← Problems to Profit
Problems to Profit
From Addiction Recovery to $7M Success: David Bayer on Turning Problems into Profit
00:43:29
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- [00:03]
A
Today we are joined by David Bayer, a transformational powerhouse in both personal growth and business. David was named by Inc. 5000 as a leading expert on mindset. David has built the fastest growing coaching company in America by helping entrepreneurs eliminate complexity and scale with simple high impact strategies. His revolutionary programs have helped thousands break through mental barriers to achieve six and even seven figures in their business. All without the usual tech heavy tactics. David, it's an honor to have you here to share all of your unique perspectives on rewiring our mind for sustainable success.
- [00:38]
B
Preston, thanks for having me, bro.
- [00:40]
A
I am so excited. Like, I know I said this before the show, but I didn't know you before this. And Teresa told me we were doing this. She said, man, this guy's going to be like the. He's like, if Tony Robbins and Joe Dispenza made it, this guy is the next guy that's going to be changing the way America thinks and already is on the path to greatness. They're like delivering and serving tons of people. I went and reviewed your content. That's a high bar.
- [01:01]
B
I am a high bar. You're setting.
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A
I'm more excited that this is my first podcast than you can imagine. Thanks for having me so excited.
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B
Pleasure.
- [01:08]
A
Would you mind starting us out like the podcast is problems to profit?
- [01:11]
B
Yeah.
- [01:11]
A
Okay. And I have a fundamental belief our problems are our gifts. Okay. They're also our guides. I think the meaning of life is twofold and it's a paradox. Loves the meaning of life and problems are gifts. Right. Would you go through some of your story of what you had to learn and earn to make you who you are today, how you became this man that's going out and changing lives, minds and people?
- [01:31]
B
Yeah. Thank you for that. And I agree with that about love and problems being gifts. The story I usually tell starts with my addiction recovery. So I was an entrepreneur since I graduated college in 1998, built my first e commerce business. About 10 years later, I realized my life had become unmanageable. I was chasing success. I had a lot of expectations that I had set for myself around financial outcomes was just burning out. And I didn't realize it because I had really buried myself underneath alcohol abuse and drug abuse and sex abuse that there was just a tremendous amount of unresolved emotional trauma from my childhood. And that was my first really big problem. And that was a problem that had been festering for a long, long time. And the solution, which was a gift, was my recovery, because my recovery brought me my first semblance of self. Awareness. It brought me into a relationship with a higher power. I didn't grow up in a religious family or much of a faith based family. It brought me into fellowship and relationship with other people. And that's when the fog started to clear in my life. And then from there it was a cause and effect. Recovery brought me into personal growth. Personal growth brought me into an even deeper sense of self awareness. And then like so many people out there, I started feeling stuck in personal growth. Like I understood all the information and I was aware of my limiting beliefs, but there was still a portfolio of them that I was living with. And it was creating a tremendous amount of suffering for me. And so that created, as Napoleon Hill would talk about a burning desire for really wanting to know, how can I go beyond just being aware of my limiting beliefs and actually transform the way that I think? And that's become the basis of the work that I do today.
- [03:04]
A
Oh wow, I love that. So you actually got stuck. So many smart people do. And it's fun to dive into. You got stuck on the self help journey in the self help position. Basically, man, I landed there.
