[Music] hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to the inside strategic coach podcast with Dan Sullivan Dan I love picking up on things that you say so I get to ask you about them and you made a comment when you were visiting one of our other associate coaches workshops is that coaching is how entrepreneurs need to look at their businesses especially in this day and age I thought that should be a very provocative comment so can you explain what you mean when you say that coaching is really what all entrepreneurs need to be doing at some level yeah and I should tell you that this insight has come largely from my collaboration with Peter dandis and the abundance 360 project which is a ongoing educational structure that happens live every January for 3 days and then on the internet and it's introducing entrepreneurs and strategic coach program with some insights about The Cutting Edge of Technology as it's taking place all around the world and the impact that the technology is having on every business that our strategic coach entrepreneurs are focused on and you know we're in one of those great shifts in history and I think it's the fourth the first going back our ability to communicate just through language secondly the ability to communicate through writing number three the ability to communicate through printing which was the great world that we were born into the the printing world I was born in the' 40s we were living in the printing world with just the beginning of things like radio and television we had movies the next shift is clearly the microchip which creates this impossible to grasp mentally internet world that we're into right now all the emphasis that I see people are talking about it's all about technology technology this technology that and you you know you're going to get disrupted and things are going to change and you're going to get totally blindsided unpredictably uh it's a big scarce story but most of the people telling the scarce stories are getting paid for telling those stories you they're selling a new technological device or system or anything so as I was going along because my whole background and all the work is actually creating another kind of exponential not a technological exponential but a teamwork exponential and actually I think that the teamwork among human beings is actually a greater exponential than Technologic as a matter of fact I told Peter diamanis I had podcast with him yesterday and I said you know I can make a case that it's not humans who are trying to keep up with technology I actually think it's technology that's trying to keep up with people that people every day can create more kinds of unpredictable new types of results than any computer programmer Ever Could you know and they can do it instantaneously with an idea they can do it instantaneously with a very short communication they can do it very instantaneously with a new kind of action and there 7.6 billion of us and we're just about doing different things every day totally unpredictable so my sense is that the great exponential for humans before we had machines was teamwork we learned how to communicate with each other and instead of having to do everything ourself we created these finer and finer more powerful forms of division of labor that were within teamwork and the kind of teamwork that operates on a daily basis on the planet now is just inconceivable the big problem is it's not measurable the way that technology is there's ways of measuring digital activity there isn't any way of actually measuring teamwork you know because 99% of it is not visible at all it's 99.999999 you know so it's just incomprehensible how much communication and teamwork is going on among humans everywhere so my feeling is that these are disconnected universes my feeling is that the Universe of exponential technology is totally ignorant of the exponential activ of human teamwork and I would say the reverse is true that the exponential growth of human teamwork is largely ignorant about the growth of technological exponentials okay so you got these accelerations going in all directions and what it creates in the middle is an enormous amount of confusion conflict complexity complication and I would say that almost any business in the world that's not in the teamwork business and not in the technology business makes all their living out of the complexity confusion and conflict that's in the middle we all make our money by taking confusion conflict and complexity for an individual customer and turning it into Simplicity and Clarity and if we do that it's coaching so my feeling is that I was on to coaching early in the 1970s right at the big upswing in the microchip age because I I just had an instinct the moment I heard about the microchip it was the invention that would disrupt and transform every other existing invention and it would create all sorts of new inventions that we can't even conceive of right now and all I saw was just massive complexity confusion conflict complication and I said gosh I said this is ready made for people who have a coaching attitude okay and the reason is that each individual on the planet really really doesn't pay much attention about the future of anyone else except themselves and so my feeling is that if you can get any individual clear about their future and you can show a game plan help them construct a game plan where they eliminate their dangers this is the Dos approach they eliminate their dangers they maximize their opportunities and they multiply their strengths they're as happy as can be and doesn't matter what happens in this exponential call to other people's teamwork or what happens in the entire technological Universe they're happy and if they renew this every quarter you know for the rest of their lives they're going to be happy all the time regardless of what's going on in the world and therefore you can do this for one person you can do it for 10 people you can do it for a hundred people a thousand a million and everything like that and every business is either going to be good or bad depending on whether its impact on its customers makes complex things simple makes confusing things clear and makes conflicting situations they feel confident about it so coaching is about where these three things are missing Simplicity Clarity and confidence that's coaching I don't care what business you're in I don't care if you're green grer or you're an architect or you're a bookie I don't you know I don't really care you're a hedge fund manager if you're not coaching you're adding to the problem you're not solving the problem so my feeling is that the great