[Music] hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to inside strategic coach with Dan Sullivan Dan you and I were just talking about how the program really gives entrepreneurs more time to think and thinking time is something that most entrepreneurs don't give themselves don't take or don't feel like they have time for so thinking time is actually the subject of this but let's explore like what exactly is thinking time why is it important let's start there well I'll make a more general statement Shannon I don't think human beings give themselves time to think it's just that I think the stakes are higher for entrepreneurs simply because they're in the marketplace independently they don't have somebody else's employment structure right protecting them from their deadlines we had a book out and it's the very first quarterly book it's called thinking about your thinking and what I've observed is that most people the kind of thinking we do in strategic coach they only do that under extreme emergency you know they're in a crisis and I'll be in a non-strategic coach setting you know we just get into some thinking about thinking subjects and people say oh this is really getting deep okay and I found that comment really interesting I said well this is just normal talk and strategic coach but for them it's deep thinking and there's something scary about deep thinking you know like why are you doing that you know any why question is deep thinking you know because you don't have the answer to it until you've heard the question and you create it on the spot so that most people have three levels of thinking they think about things you know they just are constantly talking about things things they own things they wish they own things other people have that they wish they owned and everything else and then there's a second one they talk about other people they think about other people and I guess that's why social media got so big as people like communicating with their 500 closest friends every day tell them you know took five minutes longer getting out of bed this morning they tell 5,000 people about that and that's just normal and it's not that someone just does one kind of thinking so people who think about other people think about other people's things you know so they're talking at that level and then there's people who think about thoughts but they're not their thoughts and higher education is almost entirely based on people who spent their whole life thinking about somebody else's thoughts but they're not really their thoughts so it's a lot easier to get entrepreneurs thinking about this because they're faced with real world deadlines real world challenges and they have to make real world decisions and so I found that the tools that we've created in strategic coach which are all thinking about your Thinking Tools really landay well with most entrepreneurs I would say there's entrepreneurs that it doesn't but I mean when you're out you know not in strategic code Circle don't you find that people don't really talk they talk a lot about something that you don't find really interesting or important no I saying in an earlier conversation I just have zero patience or attention really for small talk like talking about things whatever so what I want my things you want your things we're good you know that's the end of that one about other people I also know it's for me most often incorrect we can't understand someone else's motivations we can ask questions we can ask them but a whole bunch of people talking about someone else doesn't forward anything it doesn't get it there and University became a lot better for me when I realized I was actually thinking that University was about your thinking no I could make peace with it when I realized I was only learning what other people already knew in other words other people's thoughts so what I find most interesting is When someone tells me hey this is how I'm thinking about this bam I have a lot to contribute lots to ask lots to listen for that's an engaging fun forwarding conversation the other ones you're probably making it up or guessing or bragging none of which actually makes anything useful happen in my world so talking about thinking that's gold and that's by far the most interesting yeah so most conversations back cocktail parties you'll see me in the corner with one person having a deep conversation me too because you won't see me work I find a person in the room that can think about their thinking and that's it for the party 100% yeah yeah one person will say to my husband wow I had this great conversation with Shannon we talked about blah blah blah and then no one else will even know I was there it's happened more than once yeah yeah I mean it's like radio waves you pick the station that youy the station yeah but I mean the whole start of strategic coach was based on a question you know if we were having this discussion and it was 3 years from now and you're looking back from three years back to today what has to happen in your life over those three years for you to feel happy with your progress yes well that's a really big question you know and then you shut your mouth after you've asked the question you just sit there and you can see the people all of a sudden they're not looking at you they're looking off and they're Imagining the scenario that you've just set up the reason I'm bringing up this subject is that one of our team members one of our sales team just had a phenomenal month from asking that question of people and he got 13 sales which is a big deal in strategic coach and he said you know I've learned this and it always works but can you explain why it works and I said well first of all you're using a tense of the English language called the future perfect and nobody uses the future perfect it's there it's it's in the English language but you're asking them to go into the future and imagine that you're standing in the future but then you're treating the three years back to today as the past you've created three years of past that they're in the future and they're looking and it does magic things to their brain I mean first of all they bought you as a relationship because you have the premise