- [03:18]
B
By the way, it wasn't just shelf help, it was. I share my story when I speak from stage, especially at my events, but I tell my story of being what I call in Personal Development 1.0. It's like you start by picking up a book. For me, it was, I was at Miami International Airport. I was not a reader. I was going to pitch another round of investment for a company that I had for your listeners. I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but many people have where a book decides it's going to develop a relationship with you. There was this magnetic pull to this book on the bookshelf. Walked over at one of those Hudson bookstores in the airport and grabbed the book and turned it over. Didn't even look at the front cover. And on the back of it it said four things. It said, life is full of suffering. The suffering will happen to you. There's a way out of the suffering. And the way out of the suffering is the Eightfold path of virtue. And what I was reading was the four noble truths of Buddhism. And I flipped this book over and it was a book called Awakening the Buddha within by this guy, Lama Surya Das. And I had been working a 12 step program. I bought this book. I read it from COVID to cover between my round trip flight. I was like, wow, these are the same principles that Bill W. Infused into the 12 steps of alcoholics Anonymous. Buddha was just a little bit more efficient cause there's only eight. And I was like, there's a pattern here. And what was so interesting is that the business I had started was search engine optimization. Before there was search engine optimization. I used to smoke a bunch of pot and I was working for a company that was driving a ton of traffic off of local search. Before we knew people searched locally. And I became obsessed with search engines. I would just sit at home smoking a joint, putting keywords into. Back then it was Yahoo and the early stages of Google and looking at the search results and I started looking at all the metadata and meta information and saw these, these patterns. That was a gift of mine. And I saw this pattern between what Bill W. Was teaching and what Buddha was teaching. And then I became more curious. I got Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. 13 principles by studying the most successful people in the history of the world. Primary conclusion was that thoughts are things in there creating your reality. And I was like, wow, there's a lot that is in common with Bill W. And Buddhism. And so that just sort of set me on my trajectory. But it's like you do the shelf help for a while, then you start going to the live events. And so it was the Brendon Burchard, the Tony Robbins, then Landmark Forum and then you start studying spirituality. And I got into Buddhism and Daoism and Hinduism and then I was like, well what did Jesus say? Let's go take a look at that. Then my wife and I went to India and so we started studying in ashrams and going to Tibet. And all the while I'm ingesting all this information like beyond shelf help, but still suffering in my life. And then I came back and I'm, you know, went to the most spiritual place in the United States, which of course is Sedona, Arizona. And I'm looking for a vortex, right, that's going to help me solve my personal suffering. And I remember going in of the crystal shop and the woman at the crystal shop, but it wasn't a woman, it was a 16 year old teenager. Because a buddy of mine was like, maybe you need a crystal to like pull whatever energy is inside of you out of you. She says, hey, are you here this weekend to see the Arawakan and Kogi Indians? And I'm like, I have fucking lost my mind. Like what am I doing in Sedona in a crystal shop talking to a teenager about my problems. And she says, you know, it's the first time out of the Amazon they're coming up to talk about the big 2012 shift. And desperate, I looked into her eyes and I said, yes, I'm here for the Indians. Tell me where they are. So I'm sitting in the Sedona High School gymnasium. So, like, that was my journey. And then, you know, sacred geometry and astrology and astronomy and quantum theory. I think there's a lot of us that have been going down that trail, but there's this missing piece called integration. Right. It's taking the information and being able to use it to create a change in our nervous system and a change in the way that we think. And so that's really been my jam and my focus over the last eight to 10 years.
- [06:46]
A
Okay. On that, on the integration piece. And I want to clarify the self help piece to go back to the integration piece, because the listeners for this podcast are. They're implementers, they're entrepreneurs trying to find a way to break through. Okay. And where we went into shelf help, you're obviously brilliant. I mean, talking to you for two minutes, you can see the smarts in your eyes, reviewing your content. Brilliant. You were one of those guys that could hear it, see it, understand it. But you mentioned you were having a little trouble implementing it even though you knew it. And that's what I mean by the shelf help. What was the turning point? What was the driving force, the factor that. That one thing that. Or maybe it was multiple things that kicked you over and helped you intimately dive into yourself and implement what you needed to. Because I think that's what. That's what a lot of people are looking for. And there's always that silver lining of the problem that I want to dig out from that moment. The moment that made you you.
