[Music] hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to the inside strategic coach podcast with Dan Sullivan Dan I really enjoy our conversations and I love listening to you as you're coaching or in workshops or just in conversations sometimes at dinner because you say things I'm like oh I want to talk more about that and you made a comment in a conversation recently and you said The more highly credentialed you are the more likely you are to ignore your own experience and I thought that was kind of a fascinating statement so I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about that and talk about why that's true I find it true but the way you put it together was like bing just struck in my mind so why is that true what's that mean well you know I mean first of all it's a very general statement and I don't really think that you can make any judgment about any particular individual but as a group of individuals I think people and it's not just credentials it's the amount of time that you've spent being educated okay educated by by others and the other distinction I have to make here is that for 45 years I've been coaching a particular type of individual who is by the standards of society unusually successful without being overly educated or overly credentialed so I've got a very very great bias towards entrepreneurs and you know the one I guess credential that you have as an entrepreneur is that you've taken some resource and moved it from a lower level of productivity to a higher level of productivity so you have the ability to take things products Services situations anything that you can get your hands on and take that to where it's more valuable in the eyes of other people and I think that's a really good credential it's in the value that other people see it because it's more valuable for them that your status your growth your success your rewards all come from your ability to make things more valuable what I see happening now and I was born in the 1940s where there wasn't such a huge emphasis on education I graduated from a class of students who I had spent from first grade to 12th grade with and I think there were just below 60 maybe 57 58 students and my memory was that in the first 3 or four years what I knew there were only seven out of a class of 58 who actually went to college part of the reason is we lived in automotive country in Northern Ohio so you had Chrysler you had Ford you had GM and then all the subcontracting companies that supplied the auto trade and it was a big aeronautical area it was steel there were major steel mills within 30 or 40 miles Cleveland was a big Steel City and you had others there was a lot of employment available right out of high school where you could start at the bottom you know over a career which still in my day was more or less guaranteed lifetime employment that you stayed with it that was it and then it changed you know it started changing already I guess when I went from high school out into the world but within about a 10-year period the effects of the second world war had been overcome by the European countries you had some of the Eastern countries especially Japan that had really rebounded from the second world war and they did it with new ideas and new equipment so they began competing in the American market and they began competing at a time when you had the biggest generation in the history of the United States now looking for scarce jobs one of the things and a lot of people don't know this and really is connected to Kathy kby whose father created the wonderlick score for basically judging IQ it's one of two or three major IQ Frameworks in which people are attested and it all came down to a particular court case that happened in North Carolina with Duke power Duke University is named after the founder of Duke power there was a discrimination case which was a racial discrimination there was people who were minorities who filed a case against Duke power that they had been held back and they had not been promoted simply because of their skin color and not because of any kind of credential they were equally qualified with people who got promoted and they weren't and this went right to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled against Duke power and immediately every major corporation Duke was in The Fortune 500 and right off the bat right across the entire ranks of all the Fortune 500 companies in the US they said okay we're not going to end up in the Supreme Court because of an issue like this so what we're going to start using is the University system to sort out who's got the credentials and then you see the enormous movement of individuals towards University to go through and finish you know a four years usually bachelor's and then sometimes graduate school as we've gotten into it and the fact that you stayed for four years in a university you did the classwork you took the task you got your degree that was your career credential and then it was in particular areas that we were looking for and that's the big shoot here but it had nothing to do with capability it had nothing to do with what you could actually do with your learning it had to do with the fact that you had a credential and that credential immediately moved you ahead in society but people were getting their credentials in the 1970s were probably more guaranteed to be confident than someone 40 years later who's going through University now and gets a bachelor's degree bachelor's degree tells you absolutely nothing whether the person is any good it tells you that they can put up with boredom it tells you that they're disciplined enough to stick with something for a long time but being able to put up with boredom being able to operate more or less within a bureaucratic system and go through the steps and finish and get a piece of paper that really in the second decade of the 21st Century doesn't tell you anything about this person's ability to actually create value and I recognize that because except for the fact that I went to a particular type of college I myself probably wouldn't have gotten a college degree I don't like other people's schools I like my own school a lot better you know strategic coach is a school for people who just want to grow for the rest of their life and I've given an enormous amount of thought to it not just when I started coaching in 1974 but I have notebooks from the time I was 20 years old which was 1964 that I wanted to create a new type of educational system which was based on the concept that people had