that you and the other person are in relationship Up 3 years from today so the first thing in any sale whether it's a sale for a product or a service or an experience is that the first thing that people buy is a relationship and this we're together so they've already bought that they're comfortable enough with me and they're trusting me that they can imagine that the two of us are talking three years in the future and then you ask them to look backwards and what are they going to be happy about their progress well there's only one expert on what progress is going to make them happy and that's them and they sit there and I think that they sense that this is a rare experience and that they get a chance now to do some thinking about their thinking that they have never done before and it may not happen again so they better take it seriously as they're doing it and that's thinking the answer to that question they're thinking about their thinking and it's a rare experience in that question you tell what strategic coach is all about it's thinking about your thinking about your experience as you said it is a rare experience and you've said this more than once and I like it Dan because I really Echo what you say and when I've coached the team on this pretty much word for word those nuances to the question are so key they're the only experts it's about progress not Perfection it's assuming a relationship in the future and looking back and they haven't envisioned their future like that before and then we can really easily determine whether or not coach is a right fit for what they're up to and whether or not they're a right fit for Coach so it becomes this partner conversation not a sales conversation it's about hey this is your future this is where we can create value for you let's see whether or not we've got essentially a collaboration so it's such a rich question but it's interesting you have to be willing to bite your tongue and wait cuz people will take a few seconds they'll take take a beat before they Marshal their thoughts CU you're not asking them about you know what they already know you're asking them about them yeah I call it the RF Factor question because you know you're asking about the relationship and they're willingness to answer the question tells you that if things worked out they would like to have a relationship with you and that decision is made in seconds Dan can you share the example you shared the other day when someone didn't want to answer that question with you and what what you did yeah I mean I don't remember the circumstances but I do remember the drama of the situation so I asked him this question and he says well I don't even know you it's pretty early to be answering that kind of question and I says no no no it's actually it's too late I said the reason I've come here I want to see whether what we do at strategic coach can be useful to you and in order to know that it's useful I have to know something about what you're planning with your future and I can't really line up anything we're doing unless I get your answer to that question and since you don't want to share that with me there's nothing I can do for you so thanks for the time we've probably both saved ourselves a lot of time and I just reached over and you know he just reflexively shook my hand and I stood up he said well where are you going and I says there was nothing for us to talk about because you won't and said wait a minute can we I said no no you had a chance you don't get another chance to do it I mean I'm um hardlining on this if they won't answer the question the first time I don't want to hear their answer to it period so I just walked out you know I just walked out and over by period of about a year I got three phone calls from this person say Hey you know I was rude and I said no you weren't rude you were absolutely truthful you did not trust me enough to answer the question and I said I think the reason why you're phoning me is that I did an unnatural act and that is the salesperson rejected you and what you're trying to do is you're trying to restore your status you know you lost control in the situation but no I found that if someone doesn't answer the question right away they don't trust me then they will not trust me in the future either you know anyway I mean the whole point about this is the topic of this podcast is thinking about your thinking one of the things that I think is that someone like that is afraid of their own thinking yes they're afraid of their own thinking so it's not that they don't trust me to talk to me about the question they're afraid of actually asking the question themselves they don't go there because they have a fear that they won't like the answers if they ask themselves that question and another thing I've experienced because I've asked the question a fair bit is that people just don't think right their only thinking is about things people and thoughts they don't actually have their own so it's an unnatural act for them to think it's an unnatural act there you go and they don't trust what they come up with and they're afraid of it so you know we talk about always be the buyer and they want that control but if you're going to have a collaborative you know partnership relationship the other cool thing although this is not so much about thinking Dan you didn't take it personally and you didn't try to convince him to trust you you were like no for whatever reason no maybe I look like somebody who doesn't like for whatever reason I'm not going to push that it would be a waste of my time and it would be a waste of their time if I tried to come at it another way you know but already the game was over uhuh no game today so I'm going to have a coffee I'm going to Starbucks I love that the other thing about it is if they do answer the question these are really really serious matters you know and the thing is no one has ever asked them the question right consequently they may not have access to the thinking that they're doing in the next 15 minutes 20 minutes whatever it is is you know I wrote a book on this called the rfactor question everybody else was claiming it so I call it the Dan Sullivan question I just had a story that