“The Accidental Entrepreneur” With Rich Litvin | Capability Amplifier

It takes courage to put a stake in the ground, to own who you are and what you believe. I believe.

That'S a powerful thing to say. I help my clients speak their counterintuitive truths out into the world. That's really powerful. When you can own a counterintuitive truth, you really have an ability to put a stake in the ground, most people think.

But the truth is.

When you can fill in the blanks on that for you, you start to create a message and a mission about what's important for you in the world. Your people will want to come along and follow.

I believe you're worth five to ten times or more than you think you are. And so does this week's amazing guest. He's in the business of listening and sitting in uncomfortable silence. Intrigued? Welcome to Capability Amplifier, the show for curious, interested and interesting business owners and entrepreneurs who want high performance upgrades for their brains, bodies and bank accounts. Our guest is Rich Litvin, accidental entrepreneur, co author of the Prosperous Coach and keeper of a one line business plan. He's going to introduce you to a great concept he calls the 4% rule share the three biggest traps business owners get themselves into, and a profound idea he calls the dream behind the dream. You're absolutely, positively going to walk away from this episode thinking bigger and differently. So let's get right into the interview with the interesting and interested Rich Litvin. Very nice to have you, sir.

Hey, Mike. Great to be here.

All right, so first of all for our listeners, you're the author of the Prosperous Coach with Steve Chandler and the subtitle is Increase income and impact for you and your clients. But I'd like to begin because you have a one line business plan. Let's start there and then I know we're going to compose a beautiful symphony today.

Nice. Yeah. I call myself an accidental entrepreneur. My dad was an entrepreneur and did his best to persuade his three sons to do anything but become an entrepreneur. And turns out all these years later, guess what all three of us are. We're entrepreneurs. But I was a high school teacher for 15 years, eventually a vice principal. And that was my passion. I loved kids, I loved teaching, I loved education and lost my job in 2005, began a new career as a coach. And I didn't know you're supposed to have a business plan or how to write a business plan. So for 14 or so years right now, my one line business plan has been meet fun and interesting people.

And what you do if we get into the low level is you are a coach and you Take on five clients a year. Can I mention what you charge per year when you work with them? Okay, so it's $100,000 per year. But you also have a coaching business where you work with business leaders and executives and help them become coaches as well.

Yeah, and I have a high level mastermind, a group. So my, my first book is called the prosperous coach. My second book that I'm publishing this year is called when you're the most interesting person in the room. And you're in the wrong room. And that group of people are the people in my mastermind. Right now I have a mastermind called 4pc.

And 4pc stands for. Because I love the thought you put into your naming as well.

So it's called 4pc. It stands for the 4% club. And it has two meanings. 4% is the top 20% of the top 20% always interests me. Who are the top 20% of your people and who the top 20% of them? And then Steven Kotler wrote a book called the rise of Superman. And in that concept, in that book, there's a concept he calls the 4% rule. For us, business can sometimes feel like life or death. It actually usually isn't a life or death situation. But if you're the kind of person who jumps off a mountain in a wingsuit, if you're kind of the person who surfs the world's highest waves, you risk dying. Yet you want to get better and better every year. The 4% rule says that the way to get better when you're an extraordinary top performer and in an arena where you could die, is to only push yourself 4, 4% beyond your current capabilities. For most people on the planet, that's too far. But for really top performers, it's too low. And so we push ourselves beyond where we need to go and we end up getting burnt out or stressed out. And actually it's that 4% shift. For me as a coach, when I work with top performers, that's the area I play in. What's the tiniest shift that can make the biggest.

And one of the things that we were talking about because we just came back from a lunch break is you have three traps that you see leaders get themselves into. So I'd love to know what those are because just to again, provide a little framing here, one of the things and goals that I have in interviewing interesting smart people is to find a way to model how you think what your value system is. So Dan can do his magic and create filters and do a matrix style brain upgrade. In other words, how can I pull super useful thinking from you, but also feeling? Because a big part of what we were talking about today is just our evolutions as business owners and as people and as super beings, as I like to say. So we. Let's begin with some of the traps.

Well, I have to go back. Yeah, I should go back in time because. Because some of the traps were implanted at a really young age for me. So I spent most of my childhood and a lot of my adulthood trying to prove myself to my father. And so I became very successful and very driven because from a very unhealthy place, and even to this day, if I'm not careful, I get caught, I have a success. I give myself 25 seconds to celebrate and then I'm looking at how I could have done it bigger or better improved it, or I'm looking out into the future to see what I could be doing next.

Isn't that interesting? Our greatest traumas, and whether it's epigenetic in nature, meaning what we could say is DNA driven or something from our past creates the character we are, our own value systems and our own strengths. But those are the things that we end up trying to identify and overcome as we age a bit.

You're so right. And it goes back because my father's mother really pushed him to be successful and he never quite felt as successful as his brother. And so it is generational, this drive for success from a not such a healthy place. So what I see from my own life and then with the very successful clients I've worked with over the years, is that we live in a world where most people are chasing the trappings of success, so they don't see the traps that are inherent in success. And so usually you don't catch them until it's too late. You've already been successful. So here are the three that I see. There's the isolation trap. I hear this a lot from super successful people. I'm not lonely, but I feel very alone.