- [07:38]
B
Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's the thing that we all do when we get good at anything, which was having a formal practice. So I developed a practice of something very, very specific. In this case, it was learning how to downregulate my nervous system when it gets upregulated by my limiting beliefs through a set of distinctions and teachings and principles that we can get into. That is not just meditation. Meditation is very beneficial. It's not incantations and affirmations. Those can be great at the right time, but it's a. It's a specific practice that I developed to become aware of when my limiting beliefs are coming up and to have the tools to work with that material effectively as it arises. And the focus of a practice actually came out of my 12 step work. Because Recovery was a practice. My addiction was a practice, too. A practice required certain things. It required really great information, which, for me, the 12 steps of alcoholics Anonymous gave me. So you have to have, like, great content. You have to have community. It's essential you and I are here at an event together. And that was the opening statement this morning, right? It's like your challenges become overcome in community, so you have to be practicing with a group of other people who are doing the same thing. It required mentorship. I had a sponsor in my recovery program, someone who had already been where I had been and who was still doing the work, but in many ways who'd gotten to the other side. And it requires a commitment to stay in the practice. It's like so many of us want to be disciplined or practice something, but we don't. And it was very clear to me that the cost of my addiction was much greater than the inconvenience of the practice of going to three 12 step meetings a week, of working the steps, of seeing my therapist, of going to my men's group meeting. The cost was much greater. And so in my journey in personal development, I started to experience the same thing. Right? The cost of being stuck in personal development purgatory was greater than the inconvenience of being in a regular practice. And so over time, I developed a practice that's based in neuroscience. It's also supported by an understanding of metaphysics and scriptural teachings and wisdom teachings. It's a practice that I use almost every day. I'm not perfect at it. To work with the challenges or the problems, as you pointed out, that come up in my life, and to actually not necessarily solve the problems, but to be able to see them as the gifts, because then they stop being problems and they start becoming solutions in my life. So at a very high level, that's what it was. It was the implementation of an effective practice to retrain my nervous system away from the neurology of my limiting beliefs and into the neurology of the next level of who I'm becoming.
- [10:11]
A
I love that. There's so much gold there. Okay, so I want to pivot a little bit and go into kind of the entrepreneur world, because you're also a brilliant entrepreneur. You're not just a spiritual leader who understands human development and how to set your mind, but you're also an entrepreneur. I love how you kind of walked us through some of the building. You had a mentor once tell me. He said, religion is a great way, with its rules and its structures of avoiding Hell, but spirituality and I think business is a spiritual game is going there, conquering the motherfucker and coming back victorious. So I'd like you to tell me about a problem that you solved that helped you scale your business to seven figures like that hell, that you conquer.
- [10:50]
B
I see a couple different seasons of my business. So my wife and I started our business together, and it grew very, very quickly. We grew to about $7 million in revenue over over three or four years, which is impressive for the type of business we have. Business and mindset coaching, going from our first event to our third event and having a thousand people at the event. But we built the business with a lot of unmetabolized trauma. So it was belief systems, like, we had to work really hard to produce success. It was my need to have a certain amount of success or have a certain amount of revenue to give myself permission to love myself. You know, we created a business that had a lot of beautiful things about us infused into it, and it had a lot of things that were wanting to be healed. And the thing about creation is that whatever you're creating, this is the amazing thing about human beings. You know, birds are literally created to fly. Fish are created to swim. Human beings are designed to translate what seems like nothing into something, meaning we translate vibration into the material, physical universe. The fundamental design of us, our five senses, are literally that they are vibrational interpretation devices. But more than that, a human being as a whole is designed to translate an idea, which is energy, into the physical world. But as we do that, that idea that we conceive into physics, into the material world, it's gone through us. It's now become matter. As you grow, whatever that thing is, it has its own gravitational pull. It has its own frequency. And so there was a point in time where, as the business grew, the unmetabolized trauma that was in the business started to pull my wife and I around it. And this is what I see happen to a lot of entrepreneurs. I think if we were to actually talk about burnout, it's that you created a business that had a lot of you in it that needed to or wants to be healed now. And so you have to step away from it and get out of its pull to reorganize yourself and come back in and create at a higher level. And so sometimes we're forced into that because of burnout. Rarely, we're wise enough to see that happening. And