well, I want. I don't know what I want. I said, it all starts. I'm going to go right to number one. So capability equals confidence. It really starts with a commitment. And what a commitment means is that you're giving yourself a picture of bigger and better in the future. And you're saying, regardless of what it takes, I'm committed to get there. Because that starts it. Because you have to organize and channel your energies. And once you get there, you have that commitment. Then. And this is the tough part. This is the tough part. It requires a second step. And the second step is courage. Requires courage. Okay, now just to clarify, courage, the difference between confidence and courage is that confidence feels really good and courage feels really shitty. How many of you right now, in some project or area of your life right now are experiencing courage? Yeah. Yeah. And I have to tell you that this courage is a skill. It's the ability to go through periods of feeling really shitty because you've had a really strong commitment to change something with the knowledge that if you can just stay in the state of courage, having made the commitment long enough, what will happen is that the courage will give you capability and the capability will give you confidence. And once you have the confidence, you can then jump to a higher level of commitment for something that's even bigger and better. So what we have is a virtuous cycle here of commitment, courage, capability, and confidence. And our past, our past all becomes raw material. And the raw material is what? What are the two things that you always want to bring forward? Skills and achievements. So you keep stockpiling in the past skills and achievement, which you get to come forward, and it's that higher level, constantly increasing level of skill and achievement which allows you to make commitments to higher and bigger, better things. And then it starts over again. So here's a weird thing with entrepreneurs, because I've been coaching them. Little survey in the room. How many of you, your biggest breakthroughs since you started being an entrepreneur came when you went through periods of commitment and courage where you weren't guaranteed capability? How many of you, okay, and how many of you right now are planning your future to such an extent that you'll never have to go through another period of courage? Yeah, I had this guy. He was born, he was a hidden child during the Second World War, a Jewish child in Europe went through a horrendous war, comes to Canada, doesn't speak English, speaks French, so he went to Montreal and he taught himself English, got a doctorate from college, became an incredible expert on the Canadian tax code, was a financial advisor, made millions of dollars, and then he's sitting there, he's got 20, 21, 23 year old children and they're slugs because he said to himself, everything that I had to go through, my children are never going to go through that. So he had to demonstrate incredible courage and develop incredible capabilities. But he created a cocoon for them. So they had. And now he's spending the rest of his life subsidizing them because they never developed any courage or capability. So I really watch out for entrepreneurs who are always trying to make things easy for their kids. Don't make things easy for your kids. Have them go through the same four Cs so that they can actually master the freedom cycle. And if you can do that, by the time they're adults and walking around, you've done everything you possibly can for your children. So this is the three. How many of you. I made the claim that three diagrams were going to totally change and transform your sense of the past, present and future. So I want to survey how many of you. I've actually done that with my three diagrams, actually do that. And how many of you can see that the more you use the four Cs to reinforce the freedom cycle, one, you'll become an extraordinarily good wanter of the future. And the other thing is that you'll find yourself separating and not being bogged down by people and organizations that are in the captivity cycle, thank you very much.