Isn't that interesting? I was just with someone who put together a group in Los Angeles. Now I think about it, maybe it was yours. But he walked away, said there were like 30 high performers and all of them, many of them eight figure earners and beyond. And that was the number one thing that they said they lacked and they were seeking was connection. Okay, so I can relate to that. And that's the thing is once you're successful and maybe you have a dip, which is inevitable, that's when you're like, oh, My God. I don't want anyone to find out that I'm.

Not only that is also this. It's. It's what I call a high quality problem. Your friends are not interested to hear that the tax bill you're now paying is more than they've ever earned in their life. And it's not okay to go around with those. You. You. It's important to find a community of people. In 4pc. We have a ground rule. We call it the place where you can never get too big and never get too messy. So the distinction we have. The distinction we have is it's a place where you can brag. It's not okay out there in the world to brag. In fact, if you want to find something that's completely socially unacceptable is the next time you're at a dinner party and people say, how's life? You say, you know what? Life is amazing. Let me tell you how much money I'm earning. Let me tell you how happy I am. Let me tell you about all the amazing things going on. It's one of those things that's a social faux pas.

Tallest poppy baby.

Right.

At least in Australia.

In Australia, right. So in 4pc, a place where you can never get too big, but also a place where you can never get too messy. Because we get caught up in this world where we have more and more success and then life is life. You have ups and downs. My intention with my clients is if that. That I'm trying to demonstrate for you now. This is the flat line in which the ups and downs go on the horizontal axis. My job is to help tip that line so it's no longer horizontal. You're still going to have ups and downs. But if you stop to notice, if you're with a community who you trust and will speak the truth to you, you recognize that, oh, my down now is actually higher than the up used to be a few years ago.

So true. All right, so isolation is number one.

Second trap is the imposter trap. I hear this a lot. People admire me, but I feel like a fraud now. I call this the fraudulence paradox. Most people hope that finally, one day when I'm successful enough, that sense of being a fraud will go away. And what I say is, no, I wish for you that that never goes away. Because your job is to keep putting yourself into more and more extraordinary communities and giving yourself more and more extraordinary challenges to face, goals to attain, that you constantly have this sense of feeling like a fraud.

Again, I will say that the two Things that both of these have in common is they're both byproducts of evolution. Right? Isolation is a byproduct of that, especially as you evolve, as you were just talking about where your friends start realizing. And I've had this myself, you know, I grew up in a very small town. When I go back, I'm certainly, I probably, I might. My guess, out of my graduating high school class, the most financially successful and probably visibly that I know of in terms of having a platform.

I don't let it become a thing, but it definitely. There's a limitation on what I can actually talk about in a comfortable space there and finding an audience that you feel comfortable with. And with regards to the fraud thing, and I think that this is, I call it the value gap. The value gap to me is who you still identify with as being yourself versus what the outside world perceives you to be. And we very rarely as especially, you know, you hear about the introvert celebrity, they still see themselves as that shy person where the outside world sees them as this amazing rock star performer. But it's, it's, it's an identity thing. It's an attachment, it is ego, it's a containment. So that's very good. What's number three?

So number three is the emptiness trap. I hear this a lot, in fact.

That's interesting.

I have everything I ever wanted, but I feel empty. So we are in this world where we learn to chase money, success, titles to be known out in the world. And it doesn't take very long before you realize that.

It'S not giving you what you thought it would give you. Because you weren't chasing success for success's sake. You were chasing it because your mother didn't love you enough. You were trying to prove yourself to your father. And until you find out what you really need, you can't really be happy. So you can have a lot of stuff, a lot of success, a lot of being known in the world, and on the inside, you feel absolutely empty.

Very good. So I think a direction I'd like to go now is I'd like you to tell us a story of how you have worked with an individual on the isolation trap, the imposter trap, or the emptiness trap, and seen a profound shift, not only in who that individual was being, but in the shift in their consciousness. And again, I'm going to go back to something that you and I were talking about, which you call an insight moment, which is when you see life a certain way and then suddenly, one tiny shift a Language pattern shift, and suddenly life is completely different. Tony Robbins says life will never be this the way again where you can change your life in an instant. And that does come from a simple insight.

So, yeah, so I coach around insight. When I work with extraordinary top performers, I don't need to be an accountability coach. What I say to my kind of clients is that if you need accountability, you're not. You haven't got a mission that's powerful enough yet. You don't need it. Did you need accountability on the things you've done in your life? If they were important enough to do, you made them happen anyway. So I don't coach around that level. I coach around insight. And a single shift can be life changing. The. The example I mentioned to you earlier at lunchtime, it's very visual, is if you, if you haven't seen it before, Google it right now, the FedEx sign. Because when I say, have you seen the arrow in the FedEx sign? If you haven't yet seen it, you're puzzled about what I'm talking about. But the moment you see that arrow in the FedEx logo, you. You can't unsee it. And I coach my clients around, what's the tiniest shift? Would it make the biggest difference? So one of my clients, she is the former assistant chief scientist to the High performance wing of the Air Force. She's also a published poet, successful author, a coach, and a mother. And she, on a regular basis, I would literally cut and paste her bio from her website and email it to her. Because we are in our own world. We're seeing the world through our eyes, not through the way we're seen by other people. And on the inside, she had these feelings about who she is and what she could achieve. And within a year of working together, she. She went from wanting to have more extraordinary clients to realizing she has a much bigger mission in the world. She's currently raising $100 million to change the future of work. She's curating a group of extraordinary people who work in everything from artificial intelligence to some of the top corporations on the planet to look at what do we need to do to make the changes to the way that people are educated so that those people who have careers that right now will be obsolete in a few years or less, there'll be a future for them.