sometimes we never get out of the gravitational pull, and we just keep getting spun and spun and spun. So in phase one of our business, we were getting spun around the business. And there was a point in time after the pandemic. And for anybody who does any kind of digital marketing, we're all familiar with a thing called the IO iOS update, which transformed the targeting ecosystem on Facebook. So we were doing a lot of online marketing and then all of a sudden, overnight that disappeared. We just wanted to shut the business down. So this was the problem. The problem was we were cranking on the business harder than ever before, producing even fewer results. It was creating friction in our relationship. My wife was pregnant with our first child. I'm having stress related health problems because of all the stress. And as a result of that, I had, let's just call it a breakdown, which for me brought up a lot of imposter syndrome. Right? Like for seven years I'm out teaching all this stuff since 2016, telling people how to not live in suffering and improve their lives. And my life has become unmanageable again. And so my brother recommended I go back to the same place I went when I first experienced unmanageability in my life, which was 12 step. So I started going to AA meetings again. I wasn't drinking, I wasn't drugging, I wasn't sexing, But I worked through the 12 steps with a sponsor around my chronic worry. And as I work through using the steps, I saw things in the steps that I had never seen before. I said, wow, this isn't just a technology for drugs or alcohol or food or sex. We're all addicted because we've all developed these unhealthy addictive behaviors and emotions and habits of thought. It's a neurology, it's a nervous system that's wanting to change. And as a result of going back into the steps, not only did it support me in navigating through this challenge, but it helped evolve my offer mix in my product line. Because out of that I developed a 12 step structure that really married my technology to some of the best technology in the 12 steps. And I created a 12 step system called the whole Human framework. And that's now become the foundation of the next level of scale. And we actually, we were having challenges with scale in our business. A business like ours can only scale so far because you're hiring sales team, you're hiring coaches. As you hire more coaches, there's a breakdown in quality and replication of the coaching and the frameworks. And so I wanted a model that I that could really impact millions of people at a deep level and generate billions of Dollars of wealth for me and my family and our mission in the world. And so this, this new 12 step structure, without getting into all the details, was the answer to the scale question. And it came through a significant contraction. And it's very much this creation process as an entrepreneur is very much like I, you know, I was blessed to bear witness to the creation process that my wife went through when she gave birth to my son Gabriel. And it's contractions and expansions and it's contractions and expansions and I can only imagine what it was like for her, but it was like there are these waves and these ebbs and these flows. And so as entrepreneurs, what we're wanting to do is start to realize, hey, that's just the process of creation and find a way to be able to down regulate ourselves as we're experiencing the problem so that the solution can show up even, even sooner, rather than becoming entangled with the problem and perpetuating it, if that makes sense. But that was my problem and that was the solution that came out of it. Big, big problem, big solution.
- [15:53]
A
I love that, the pattern of that. I see this in almost every successful person I talk to. It was so beautifully framed. I'm glad you're here. So the problem was you had a business that you built to own and it wound up owning you. It wound up taking control of your life and it wound up causing suffering. By the way, I think love is only measurable by one thing and that is suffering. Through that suffering, you got an opportunity. Like, thankfully, I think you said it was your brother, like your guardian angel comes and says, hey, go back to the source of the formula. Like if life is faith, family, fitness and finance, these four cores that make us up the beauty about finances, everything's measurable and it has been for thousands of years. And I think you've created ways to measure spirituality and faith and all that which is genius. And it sounds like your brother helped you on a roadmap to do that and create more measurability in every aspect of your life by saying, hey, go back to the source. You built a formula from the 12 step formula that probably saved your life or at least extended it tremendously, right?
- [16:48]
B
Yes.
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A
And you turned it into an economic miracle that wouldn't just help you, but it would also bless everyone that you get to come in contact with. And even generationally, I think is the most, hey, it's the most important thing we do in life as men. It's the most masculine thing you can do. Because if masculine is about Productivity, yours becomes unending. You become immortal by gifting that to everyone. So going into formulas and the way that you shift beliefs, I'd love you to talk a little bit about some of the formulas that maybe that key formula for you helped you develop, that you put in your business to do, scaling to do. I'd like you to kind of stick more to the mindset ones. I mean, we'll get into the minutiae of all the different business formulas, maybe on another episode, if you'll come back. But right now I want you to give the mindset formulas because I think that's some of the key pieces that people need to get themselves through.