I got someone who referred to possibly be a member of the Strategic coach program so he was a good referral and he said so and so said a lot about your program can you tell me about your program and I said well before I tell you about my program I just want to ask you a question so if we were meeting here 3 years for today and you were looking back over the three years what has to happen in your business and in your personal life for you to feel happy with your progress okay notice it's happiness with your progress not happiness right what's going to make you happy I don't ask that question ask question happy with your progress which means that they have to in their mind establish I grew here this is bigger this is better I'm freed up here because their progress and it was progress that they'd be happy with so this person didn't answer right away he took about a minute you know so I asked the question and but I could tell he was thinking you know I wasn't impatient and there's no use me saying anything else it just destroys the structure of what we're doing and he says well I'll tell you three years ago I was a complete and total alcoholic wow and he says it's taken me three years to get back back up to Ground Zero I was in such a hole so I've got to really make up for L time so in 3 years I have to do this and I have to do this and I have to do this I was looking at my watch he talked for 23 minutes straight and at the end of 23 minutes he said well your program sounds really good you know and there's a humor to that because I didn't say a word after I asked the question and he's saying my program sounds really good and I thought about it afterwards I said I really did tell him everything about the program that the program was going to be about him and it wasn't going to be about me and that's all he wanted to know who's the program for right and I contrast that to a program where I'm going to talk nonstop at him and he just didn't want to go to a program where he was talked at he wanted a program where he could do some real thinking and I love that example Dan because it's so illustrative of the power of the rfactor question and of our program because the program is about you the Strategic coach and the membership is all about you and what you're up to not about us we have brilliant tools to help you get there but they're all thinking about your thinking exactly yeah so Dan I want to go back to what you said I said entrepreneurs and you said actually it's people don't give themselves don't take a lot of time for them to think so let's unpack why that happens or how that happens what's the fun there they're busy no they're busy they get up in the morning they're busy with this they're busy with that they're busy with this then they're you know checking social media then you know returning phone calls and you're doing emails but they're not really thinking about their thinking they're just engaging with whatever the world is throwing at them for the whole day and then they're really tired and then they watch television but you definitely are not thinking about your thinking when you're watching television okay and I have to do because I gave up television six years ago I haven't watched any television and I noticed I got 800 hours back to think about my thinking a year 800 hours a year six years is close to 5,000 hours I got back but people are busy you know and it's not Modern Life no in the middle of the 19th century people weren't thinking about their thinking they were busy with what constituted business back then okay you have to learn how to think about your thinking all the other thinking comes naturally because you're just reacting to what's coming at you here you're taking control you're taking agency over what actually goes on in your mind you know and then you discover gee there's a whole world of thinking that I never knew was there I just never knew there was this other world where I can actually think about my thinking yeah I had one this morning uh it's a fairly new tool well it was yesterday I had another tool this morning and the thinking exercise if your entire life up until now was a single project what's the project you're working on okay and who you know I have a way of taking them through a series of questions and they have a sheet of paper and they write it down and then at the end of it and they've answered all these questions they said so what were your three biggest insights from doing all that thinking and then they write down the thinking then they go into breakout group and they're amazed they're amazed they said my life really has been a single project I never realized that before so I said what's that doof that you're thinking about the future that your whole life is a single project and I tell them what mine is mine is creating Thinking Tools for entrepreneurs to think about their thinking that's my entire project I was doing this in one way or another when I was seven or eight years old not with entrepreneurs but with humans and humans often times who are 4050 years older than me right okay and I just noticed that there's this whole vast unlimited Universe called your thinking but most people never think about it until they have a crisis okay you know they have a an emergency or they have a loss or they have a failure and then for a very brief period of time they think about their thinking and they review their life and they sort of say decisions and you know what they call that thinking about their thinking trauma oh yeah interesting oh that was traumatic that was and they don't want to do that again they don't want to be in any situation again where they have to think about their thinking so they spend their whole life missing life oh that's fast I just thought that up because I was thinking about my thinking there you go and Dan what's interesting because at coach you just had two connection calls yesterday and today plus other exercise that you've done this week with our coaches and then every coaching opportunity so people in our programs as part of strategic coach have lots of opportunities to think about their thinking oh yeah and what's interesting is the more you do it the more normal it becomes you're not