new addition to society that happened as a result of the industrial economy middle of the 1800s going right up until 1970s 1980s was the the industrial economy and management management layers and layers and layers of management I think GM at one time had 19 layers between the CEO and the factory worker before the person in the plant and what technology the microchip has done is it's taken away all those layers of management but it didn't replace it with anything useful and the useful thing is coaching and I just noticed I mean we just strategic coach we just went through a three-year process of switching our entire database and everything related to our marketing to Salesforce a massive exponential technological system but without coaching we would be bankrupt without coaching between how the exponentials of the technology could be translated to the exponentials of our teamwork if we didn't have a coaching model in between it would have driven us off a cliff this is really a profound shift and I'm sure we could talk about management versus coaching for a long time but I I want to talk about the coaching attitude because there's a very different mindset than being just technically an expert or just very very good at something so I'm curious as to what you mean exactly by the coaching attitude I have an inkling but it's not just about what you are innately good at there's much more to it when you go to Coach someone so can you talk about well you become a uniquely expert and supportive and useful an unusually insightful and supportive and encouraging expert on other people's future that's really interesting and do people already start with some of those capabilities now like as you're listening to this if you're thinking okay well I've always thought of myself as an expert how do I become an expert in other people's futures how can they make that jump well they have to take it away from their product in other words most people are as useful to other individuals and they do coaching to the degree that the other individual will buy your product by your service or by your experience okay but beyond that you don't want to know anything about their future or anything and the coaching says regardless of what I'm selling or regardless of whether they're going to buy what I'm selling I'm going to help this individual have a bigger future that's the shift okay so the person who is actually doing coaching activities but doesn't see themselves as a coach and really aren't seen as a coach only relate how much help they'll give another individual to the degree that the other individual will use their product or service in the future and I as a coach all I want to do is sell people on their future okay so that's the first thing the attitude starts is regardless of whether somebody buys anything from me I really really don't care but I would like to have an impact that they have a bigger future for themselves okay and if I get smart about my business and if I get smart about who I help in this respect I know I'm going to make a lot of money as I go along and I'll probably keep them for long periods of time I mean I have 40 strategic coach clients who've been quarterly to the coach for 25 years or more the longest is 31 years and every quarter these individuals come back and we put another burst into their understanding of their future and they do all sorts of interesting things that I would never have thought of and they're happy as can be and they just see this as a lifetime journey and that's coaching then I can introduce them to all sorts of other Specialists that I know who can actually help them with specific aspects of their bigger and better future but you're selling bigger and better Futures and it's totally about the person you're talking to too my mind's bursting different directions here so one of them is that there's so much exponential technology around us that there is so much room for complexity confusion conflict that we're probably going to need lots of different types of coaches oh yeah you know Dan you're a very particular type of Coach you're one of my coaches and I also have other coaches a lot of people have Fitness coaches they've got health coaches they've got relationship coaches so what I love about this is that it's a very multiplier Universe it's not just limited to one coach depending on what parts of your life you want to grow there's lots of room for different people to show up in their areas of expertise as long as they can help you make your life better in that particular area MH yeah and the other aspect about this is to be a good coach to others you have to be coachable by other people so coaches who are not coachable are worthless because they're not grasping the essential activity that's actually taking place and the other thing is that people want to check you out for integrity so you're preaching something but you're not practicing the thing that you want them to pay for okay and people pick up on this and you get rejected really fast and the word goes out that you're a phony you know to this but the other thing is think of it this way 7.6 billion people and each of them has a unique notion of what bigger and better for them is in their future so the degree that you have have expanding aspirational human Futures that tells you how many coaches can be possible in the world right seems kind of infinite well it is and it's exponential it's exponential so once you grasp the mindset that you're going to help a person create a bigger and better future so that they feel confident about it and you don't hold as a condition for doing that that they have to buy your product or service I mean we've had 19,000 entrepreneurs in the program who've actually paid us but at the same time I bet our influence is easily 10 or 20 times that of people that we've just given them our principles in book form audio form like we're doing right now and we're saying we just like you to have a bigger and better future I just think that your life will be better people around you will be better if you have a bigger and better future that you feel clear simple and confident about and my job J is just to constantly create a greater growth of this Clarity confidence and simplicity in the world so that lots of good things happen and people aren't overwhelmed by technology they're finding Technologies and exponentials that are good for their expanding teamwork but the other thing that you want to be clear about as a coach you understand that the problem is being caused by the confusion the conflict and the complex it caused by exponential technology and you're Preparing People to actually