- [17:36]
B
I think there's two things that come to mind right now. One is if I were to create a lens for people to think about how to create success, how to create wealth, how to create health, how to create desired outcomes. In a simple way, it would be an equation which is desire plus non resistance equals desired result. And so there's only three parts there. We have desires, and we only know our desires when we experience something we don't want. We experience a chronic health condition. We want to be well. That's the desire we experience the absence of a soulmate in our life. We want to meet our soul mate. That's the desire. We experience a marketing campaign not working. We want to have a marketing campaign that works so that we can generate more high paying clients and generate more revenue. That's the desire. So it's important to understand that our individual desires, which differ, your desires are different than mine. There's some overlap, of course, but we're different people. Our desires are the byproduct of the contracted experiences or what we would call the problems or the things that we don't want. So it's just important to appreciate them that way because they shape our own unique path. The next part of the equation. So we've got desires down, right? A listener has a bunch of things they want. Desire plus non resistance produces the desired result. It's not desire plus hustle and grind equals desired result. It's not desireplus have the perfect plan equals desired result. Or desire plus have enough time or money equals desired result. It's non resistance that changes the focus. The focus now becomes where am I resistant to what I want? One way of looking at that, this is a very simplified way, is what are my limiting beliefs about the potential outcome of this desired result that I have? My limiting beliefs about money, my limiting beliefs about whether I'm good enough, my limiting beliefs about how hard I have to work in order to be successful, My limiting beliefs about time, my limiting beliefs that my business will take away from me, being a good mom or a good dad.
- [19:20]
A
So, David, is the resistance, the non resistance we're looking for is the resistance, the emotion that the belief is generating in your life, in your body.
- [19:30]
B
So I would describe the resistance as a limiting belief, which is a thought or an idea, and it has a corresponding emotional reaction that takes place in the body. And 100% of the time, a limiting belief or the resistance is going to produce a state of being that doesn't feel good. So we talk about how there are only two states of being. There are powerful states of being and primal states of being. Powerful states of being are states of being like joy, curiosity, excitement, passion, compassion, presence, states of being that feel good. And then there are primal states of being, states of being that don't feel good. States like stress, anxiety, overwhelm, jealousy, anger, boredom. There are only two states of being, and you're always in one state of being or the other. If you were to ask me, hey, what's the name of the game of entrepreneurship? Because I believe that the equation is desire plus non resistance equals desired result. The name of the game is notice when you've moved into a primal state, because that's an indication of resistance, and use whatever tools you have to move back into a powerful state of being. The byproduct of that will be finding the right strategy, finding the right soulmate, finding the right doctor, healing your body, whatever the case may be. These two states of being map to neurological expression. So a powerful state of being is the parasympathetic expression of the nervous system. A primal state of being is the sympathetic expression of the nervous system. When we're in a powerful state, we have access to resource, wellness, abundance, prosperity, solutions, intuition, inspiration, connected to God, connected to others. When we're in a primal state, we reverse to the ancient nervous system. So we're operating like however someone would want to describe it, the primitive mammalian, reptilian type of brain. And so what's also important to understand is what determines what state of being you're in is not the experience that you're having, it's the thought you're having about the experience. 100% of the time. The state of being that you're in is determined by the thought you're having or the meaning you're giving the experience. And so when you have a limiting belief about something, there's resistance, and you move into a primal state and you can't be productive from there.
- [21:22]
A
I don't think I've ever heard it. Better put. And I've been to every guru's events out there, maybe except yours. Now, I need to go for the listeners. If you didn't catch that, I want you to rewind and listen to that again because he literally just gave you the key to turning your problems into profit in whatever tactic you're going to leverage by being able to generate a productive vibrational energy within you to get there with that. Thank you for that. Like, I feel like this is my first episode and we're gonna do a second one, but we may not need it after this, bro, because we're solving all their problems in one. I want to dive into. You know, I love psychology, I love economics, I love studying what the world's doing, and I like trying to predict the future.
- [22:05]
B
Right.
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A
I want to think I'm psychic towards the future of the economy. You know the problem with economists, right? They're like astrologists. They're wrong about 90% of the time.
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B
That's right.
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A
But there's certain things that we're right on, we may just be wrong on the timing.
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B
Okay.
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A
Right now. And I want to create some fear, I want to create some negative energy. I think you and I probably agree on this. If someone wants to be spiritual, wants to be happy, wants to be excited, it's not by ignoring the threats, it's by understanding them and improving your life to leverage a better situation, to better avoid it. If you see a brick wall, don't drive straight into it. Go around, right? To give a poor example, if you're an employee today and just framing this for you to kind of answer it and turn bad into good. And I can build your job description with 5, 10, 25 bullet point things that dictate your value on an hourly or salaried basis, you're doomed. Like, unless those bullet points require high level thinking, you will be replaced by AI or AI merged with robotics, or AI merged with robotics and quantum computing within the next 10 years. Meaning you're absolutely obsolete. Unless you find a way to generate productivity that is purpose driven, which I think you and I both call entrepreneurship. How can most people out there? Because my mission is to democratize entrepreneurship. I want to help demystify the bs. Like, there's so much BS that can be replaced by the belief systems to help people become that productive entrepreneur. How does somebody get out of their own way, remove some of the fear that they have around entrepreneurship and maintain, I guess, obsolescence well, we have to.