scared of your own thoughts well yeah and the other thing is you don't like thinking about things and thinking about people and thinking about other people's thoughts this is very addictive activity in the best way possible and this is interesting this ties into another point I was talking about with you earlier came like a flash of insight and then I read it once I wrote down I'm like oh it doesn't sound that spectacular but I looked at a couple of clients that I've known in our free zone workshop and I looked at their businesses four years ago and where they are now they're 100 to to a THX of what they were before and my inside was like wow this is what our tools unlock people's thinking which the evidence of it is wild it doesn't sound all that dramatic but it really does and it's kind of amazing what happens when you're in an environment where that's supported it's not traumatic it's not trauma it's normal it's normal and then these incredible possibilities and then realities happen out of it and it's Stellar it's why to watch but unlocking people's thinking is really the magic of both the tools and the environment and the community that you create which has been really fun to be a part of to watch for my own thinking as well yeah so it's really interesting well what about you I mean you're 33 years in coach you know a team and a leader in coach for 33 years what was your thinking about your thinking in 1991 and what your thinking about your thinking in 2024 there's so many little steps I actually can't wait to do that exercise your life is a project because I'm curious single project single project I'm I'm having a hunch of what I think it is I think it's next Thursday oh excellent yes I'll be there so I think for me what is most true is that limitations that other people see on themselves I don't have people like oh I can't do this I shouldn't do this and I'm like what are you talking about of course you can so it's kind of this Limitless it's not impractical but it's this really sense of oh well if I really want it to happen I can make it happen between technology and who's and unique ability I can make anything I really want to have happen happen so it's just this sense of expansion and this sense of freedom and I was reading a particular book where they say you have to like look at your mindsets and make sure you eliminate like limiting beliefs and I'm like wonder how many do I you're thinking about your thinking that's taken care of totally it's fun to realize that my brain is in some ways despite being add calmer in those aspects than a lot of other people people have this internal conversation that just looks brutal and I think when you're thinking about your thinking you just have access to shift it to be something that's you know more forwarding to the Future that you want I've known you for 33 years and I've only seen one situation in your life that was really traumatic and you didn't think about your thinking and it happened within the last year oh okay yes packing up your house so your house could be renovated you so right and you did not do any thinking about your thinking you were totally reactive to that whole situation and it was awful well you got a little insight when you don't think about your thinking 100% I've seen you in real emergency situation with people dying and and having to really take leadership in a situation and you're cool and calm you are not add when you're in those situations you're very focused you're very calm and everything but in my 33 years the only time I've seen Shon not thinking about her thinking is when she had to pack everything and move you know yeah move out for a renovation well and to that point it's been a huge learning from last year just huge because my husband and I Bruce decided to get married in 1996 yes July 27th 1996 we used a strategy Circle to get married right like a critical thinking tool and Coach the number one and did I do a strategy Circle an impact filter for moving no I did not like I did one 28 years ago and I didn't do one today yeah that was kind of crazy which is kind of funny cuz I realized I didn't take complete owner ship of project and then I didn't do the thinking about oh you were a victim from day one yeah I kind of thought I could just on the surf packing yeah and it truly an incomp it was traumatic it was you're 100% right but to that point knowing that I'm not beating myself up it's like okay no to self do something different next time and I think that's one of the wisdom that comes out of the Thinking Tools and by the way it's not easy to think about your thinking without the tools or at least it's so much easier with the tools is one of my other takeaways cuz I put your brain on paper and you can see it differently but it's just the fact that and this came out with all of our coaches when you can think about your thinking it allows you to be capable and present and handle stuff as it comes up and confident and confident and resilient like some of the circumstances that our coaches our community have had to handle are other otherwise you would have said traumatic but they're incredibly challenging and they had the freedom of time money relationship and purpose to handle it and it's impressive so one of the byproducts of thinking about your thinking is allows you to be your absolute best most capable most contributing self no matter what you are not at the effective circumstances you can be very alert to what's required and take effective action it's pretty impressive yeah yeah and you know it's just an observation and I don't know how human talents are distributed it seems to me that there's no predictability but regardless of what your other talents are the talent of thinking about your thinking I think it has to be consciously learned yes and I think it has to be practiced and every time you do some thinking about your thinking I think the skill of thinking about your thinking expands you get better and better at it you know for example sometimes I'll get myself in a deadline Crunch and my first thing is I sit down we have another tool called the fast filter instead of doing any of the stuff that I have to do to meet the deadlines I stopped for about a half hour