So.

I would like you to tell another story now. So I'm going to shift gears a little bit. I want to talk a little bit about enrollment with you. And to me, I don't like the Words pitch or close. I've decided that I wanted to eradicate those two words from my vocabulary for a simple reason, because I think it takes away from the intimacy of a deep, connected relationship. So I'm projecting on this question already. I'm aware of that. But I want you to talk a little bit about the first step to being able to actually help people is getting them to say yes. First of all. And anyone who's listening to this, first of all, if you're in strategic coach, you went through an enrollment process and you decided there was a benefit. We do this as coaches and advisors and in any way, shape or form. If you want to influence someone, you've got to get them to have a breakthrough. So the way I want to frame this question for you is you have a mechanism, I guess, for finding out what someone's dreams are, the dream behind the dream. I'd like to ask, like, what's that process of what kind of questions you ask to get someone in a place where they are able and willing to. To tell you what that is and sometimes even discover it with you? Because some people might not even know what that is. So that's the first question is when you're talking to someone who may become a coaching client, what percentage actually know what their dream behind the dream actually is?

I'm pausing to check in because of course, these days it's more and more because by the time people have come to me, they usually know who I am these days. But.

Let me take this back and give context because you said an important word. Intimacy is a really important word for me. And.

I've built a business based on intimacy, on deep connection. There's a story I tell in the prosperous coach about my grandparents who were immigrants from Europe before the holocaust because I'm Jewish and they came from Europe to the United Kingdom and they. My mom's mom and dad set up a store in Waterloo underground station selling clothes. I used to go there as a kid. There was no Internet, There was no email list. My granddad would see you and know that you like brightly colored pocket squares. And the next time you walk past, he'd come over and say, hey, I've got something new here for you. He really modeled how to build a business. I was going to say the old fashioned way, but the only way businesses really ever been done throughout history, it's by knowing people.

Personalization, taking care of people.

Absolutely. My. My number one strength on strengths finder is individualization.

How interesting. Okay, yeah.

So. So there's the heart of enrolling clients is this phrase for me. Serve people so powerfully, they never forget your conversation for the rest of their life. So I'm not walking into an enrollment conversation trying to enroll you. I'm walking into an enrollment conversation trying to serve you. And it's a really important distinction because if you ever ask a woman what it feels like to be in a bar when a man approaches her and pretends he's not interested when she. When he is, the same word comes out every time. It feels creepy. And it feels the same in business when you're pretending you're not trying to enroll somebody and you are, it feels creepy. We have these. What does Dean call it? The cheese.

More cheese, less whiskers.

More cheese, less whiskers. Right. When you come from serving. What I know is if I'm willing to serve enough people, that energy is going to come back to me. I can't have it be that I'm trying to serve you right now. That fingers crossed, I hope that you're going to become a client is just. I know if I serve you powerfully enough, you might become a client. Now maybe in two years, maybe four years has been the longest for me. Someone came back to me four years after a really powerful conversation, and she said, rich, I got scared after that first conversation because of how powerfully you coached me. And now, four years later, I have a mission that's so powerful, I can't think of anybody else who I'd like to coach me other than you. So I have this distinction about serving people really powerfully. How do I get to the dream behind the dream is I.

Maybe we should define what the dream behind the dream is. Because I picked that up from your book. At least I think I did.

You did?

Yeah. And why don't you explain what that is, first of all?

Well, people come to you with what they say they want and what they say they want and what they actually want. And one of the things that many coaches and consultants will know is the feeling of having an initial session with somebody and they say, oh, my God, I'm in. This is great. I'll send you the check. Invoice me. I mean, let's begin. And then after that, there's absolute silence.

Crickets.

Crickets.

It's because you didn't get to what they really, really need. So that's your mission, to push them, to stretch them, to challenge them, to find out what has them wake up at 3 o' clock in the morning with tears streaming down their face. What are they Afraid of what are they dreaming of? One of my favorite questions these days is to ask people, what's the book you want to write? And that comes pretty quickly. I get the answer to that, but I don't really care about that. What I really want to know is after they've answered that question, what's the book you're afraid to write? Or what's the book you'd only write once you're already successful? Those are the kind of questions that go to the heart of what they're really about. And people always know. They know the first one because it's easy and it's quite close to the surface, or they're already writing it, but what's the one you're afraid to write that gets to the heart of what are you really about? And that's what I'm interested in. Always using questions. I can't give you a simple answer. There are no questions off the top of my head because this is personal in the moment, me being willing to challenge somebody. So here's a distinction I have. I'm here to serve you, not to please you. I had a client show up once, 20 minutes late on a phone call. I was in my office, I was working, and the phone rang 20 minutes after the start of the call. And she said, I'm here, I'm ready. And it was a potential high fee engagement with an extraordinary client. And everything in me wanted to just begin. But I'm here to serve, not to please. So I said to her, look, before we begin, there's something important. You showed up 20 minutes late. Now, I'm not here to berate you or make you feel bad or wrong about this, but I'm curious, where else does this show up in your life.