- [23:40]
B
Take a step back and understand how reality functions. The framing of your question, which is a very valid question, is very much in the weeds. It's very specific what you're asking. Then people will try to solve that specific question without understanding how reality functions. We live in a system of intelligence that is reflecting back to you through the experiences that you have and the results that you produce, what you believe. And the mind will want to get into the details of I'm going to become obsolete and what's going to happen with AI and it's happening so fast. And they said this here and they said this there, and what am I going to do? And I want to bring people back to. We live in a reality of possibility. We live in a. We already in some ways describe this reality as a simulation. Our senses are interpreting vibration into a physical reality that is not actually the base reality. Science tells us this. We consist in a material world that's made up of building blocks that aren't really material at all. So, like, this is a great mystery that we're coming to understand and explain. So I would like to move out of that question or propose a way of approaching it, which is what do you want? And go back to Desire plus non resistance equals desired result. Because if you want to do something you're passionate about and have financial prosperity and abundance for yourself that makes a contribution in the world and that is aligned with your strengths and your gifts and your talents and your interests, then that's the desire. The desire must result itself. If there's non resistance, that's how thoughts become things. Thoughts become things through non resistance. When I have a desire, meaning when my beliefs are in alignment with what I want, I have thoughts that are conducive to producing that result. I experience emotions that are conducive to producing that result. I take action that is conducive to producing that result. And given enough time, I will produce that result. My unconscious mind starts to tap into ideas that I need. My vibrational output starts to become in alignment with other people and synchronicities and coincidences. This is where I think a relationship with a higher power of your own understanding is very important. It doesn't matter to me if it's Jesus or Allah or God or the universe, a personal relationship with a higher power, with what you might deem as the creative force that has organized the universe or heaven and earth. Because then you look at it and go, well, shit, if my God can't handle AI, I don't have A very big God. Right. If I cannot be taken care of or have the thoughts and ideas in relationship with my higher power to transcend this challenge, even though we're calling it AI, then what type of force or power is this? And I think that's why we're seeing so many people, whether it's Candace Owens or Russell Brand, starting to reconnect with their faith, in this case, their relationship with Jesus. It's why I, over the last few months, had been really praying to have a more personal relationship with my higher power, because I want to be able to courageously face the Goliaths that show up in my life and to know that there is a God in my life that can deliver the day to me. And so then the details don't matter, right? But I go back to. I would encourage people to get away from the problem. Go, well, what do you want? Most of us want the same things. Okay, got it. Then just know that that desire can produce itself as a result. If you're willing to take a look at your resistance. And the resistance is really old habits and unmetabolized traumas and misunderstandings about how reality works that upregulate our nervous system and move us into a primal state. And the relationship with a power greater than ourselves is one of the downregulating tools that we have access to. So, yeah, it's a real thing that you're articulating. And it's going to become the great opportunity for many, many people to transition into something that, frankly, they're even more aligned with and more passionate about, because you know the statistics better than I do about people who are dissatisfied with their jobs, hopefully. And this is my belief, because I believe in the certainty of the goodness of the future that's going to give us all a phenomenal technology to support us in outsourcing many of the things that we don't want to be doing and don't need to be doing, so that we can all be more involved in creative pursuits and in community and in creating better systems in the world, because God knows, like, it's time for better systems in the world.