and I said so what I have to do tomorrow usually it's tomorrow I have to do this tomorrow and before I go to bed at night I just simply say tomorrow how am I going to do this and I said I'm just going to do all this really superbly and even though I feel I don't have enough time I'm going to have absolutely more of the time than I need to get everything done and then I say what's the worst that happens I just go into a panic I cancel things and everything you know just the worst result and I'm very very good at envisioning and stating really worst circumstances and then I said so I got five things to do tomorrow this is how I'm going to handle this one this how I'm going to handle it and then I go to bed first of all I I'm not thinking about it during the middle of the night I get up in the morning and I just five things and what i notic is because I took ownership for the five things the night before I didn't have to think about them as I was doing them because I had already predicted success for all five yeah I'm learning not to get into deadline crunches but it happens this ties into something that you've always said but I've never applied it quite the way You' just said it which is the problem is never the problem the problem is not knowing how to think about the problem and I think that's what causes so much consternation with people against deadlines because they're not sure what to do the fact that you thought about the night they don't even know how to think about the deadline they don't know how to think about whatever the activity is whatever the project is they've not given themselves permission to even think it through yeah and I do find that the first thing that happens as a result of my night before thinking is I find that there's about five other people who can help me with this and I do another fast filer in the morning and I said I need this done and I lay it out and I take 15 20 minutes thinking how they can do it for me rather than I'm doing it and so if I have five projects I can probably get it down to three you know which I didn't have that time the day before but I have the time after the thinking I love it Dan last thing I want to touch on is one of your other Expressions because you have a lot of great ones about this in that two tightly scheduled entrepreneurs cannot transform yeah it's not too tightly it's tightly tightly scheduled okay yeah not too tightly just tightly scheduled you can tell I'm trying to maximize here no tightly is too tightly clearly you can see my calendar tightly means you got no space between right schedules so I have a rule it's enforced by my scheduler that if I have four things in the day I have a half hour between each of those things right if one of them goes a little long I got the half hour there to do it and I get time to relax walk around do something else and then I do the next one and that ends and then I got a half hour to do that and most people won't give themselves permission to do that because they say well between or four things you had an hour and a half you had 30 30 and 30 between the four and they say think of what you had done if you had done something else with the 90 minutes because they think that there's a victory to getting a lot of things done and I think there's a victory in getting the right things done comfortably and confidently and you're not distracted you're fully present you're with people be it on Zoom or what have you yeah so doing a few things really effectively well is far more important to you than just checking off a a long list and usually it's three per day that I have you know I try not to have three important things in any given day yeah so a tightly scheduled entrepreneur tightly scheduled entrepreneurs cannot transform themselves I love how I just added a word there here's the thing if we did a competition and you just packed your day of getting things done you could beat me on day one uhhuh you might beat me on day three but on day four going forward I'm beating you because you're tired you're stressed out you're not getting enough sleep you're not exercising you're not doing enjoyable Pastime during that is just anybody can beat me for the first three days but I'll produce them starting on day four that is so good yeah yeah I'm not competitive but I do like winning that's a good quote too Dan I'm not competitive but I do like winning I love it so Dan I really like this because there's been a lot of practical takeaways so leaving half hour between major things doing an impact filter and we will link the impact filter on our show notes because that's something a tool that let's do the fast filter oh okay let's do the fast filter fast filter because it's 15 minutes you can you can do that love that and then also you can ask other people the rfactor question but you can also ask yourself and that's a really powerful tool so I'm thrilled that we've given you know you The Listener very actionable things that you can do so that you can be less scheduled more thinking about your thinking and then transform the way that you want to yeah and I think all of our tools have the quality that you get things done faster you get them done easier you get them done cheaper and you get the bigger result we count them up because we're submitting a lot of them for patents right now and I think we had a total of 240 and all those tools came out of me having time to think about my thinking people say well where do you get these ideas and I said when I'm thinking about my thinking lots of stuff just comes to me that's not predictable but I take it seriously anything that occurs to me during thinking about my thinking is usually really good stuff that's a great Point IP is taking your ideas seriously intellectual property so I really like that I think you know giving yourself time giving yourself that space trusting your thoughts not being afraid of what you might be thinking I think is key and then using tools Thinking Tools which is really what all of strategi coach is 100% about so thank you Dan I feel like this is a very timely important relevant and practical conversation to help free people up which is again what we're all about so thank you very much thank you Shannon