So often? Mike, how we do anything is how we do everything. And so I said to where else does this show up in your life? Like.

What comes when I say this? And she shared a story that from a young age she cried. She said I was very attractive as a young girl. I've always been a very attractive woman and it sways people. And most of the time I get away with things that no one else would get away with. You are one of the first people in years who has challenged me on something as simple as showing up late. And I just, it's. It's almost like the test she has for people. Like, well, I can I get away with things? And I didn't let her get away with it. And it was edgy for me to hold the line, but I Have this distinction of I'm here to serve you, not to please you.

I love that. And it really gets down to the reason why I ask a question like I just asked is sometimes the I think your thinking is more important than the answer. And this is something else that you and I talked about is the easy thing to do is to write a how to book. It's harder to ask a why book, and it's much harder to ask the why behind the why book. That's where the real editorial takes place. So this gets back to my original question is how do you get to the dream behind the dream? And what you answered is, well, I'm here to serve. So it goes to.

Well, I'll give another answer to that as well, because I just remembered a conversation I had with my wife's grandmother when she was 97 years old. And I asked her, do you have any advice for youngsters today? And she didn't hesitate. She knew immediately. She said, yes. I would tell them that the word listen has precisely the same letters as the word silent. And I had to pause and do that in my head. And I realized that's the power of the coaching that I do, is I say far less than my clients. One of my clients once said, I've paid you rich. I paid you more money to say nothing than anything else I've ever invested in in my life. So that willingness to sit in the uncomfortable silence and to hold the silence while they pause and they reflect, to not jump in, it's very tempting when you're. When you're bright, when you're intelligent, when you've got a wealth of experiences behind you. Sometimes somebody walks in and you can tell in 20 seconds you know exactly what they're, what's holding them back, what they need, except you may not. And your willingness to sit in the discomfort of the silence is a very, very powerful coaching tool.

Now, were you born with that ability to sit there and stfu? And for those of us that don't know what that means, that shut the blank up. Rup. There we go. S. Yeah. S T U P. Yeah, I got it.

No, no. Look, one of the reasons I think I've tried to prove myself to my dad so long is that when I was a youngster, I'd share with my dad some success I'd have. And very quickly he'd say, okay, that was great, but here's how you could improve it. Do it better. Here's where you could go next. And.

That impacted me. And it became like I'm a problem solver. You come to me with a problem, I can help you solve it. It's just who I am. Solution focused on future focused. It's been a gift, but it's also been a challenge. And.

I've learned that my solution isn't necessarily the best for you. So it's taken. I wrote an article a few years back, Mike, called How to Become an overnight success in 46 years.

People loved it. And when I got feedback from it, I realized, oh, my God. I shared with you all the challenges and struggles I've had and the things that I've done that have worked out. I've never stopped learning. I've never stopped reading. I had a boss years ago when I worked in the world of education who mocked me. He called me an avid reader as a way to mock me in front of the senior team that I was on. I take that as a badge of pride. I've been an avid reader my entire life. And so how to be a success? Overnight success is everything you've ever done. In 1992, I went to Botswana in southern Africa to be a teacher. For two years, I taught kids in their third language. They spoke Ikalanga, their tribal language, Setswana, the national language, and English was their third language. And I was teaching them science in their third language. These are kids who lived in mud huts who would run for an hour to get to school. I had to learn to make no assumptions. I'm from London, we have double decker buses. These kids had not ever seen a house with more than one story. I had to learn to listen carefully to what they were saying and moderate and modulate my language in a way that I could be heard. I've been working on this for decades.

That's so interesting. So I'm going to just throw out two things. First of all, there was a little takeaway in the last conversation about just learning about silence. And when you talked about what the answer to the question is, no, you weren't born with that. You learned it. And some of it came from daddy trauma.

As a father, I can see this in myself, which is more than anything I want to give my son, prevent him from experiencing the same pains I did. As parents, That's. But we're. And sometimes the only way to truly learn and the greatest gift you can give is to let go and let someone experience the trauma and the pain. It's what builds character. But also the takeaway here is the person who speaks the least and asks the most questions is the person in control. And Also the best teacher.

And there's a lovely story of two British prime ministers, Gladstone and Disraeli, before an election. A reporter sat down with both of them to interview them, and she came away from dinner with Gladstone and said, gladstone made me feel like he was the most interesting person in the world. And then I had dinner with Disraeli and he made me feel like I was the most interesting person in the world. And it's no coincidence Disraeli won that election. And I think that speaks to. It's far better to be interested than interesting.

So true.

So true. You effectively said when I asked about the dream behind the dream is you have to personalize. You've got to create an experience. And you said this without saying, which is I have to ask a lot of questions and I have to embrace the silence to find out what the dream behind the dream is. But one of the hints that you had here is when you said, you know, what's the book you want to write? That's the surface level. But then it's what's the book you're afraid to write? Or what's the book you'd write if you're most successful? So I'd like you to think a little bit through the lens of the questions you ask, because really, that's where the power lies. And can you think of some of the questions a story about some questions you've asked that you have found have delivered some significant transformations, some grand distinctions? Are there any that pop up in your mind? And again, I'm going to just use give you another thing to jog your memory a little bit. You said that at one point you saw a deck of cards that were filled with great questions for a coach to ask. But what are some of the questions that pop up that you are go to questions that really start deep, meaningful conversations and unravel someone's why? Yeah, there you're smiling.