create exponential teamwork using the best of the technology that's coming across and it's your talking to them and creating thinking structures and thinking process which allows the best of one exponential to impact positively on the other exponential so my feeling of the future of the world it just has three layers it's got exponential technology doing things for its own reasons it's got exponential teamwork involving 7.6 billion human beings at the bottom and then the medium is a growing coaching capability and Technology does not coach people on its use you know no it really doesn't and what strikes me too it's been experienced with a lot of our clients is is they pursue you know selling their product service or experience they're actually giving the coaching away for free so so many people are already doing this MH but they don't actually recognize or see the value of it and yet it's actually through the coaching that the person sees oh this is what will make my future better or this is what will help eliminate one of the areas of complexity in my life so you know I think lots of people are natural coaches they just don't appreciate that that's what they've been doing yeah the fact of it is that a lot of people are great coaches without seeing themselves as a really first class political leaders are actually great coaches they're providing context so that people can actually understand what's going on so that they don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about what everybody else is doing that they feel confident just to pursue their own life we're all very highly specific and we're very very particular just about what's important to us in our lives and you know there's maybe 20 people who are just crucially important to us and the rest of it is just people you know and as long as our 20 people are moving forward were happy as can be regardless of what was happening with all the other people we can't think beyond that I mean we have an idea that we can think further than that but it's just an idea we actually don't have any ability to do that it's okay you know it's okay nobody has to be in charge of this we're all in charge of it yeah Dan and last Point here in terms of how people can take action on this one of the things you say about coaching we say about coaches is a really great coach asks really good questions so what are some things that people can do to actually kind of explore this idea of perhaps being a coach if they have not thought of that yeah I think the Dan Sullivan question is the primer for coaching in any activity and that is you say to someone look if we were having this discussion 3 years from now and you Nam the date three years from this calendar date and you were looking back in that conversation back to where we are right now what has to happen over that three-year period both personally and professionally for you to feel happy with your progress and one of two things they'll answer the question or they won't if they don't answer the question they really don't want you in their future if they answer the question they're saying you know if you can be really useful to me in my future I'd like to have you alone and then they tell you and that's reality that's reality their answer and then you can frame it in terms of what are the dangers that you have that you know have to be eliminated for you to be happy opportunities have to be captured and maximized for you to be happy and strengths are constantly multiplied for you to be happy and that's reality and that's a total reality in terms of the world and then you've already given them an enormous value because you've allowed them to articulate the best bigger and better future will be for them three years out and then you can say well there are certain areas that I can help you with and maybe they'll say well could we do this every 3 months and that's the model that we created because things change you make progress you get frustrated you get blindsided by certain things you build it back into the best in future plans so it's a very simple model right at the center and you could do it regardless of who you are I don't care what profession you know my dentist who was in the program for about 10 years from now I went in and got all my teeth redone and got caps and everything else I came in you know and she said Dan I'm going to ask you a question if we were having this discussion not 3 years from now but a year from now what has to happen to your dental health and for your feeling of confidence about your appearance and your ease with which you can smile and show your teeth what has to change for you to feel happy and confident about your teeth and I sat there and I talked for him and she says well that's what we're going to work on we're going to work on that Vision I came back next time and she showed me what my vision looked like she actually had created a model and she says now it's going to take about six or seven steps to get there and I'm going to guide you and tell you why each step relates to what you said a year from now that's not a dentist that's a coach who has a specialty in dental surgery Dental Cosmetics you know I love the context you just put around that because we can all be a coach with a specialty in we've talked about our double shift which is you're not r preneur with a specialty in rather than a professional name but I think if everyone did that first of all it be a lot better experience that people would be creating and more and more of your wisdom and it's such an incredible recipe for Value creation yeah well I tell every entrepreneur now especially the game changers I said you know the more that your business is based on the structure and process of my business you're going to multiply by 10 times or a 100 times you've already got all the specialty skills you need but it's not a coaching structure so it's still about you and selling your thing into the marketplace and I said why don't you make it about them and what kind of future they want and then see where the specialty you have is incredibly more useful in their bigger future than trying to sell it to them as something that they don't know why they would want to do that I love it Dan I feel like you've given the answer for the future for so many people well thank you very much for sharing your on this it's fascinating thank you thank you I appreciate it you know it's a thought that I've been developing but the more people I share it with I just think that everything in the universe is moving towards this coaching model because of the other two exponentials the technological exponential and the teamwork exponential