experiences and then had an ability to think about their thinking as they were going through that experience and then they d derived unique lessons and created unique action systems for themselves that actually made them more than competent out in the marketplace it actually made them kind of really uniquely creative uniquely productive in a way that someone else who had spent 10 15 years in today's world maybe 202 or 23 years in the credential Factory and they got all sorts of cred IAL but there's absolutely no proof that they have any capability to do anything except what they were taught mm that's so true I no that's sort of my thesis here we're at a point now where this credentialism is actually being questioned a great deal more than it was in the 70s ' 80s '90s it was you know you go away you'll get paid for it doesn't matter how much money you spend on your University education it's like a mortgage you know a mortgage in a good real estate District doesn't matter how much you borrow doesn't matter how much you take on you're going to get repaid down the road and it's not so clear that that's true anymore well I think that when people buy into credentials and buy into that educational system whatever it might be that they are less likely to pay attention to their own experience and I think that's kind of an interesting perspective and it's so fun because I do have a University degree but as we were talking about in preparation for this episode I was happy going to University once I realized I was only there to learn what other people already knew or as you put what they thought about what they knew but I wasn't going there for any new ideas I wasn't going there for any Innovative thought and once I recognized that I could get through it but otherwise it was boring and then a coach as you say it is a school for really paying attention to your own experience and that in our experience at coach with our clients is really what has them be so incredibly successful is they don't overstep it they don't put someone else's ideology on top of what they know works or doesn't work so as a result they're so much more capable than other people we live so much in this environment that you know we more or less take it for granted this is how the world actually operates but actually very very few people operate in a purely entrepreneurial fashion namely that you're totally responsible for your own Financial Security not only that but you're responsible for the success of your clientele your customers you're responsible for the team members who actually work inside your organization you take responsibility I know I think about it a lot that their families will be okay so there's an enormous taking on of responsibility and every quarter actually every 30 days you get a report card on whether your notion of creating value out in the marketplace is a correct bet it's a bet and one of the things that I would say is that entrepreneurs even the least creative entrepreneur who depends on being able to bring in money through their own intelligence and through their efforts but the entrepreneurs that I've seen you know just by who we are and who we attract we really attract really really smart adaptable very creative very flexible very self- transforming individuals I mean compared to the rest of the world we've got the cream of the crop and strategic coach but even entrepreneurs that I meet at conferences who we would really have inside strategic coach just based on the fact that they've taken a bet on themselves that they can go out into the marketplace and go face to face there's three things you have to come face to face with in the market Marketplace one of them is the pricing mechanism of the marketplace that people will pay you for what they think you're worth they will pay you for what they think your creativity is worth and there is no other determinant and a lot of people would like about five credentials between themselves and the pricing mechanism of the marketplace and they'd like to be guaranteed that all their education is going to be paid off almost like a formula so they're not betters the vast majority of people are not betters they want a guarantee so that introduces a totally different mindset you're not guaranteed anything as an entrepreneur so you got to be very alert you have to be very curious about what's going on out there you have to be very very responsive to new requirements and new demands and you have to be very very resourceful about taking limited resources that you have and maximizing the value of those that happens as a result of unpredictable changes around you so it's a totally different game I really haven't spent much time with the credential world at all just to be an observer from the outside but it just seems to me that the people who bet on their own experience they bet on their understanding of their own experience and are willing to take the Judgment of the marketplace and object themselves to a scorecard which is called profit or loss and then they actually use their profits to actually create property for themselves the most important one being intellectual property that they come up with ideas whose value goes way beyond their individual performance they actually have ideas and new processes new formulas that actually work in the marketplace and you know the people in today's world who have bad on themselves in that way are cultural Heroes at least in the United States they are yeah I love that Dan you also talk about when you first meet someone you have a personal check that you do is someone growth oriented or are they status oriented because a lot of times you know if someone needs to get credentials because that will help them be successful in their Marketplace that's cool but if they're doing it just for status then you know that's not someone that has the right mindset for coach for example I'm not against credentials because I use them for the success of my business and I'll tell you two credentials that I have I have both an American passport and a Canadian passport and these are two credentials that have stood me very well in operating a business both in Canada and the United States but then also being able to go to the UK which recognizes American and Canadian passports there are certain credential if you own something you've got ownership proof we have intellectual property we have trademarks we have patents we have copyrights those credentials I believe in because without those credentials you don't have a say but a credential that because