I'm smiling because I'm realizing a couple of things. One is I coach around distinctions. Distinctions are very powerful. Distinctions frame your world. So I don't have many distinctions around wine. It's red or white, it's got a screw top, or it's got a cork, or my favorite, it's got a nice picture on the bottle, in which case I'm most likely to buy it. My friend's wife is a sommelier. She can tell from the flavors, from the smells, from the how when you, when you swirl it in the glass, how it sticks to the side of the glass, even the vineyard. It's from. She has real power around wine. We all live in a world of distinctions and we don't know them. So I'm listening. I'm listening for how someone creates their world. I'm listening to their listening of the world and how they see their world. Because when you see.

When someone can see how they see their world, they have more power.

Tell me a story about that.

So I was working with a client whose background was in fundraising. She'd raised over half a billion dollars as a fundraiser. And I transitioned into becoming a consultant and a coach and was struggling to be successful and had come to me because she'd read the first book, Prosperous Coach, wanted to put that into action around creating clients. And when I said to her, when you're the most interesting person in the room, you're in the wrong room. She had a shift. It clicked immediately. She left the session with me, went to the airport, sat in the lounge in the airport and said to herself, who's the most interesting person in this room? And there was. She's a short Jewish woman from Ohio. And in that room was an African American man, about 6 foot 7 tall with rings on every single finger. And she went up to him and said, hey, you look like the most interesting person in the room. And they just sat down and had a conversation. He ended up becoming one of her clients. He plays for the NFL. She now coaches other clients at the NFL and is teaching at the NFL. The tiniest shifts can have a massive impact.

I love that. I'm going to start using that all the time now, which is I will walk up and I'll find the most interesting person in the room. I'm going to introduce myself and tell them that and see what happens. That's a very, very powerful distinction and a story. I love it.

I've got a client who's a military veteran. She has something after hearing that, she calls it the middle seat project. Whenever she flies, she books the middle seat because she figures I've got twice as much potential to meet somebody interesting.

And what a way to reframe getting stuck with the middle seat, which is what most people would say. I love the reframe.

So let's go just a little bit deeper there. Think about another way. Like if you wanted to. What's a test question you'll ask to find out how someone models the world or sees the world?

Here's a good one for you. And as I say it to you, see how it lands for you, as if I'm asking you this question yourself. Mike. Mike, what are you tolerating right now?

What are you tolerating?

So what happens when I ask that of you?

I'd. First of all, I asked myself this question. What is it that I tolerate about myself versus what do I tolerate. Tolerate about someone else? And right now I decided right away that I was going to focus on what the thing I can control, which is me versus the outside world. And if you would have asked me that same question 18 months ago, I would have talk about someone else and what I was frustrated about. Now it's about an area or an opportunity for growth. And in my particular case, it has to do with being super intentional and.

Holding to a higher standard of an outcome. So right now, at this moment.

I have a few goals. Again, all this happened within like two seconds, as you said that. The first one is I have two books I'm working on, so I make a lot of my day and my life about creating circumstances and opportunities to connect with people and communities that will enable that book.

Can I pause you for a second?

Go ahead.

I'm a coach, so I'm going to play with you. If you're okay with this, go for it.

I know this is good, so this.

Is interesting and I'm intellectually engaged and I'm missing something. So the power of what are you tolerating? It's usually an emotional question. It hits you kind of in the solar plexus and people know. There's. There's someone in my life. I'm tolerating this. There's. There's a habit I have that I'm tolerating. There's a thought that comes up again and again that I accept. Tim Ferriss has a lovely rule. He says you can give everything you want in life a number from 0 to 10, but you're not allowed to use the number 7. Sevens are your tolerations, you know, for 6 or under. I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't work with that person. There are six or below your sevens.

Under 10, by the way. Thank you for that. That was great. You want my answer or do you want me? I know I interrupted you. No, no, no, this is what I'm tolerating. I have been undisciplined and I hate the fact that I've been undisciplined with my time. I get a lot done, but not to the degree that I know I'm capable of. And at the end of the day, the amount of purposeful.

Meaningful work that I can look back at and say that was My art is relatively low right now, and that's what I'm tolerating. My life is so amazing on so many levels that I'm tolerating a lack of discipline.

There you go.

That was good.

So Mike's smiling at me right now because these are the kind of questions that hit.

Yeah.

And that's how you get to what do they really want?

Another question that gets to the model of the world and how they see the world.

Oh, okay. I know you're a dad, so this is a powerful question. There are some powerful buttons that we can push as coaches, and this is one as a parent. So I know as a parent I can have all these aspirations for my sons, what I want for them, but they're going to model who I be in the world more than what I say. Oh, yeah. Who are you being right now that if your son grew up to be that way, you'd feel like, oh, how did I do that? I missed that. Like, why? I didn't catch that. I was modeling that for him.

That's really good. That's really good. And this is something that.

My son will sometimes come up to me and he has an exceptionally high EQ. And at 16, he still hasn't determined exactly what he's going to be, although on some test he took recently, it said he'd be a good lawyer. He's always had a strong sense of justice and right and wrong. And at 16, he does not curse. He hates cursing. So I'm using that as a little backgrounder. And there will be times when he'll just flat out say, I don't like who you are being right now and here's why. Or it's like you're grumpy and angry and they're like, I don't even notice it. And I'm like. And I usually have a pretty good sense on if I'm in a bad mood. So he is a better barometer of who I am being than I am. And I'm embarrassed and ashamed to admit that. So. And that causes me pause because it's like, what is going on? What do I not have control or knowledge of or awareness of? And that lack of self awareness when you have a 16 year old who has more awareness than you do is scary as a parent for me. So that was profound.

That takes me back before I had kids, when I knew I was going to have a boy, I went to the guys in my men's group and this is a group of powerful men. And I said to these guys, If I'm honest, I'm terrified. What the hell do I know about being a man that I can teach my son? And they said, don't worry. He will teach you everything you need to know about being a man.

That's the pressure changer and compression cycle. All right, I'm going to push you for another one. What's another question? Because these are. These are profound. What's another question you ask to determine someone's model of the world and how.

They see the world? Well, I love the story about Alfred Nobel. Most people hear his name, and it sounds familiar. Well, it's familiar because his name is what was given to the Nobel Peace Prize. Alfred Nobel. What most people don't know about him is that he lived and died over 100 years ago. And he was a chemist, and he invented tnt, which is also known as trinitrotoluene, or dynamite. One day, Alfred's brother died, and the local paper printed his obituary, except they made a mistake. They printed Alfred's instead of his brother's. And the headline on the newspaper that day said, Dr. Death dies. You see, dynamite had been used to kill more people by that time than any other weapon in history. And Alfred was horrified. Like this. He literally saw in front of his face the legacy he was leaving on the planet. And he said, I am not going to leave that legacy. We know the legacy he made. He was determined to leave because every year, millions of dollars are donated in the cause of peace and scientific discovery, because the Nobel Peace Prize foundation, when he died, his family tried to fight him in the courts because he left all of his fortune to create this Nobel Peace Prize, and they were horrified. We know Alfred's legacy because he got to see the legacy he would actually leave. So a question I will sometimes ask somebody is, what's. There's a painful way of doing this and not so painful.

Yeah, I want both. Yeah, let's start with painful.

The painful legacy is. The painful question is, we don't know, Mike. Right. I've lost a couple of good friends in the last couple of years. We don't know what's coming. We really don't. Whether it's a bus that's coming down the road and we're not looking, or illness or we don't know what's coming. So we don't know whether this is our last moment on the planet. But if it was, what's the legacy you want to leave actually leave today? If you and I. This was the podcast finished, and a rock hit your apartment, and we didn't make it through to this afternoon. What's the legacy that people are going to remember us for right now? The more gentle one is what's the question? The legacy you'd love to leave, but the uncomfortable one is, you know, actually right now, look, I'm proud of these things, but actually this is all I've got right now. And it. Whilst 10 years ago, it would have been amazing to say this is my legacy now in this moment now, there's usually something that's missing.

I love that. So what's the legacy you would leave versus you'd like to leave Are the two questions then the painful and the non painful one? I just want to make sure I've got that straight.

Yeah, that's great.

I don't say this out loud and it's not on my website anywhere, but what I do in my work with people is I help powerful people to remember how powerful they are. Yeah, I felt powerless for so much of my life. That part of my gift is I just, I see your power and doesn't matter how much you try and hide it from me or how powerful you are, I can see where there's something missing or lacking in your power. It's just, it's just, it's my gift. If, when I have a tombstone mic, my name can be written on it in the bottom right hand corner it will say, rich Litvin was here. But really what I wanted to say on the tombstone in big letters is, you are more powerful than you think. Because when people walk through the graveyard and they see all the stones with the names and they pay no attention, they're going to stop and see that. And that's what I do. I help people remember how powerful they are. And so that's the legacy I know I leave to this day. I still have. Some of the kids I used to teach from years ago reach out to say they haven't forgotten the lessons I used to teach them. And it was nothing to do with science because I taught science, because I had to have a degree in biology. Science bored me, to be frank. I messed with their thinking and I taught them to be better people. And I do that to this day.

The painful part about what's missing for.

Me.

Peter Diamandis says, what would you do if you had a billion dollars? Because it gets to what he calls a massively transformative purpose. And for me, if I had a billion dollars, it would be the little ticket in my pocket that would allow me to sit in rooms with billionaires because I love to work with people who are making a big impact in the world. And when you help someone who makes a big impact, already have a tiny shift in their thinking, that impact can be massive. And so that's what's missing for me right now in my legacy is there are some more interesting people out there making a bigger impact than I currently know and work with, who I'd love to know and work with.

Yeah, I think that's probably what brought you and me together today because I feel very much the same way. It's one of the reasons why I chose to liquidate everything and burn the ship, so to speak.

Yeah.

So this is going to bring me to a distinction that I've experienced as I've been listening to you and learning more about how you think today. And what I hope Dan's and my gift to our listeners will be is.