you have a credential means that you have a capability is other people betting on you I don't see any real proof that the mere achievement of the credential actually is respected in the pricing mechanism of the marketplace I might get you in the door but it's not going to tell you what happens after you go through the door that's a really really good point interesting so how can people if you got credentialed as we both have how can people really if they're stuck in that mindset or if they're hanging out with people in that mindset how can they really focus in on paying more attention to their own experience or giving equal or more validity to that in terms of if people are in that kind of shift or again spending time with people or their own experience I mean I think the entire strategy coach program is really about how to pay attention to your own experience and learn from it but what's a quick simple step that someone could take to get started have goals I think goal setting is the number one vehicle that sets up a learning process where it's clearcut you either achieve the goal or you don't achieve the goal and then your honesty about that that if you achieve the goal you have an honesty to go back and say well what did we actually achieve here that's repeatable in the future you know and can I teach other people how to do this so that there's parts of it next time that I don't have to do so this is our who not how formula mhm I've done if I start at you know really childhood I had a passion for seeing the experiences I was going through as something I could stand above and I could actually look at how I had actually done this almost like I had a movie of myself and I could run it from the beginning and I was fascinated with how I thought about things as I was actually doing them and then I asked myself questions what really worked about this so that's a what we call an experience Transformer and what I learned that is repeatable what didn't work so well where I have to actually change things I have to either not get into that situation again or I have to approach it totally differently and for me I caught on to this very early in life and I'm not talking about in my teens or 20s I think I had this one pretty well nailed before I was 10 years old but I was kind of alone with this because there was no one else who for my observation seemed to be doing this because it would show up in conversation and one of the things I've noticed is conversation is the great teaching mechanism where you can sort out really quickly what someone else is striving for are they striving for status or are they striving for greater growth and you can hear it and terms of what they talk about and a lot of people talk at the level of things they want to have things in their life usually they're material things and that if you have a lot of these things that gives you a status and other people talk about people because if you know certain people that gives you a status and then thoughts that there are thoughts which are more or less dominant in the media in culture at any given time and if you show a knowled about these thoughts you know you could go down the list of the last week's news media and there's five or six major things and where you stand on these and everything kind of determines your status or your acceptability to other people but things and people and thoughts don't have anything to do with thinking thinking is that you can observe how you are actually experiencing your own life so when you're fronted with someone else's thought you say well would that work for me I don't care who's teaching me it first of all is the person teaching me do they actually operate that way so that's one thing I want to know and I noticed an enormous number of educated credential people have a private personal life that in no way demonstrates what they learned what they learned is on a sheet of paper on the wall you know there's a wardrobe that goes along with that there's a lifestyle that goes along with that there's outward manifestations but it gives you no indicator whether the person has a moment by moment experience by experience capability that's come from any of their learning so for me it's all personal you know and that's what I noticed that entrepreneurism is a far more individual personal way of existing on the planet other people are in a group you know they're group who went to a particular University they're in a group that lives in a particular neighborhood they're in a group that belongs to certain clubs has nothing to do with you as an individual okay other than you learn the rules and how to conform you know but you didn't learn the rules and how you personally create and entrepreneurism is the area of life that covers all activities that could cover the Arts it could cover Tech technology it could cover any area of sales any area of creating new Services creating new Solutions and what I see is that I'm never ever introduced by what I studied in my educational system you know I'm introduced by the thousands and thousands of examples that we have in strategic coach oh people from strategic coach you know Ari misel who's a great favorite of mine and Ari is a genius at finding shortcuts for people to get bigger results easier faster cheaper and produce bigger results and he says I can always tell strategic coach people from everybody else that I deal with and he said the thing I know is this somebody's coming out of strategic coach and they want to use my services they always walk in knowing exactly what they want and he said and the other thing is they're incredibly coachable and number two is they'll turn on a dime if they see a better way of doing something so he said that's not usual they don't fight you with what they think they already know they listen to what you say and say oh that's a really different way of proceeding and if they do argue they argue after they've tried it out theyve they come back and say Well it kind of works but I notice this and then arri gets rewarded because he finds out new things for himself that's a wonderful it's kind of like a dance it's a dance to music that's actually being created so it's Jazz it's kind of like a jazz type of activity I love it Dan I really love this distinction because it explains so many conversations I've had people I've spent time with people I don't enjoy spending time with and I just to my mind getting even clearer Direction about how to always be in that mindset creating value direction is incredibly useful thank you thank you