What you're really good at doing is composing questions to invoke self realization.

And as you would say, it's like if I were going to quote you in a variant, is I see your power.

I know for me, I see your vision. That's a distinction between what I think you do and I do as coaches or advisors. But I'm curious.

If you meet someone and get a sense of what their model of the world is and you ask them a few questions, do you invent questions to help them see their power versus tell them what you see? And can you think of a story right now about how you compose a question that's personalized for an individual?

Do I invent questions? In some ways, yes. I have to because I have to be so present to the person who's with me the moment I'm thinking of something clever to ask and not being present. It's like I said earlier, the challenge.

Is.

Well, let me make it real. You ever had a buddy who keeps dating the same kind of woman and he comes in with a new girlfriend and he says, mike, you got to meet her. And you meet her and you say to him later, look, Mike, Fred, she's just like all the other girls you date. And he says, what are you talking about? This one's different. And it doesn't matter what you say. He can't hear you. And he literally can't hear you. So that's the problem of trying to tell people what you think they need to hear. You've got to help them see it for themselves. Because then the shift being far more powerful.

Absolutely. So I think worse than that are people who marry the same person. Right. Or they Marry their mother. So intimacy represents a mechanism for. It's a band aid for an old trauma.

And again, going through this whole idea of changing someone's model of the world can happen with a simple distinction or asking a great question. It's sort of like it chips away at a layer of an onion, which, again, I see trauma as a band aid for an emotional pain. If it's left alone long enough, it can manifest into a disease or a tumor. And we talked about what cancer is earlier on, so it's interesting.

Trauma is one of the ways that that often leads to massive transformation in people's lives. It's. It's not the only way. It can be trauma, it can be challenge, it can be reflection. The ones that come to mind to have a shift in your world. But sometimes something traumatic happens. There's research these days. We've all heard of post traumatic stress. There's a lot of research being done around post traumatic growth. We've come through for. You're a survivor of cancer, people. I lost my job. And I'm grateful now, all these years, like, I look back, how grateful I am for that happened. There are moments in life with where those shifts that could be traumatic turn out to be the stimulus for some massive, powerful transformation in our lives that makes total sense.

So I'm going to bring this. As we sort of wind this down, I'm going to ask you just a couple more questions, which these are Dan Sullivan questions. One of them, he calls it his dos, which is, what do you see right now at this point in history as being the dangers that leaders are facing? And again, I'm going to contextualize this a little bit more in the sense of your objective and goal is to reach more people capable of significant impact. And if you're going to address your legacy, your big goal of getting into bigger rooms with bigger people who are capable of greater impact, what do you see as the dangers to realizing that goal right now?

Well, I think the danger is implicit in your question, actually. It's interesting how you worded it good. It's not more people, it's less people. And that's the day we live in this world of more and bigger. And that's not always a very healthy place. It's not that difficult to have a million followers. Followers on Instagram. But where does that get you? What does that actually do? You spend all your time on Facebook putting stuff out into the universe that brings nothing back in a healthy way. We're caught in a world right now that's Social media focused. That's image focused. And I think that's one of the dangers. I wrote an article a year or so back called Go Weird, Not Wide. In a world where everyone is saying go wide, it's important to have a million followers. Maybe not. Maybe it's more important to be so weird and idiosyncratic and unique that you draw your people to you. You see, your job is actually to polarize people. I think the most insidious part of Facebook is the like button. Your job is not to be liked. You want people who are zeros and tens. The zeros are not interested in you. They switch off. The tens are your dream people, and you want nothing in between. Your job is to polarize. It doesn't mean to trigger or upset people, but to put them into those two camps, and that's it.

So good. And you know the power in that. Those who are willing to polarize are those with power. And I can think of one I mentioned today to you is Joe Rogan. He's got close to 5 million YouTube followers right now, and he's a podcaster. So it's his live performance that he also turns into an audio podcast. And he is such a fascinating character. I love how he thinks and how he presents and performs. And one of his, someone he's had on, I think, twice, is Jordan Peterson. We were talking about him earlier, who I think is one of the most interesting people out there right now. And his book is. I think it's one of the most popular books ever at this point. It's sold a lot of copies. And I believe the times refused to acknowledge him for quite a while, for some reason or another, because he's seen as a polarizing character. And if you read and study him, I think he's an amazing, amazing thinker and one of the finest debaters I've ever seen. But he hasn't been afraid to stand up for what he stands up for, which tells you something about polarization, which is when you are willing to be uncompromised.

And that is someone who is sure of themselves. And you can say that's one thing about Donald Trump, for example, and we can rip him to shreds, but he's President of the United States. He won, or maybe won, but it doesn't matter. Let's say he won enough, but he. He represents a certain amount of certainty. And that's what people will vote for. It's what they will admire, it's what they will trust. And I know I went down on a Rabbit hole there and that whole. That. That whole thing. But I just wanted to riff on that a little bit and throw it back in your lap to just get your impression and talk a little bit more about being a certain leader, being a strong leader and a powerful leader. Yeah.

You give two interesting examples. I'm not a huge fan of Jordan's work, but I like some of it. I'm certainly not a Trump fan, but I understand.

Why you use them as examples.

I think.

We have to be careful when I use the word polarizing, because Trump is polarizing, but I think he deliberately tries to antagonize to create a following. And that's not what I. Not quite the same as what I'm talking about. What you do touch on, though, is it takes courage. It takes courage to put a stake in the ground and to own who you are and what you believe. I believe.

That'S a powerful thing to. Thing to say.

I help my clients speak their counterintuitive truths out into the world. That's really powerful. When you can own a counterintuitive truth, you really have an ability to put a stake in the ground, most people think.

But the truth is, when you can fill in the blanks on that for you, you start to create a message and a mission about what's important for you in the world, and your people will want to come along and follow.

That was awesome. So most people think. But the truth is. So here's the way I want to almost wrap this up. Tell me one quick story about the Most people think. But the truth is that floored you. That again, either created a distinction, either in you or with someone you were working with.

It would sound something like this. Most people think that when you finally have successful money and fame, you'll be happy. The truth is you can never have enough of what you don't really need. You can never have enough of what you don't really need. I know that for myself, when I've achieved things that weren't really what I wanted, there's been an emptiness inside. And we see this in.

I'm wondering whether to get political, but I'll be frank. I think we see it in President Trump. This is effectively the most powerful person on the planet, and he feels absolutely powerless, which is why he spends all day tweeting in order to feel some sense of personal identity and power. And you can never have enough of what you don't really need.

So interesting. I think that's.

I barely, barely am containing myself right now because I'd love to add some more color commentary.

Oh, I can't help it. The crybaby in chief. But it is. It's so interesting to see how that manifests. And.

Okay, I'll ask you one, one last one, because I can't help myself. If you got to sit down and ask President Trump a question right now that could possibly cause some form of self reflection or a distinction. What would you love to ask?

In aa, the first step is saying, my name's Rich and I'm an alcoholic. You have to be ready for transformation. You can't thrust it upon anybody. So there is no question I would ask President Trump, unless he's come to me to say, hey, I'm ready for some help, or I have a question or I want to do something that I'm unable to do. Then we could sit down, have a powerful conversation. Without that. My job is not to go and tell you, whoever you are in the world, there's a shift that you need to make. And here's the question I have for you or the idea I have for you.

Wow. That was good. That was awesome.

I'll finish with. I distinguish between four types of coaches. There are informational coaches outside in, little impact. They just want to tell you this is how it should be done. Do this. There are motivational coaches outside in. Again, there's a temporary high. There are inspirational coaches. This is inside out. And again, it's just a temporary high, though. The fourth kind, which for me is where the power lies, is a transformational coach. A transformational coach is willing to go to the dark with you. They're willing to be disliked for your breakthrough. Serve you, not please you. They're willing to push your buttons, and they're willing to remind you of what you want rather than what you say you want. That's the game I love to play. Transformational coaching.

Well done. Exceptional. So aside from grabbing a copy of your book the Prosperous Coach, which one of the reasons we're together today is someone told me about it. It turns out we had met previously, but I just didn't put two and two together. They told me about the book, and it was over $40 on Amazon for a paperback. And I thought, if anyone has the guts to ask for that on Amazon, I like them already. And I'm gonna buy the book. I immediately bought it. It was like, push button showed up and I tore into it and I was like, damn, this is really good material because it's really well thought out. The chapters are.

Really short, digestible. There's great takeaways and it inspired me enough to look you up, learn more, find someone who we knew in common, who it turns out it was Sean Stevenson who connected us and we're here today. But how would you like someone to learn more about you or reach out and connect with you?

Well, thanks for asking. Everything really is on richlitvin.com and my websites, Mike, are usually five years out of dates. We're actually redoing it right now, but it doesn't matter. I don't ever intend to be found on Google. If you search for a coach. What I intend is if you've.

Met someone who knows me, if you've listened to me and you're interested, you can read a lot of what I've written online, you can watch a lot of what I put out online. I have a body of work now. And then you get in touch. The way I put it is if you're the kind of person who most people will think doesn't need a coach, then you and I should have a conversation.

Well, here's what I'll say. This has been a pleasure. I love the way you think, which is really important. But more importantly, I like who you are and what you stand for, your values. And it just shows up in your writings. How you communicate, how you think and with the moments in between, that's really who you are. It's the little gaps, it's the silence. And I appreciate that about you. Thank you.

Yeah, nice. Me too. It just dawned on me. I looked at the time we met three and a half hours ago. We have not stopped talking since we first met. What a treat.

So we got to co create together too, which I think is one of the highest compliments you can ever give someone. So thank you. I'm looking forward to more conversations like this with you, Rich.

Thanks, Mike.

All right, that's it for this episode. But don't go anywhere because my co host, Dan Sullivan and I have a really easy ask for you. Will you open up your podcast app and give us a five star review and leave a comment about what you love about it most? Dan and I read every review and it'll take less than a minute. And while you're at it, share this episode or tell someone about it because the best way to grow an audience is by word of mouth. Now if you want detailed show notes, photos, links to all the cool stuff we talked about, or want to ask a question, have a show idea, or want to leave a voice message for Dan or me, just head over to capabilityamplifier.com for all this and lots of free goodies, including copies of our best selling books. Now, this is Mike Koenigs. So on behalf of Dan and me, thanks for subscribing and listening and we'll see you on the next episode.