- [27:48]
A
So I love this, and I think people are going to become more entrepreneurial as a factor of need as things do advance. And so your answer is, perfect. I want to dive back into thoughts because we keep coming back there, and I love it. I was doing a meditation. Yes, entrepreneurs meditate. The whole key around the meditation for me was the only people I'd ever met that were possessed, were possessed by a thought. And it was funny because later I'm a Christian, I open my Bible and I wind up where, you know, Jesus is fasting and he says, get behind me, Satan, as Satan's tempting him for food. And one day I'm sitting in a seminar and a guy's like, oh yeah, the word Satan means crazy thought. It hit me, the only demon that can possess somebody is the thought they allow to possess and own them. How, how do you go about dealing with the demons as they rise up, dealing with the thoughts as they rise up? Because I mean, we're alive. I mean, as an entrepreneur, we deal with problems like the problems are the things that we, we solve. And you have no sale without a solution for that customer's problem is your opportunity to solve with a sale based solution. Right? But as we grow and scale in business, we encounter new problems, we encounter new stages of development, new growth. I had a year this whole year, and I spent a whole year dealing with a con artist, horrible lawsuit. And it was funny because I spent a whole year hoping it would resolve. Still working, but everything was hope based. One day my wife gave me a lecture, and she's probably my greatest mentor. She said, you know, you used to believe in things instead of hoping for things. And it hit me like, oh my God, my thought demon is actually hope. And it was a huge overcome for me. And it was funny. Three months later, we solved it. $12 million problem gone, everything back on fire. I knew everything she was saying to me well before she ever said it. And I didn't live it even though I knew it. How do people identify that resistance and identify the thought demon, even if sometimes the thought demon seems like a, a good positive thing, like hope?
- [29:37]
B
Yeah, it's a good question. I think that a beneficial part of the process is that period of time we spend in forgetting. Because if we benefit from building a connection with a power greater than ourselves and moving from fear back into faith, then it just makes sense that we need to put in the reps. You know, to your point about problems, I don't, I don't know that that wasn't supposed to happen. So now you start to say, well, is hope the devil or is hope an angel? Right.
- [30:01]
A
Without a paradox, can you have faith?
- [30:03]
B
Right, yeah. Like, is this really sabotaging me? But, but, you know, your question is, how do we know if we're having thoughts that are self sabotaging? And I think the answer is sometimes we have to wait until they materialize into our life and then we work with them and we learn from that process. And it's important to have grace for ourselves and to not beat ourselves up for that because we're developing like that is the process of development. And then separate from that. One of the things that came up is you were sharing when your wife said, you know, you used to believe. In our vernacular, we take it one step further, which is that we decide, but belief still has, feels like some hesitation in it just by the nature of the word. Like, I don't know if it's true, I'm choosing to believe, but a decision has conviction in it. And one of the biggest breakthroughs that I had as I was working with my limiting beliefs, my wife and I were going on a walk one day. We were living in Sarasota, we were walking on the beach and I'd just been like asking and asking and asking for a deeper awareness to shift more of my limiting beliefs so I could be in less suffering. And I had this awareness that beliefs are decisions. You know, when I, when I was a kid, I came to believe certain things what my parents maybe believed or I interpreted a circumstance or situation supposed to meet my little buddy by the drinking fountain in first grade and he didn't show up. And so I, I came to the conclusion that I can't trust people. But what happened was I, I allowed myself to decide that over and over and over and over again. So Even as a 30 year old and a 40 year old, I was still deciding I can't trust people. I was still deciding that I wasn't good enough. I was still deciding that there's not enough time. I was still deciding that I don't matter. And when I realized that beliefs are just decisions, I was like, I know how to decide. I know how to decide something different. And so I, I started giving myself permission to just decide differently about myself, about life, about money. And I started noticing that when I just decided money wasn't hard to make. It's just that that's what I observed from watching my dad really bust his ass to provide an upper middle class income for the family. I saw evidence out there of other people who seemed to be making money easily. And I was willing to decide that and work through my old life as it was still materializing. Because there's this thing that I call the echo effect. It's like it takes a little while for the reality to change. So a lot of people get very excited and they come up with a new incantation or affirmation. And then a week later, exactly the old limiting belief shows up and then they undecide. But if you have conviction with your new decisions that I am good enough, that money is easy to make, that I will have more clarity, that I do have purpose, then you start seeing the feedback from the system, and you start making more money or you start having more clarity, you start tapping into more purpose, or you attract your soulmate. Now you become a believer. And so now the opportunity is to start inventorying all of these limiting beliefs that we have and just making new decisions and having faith that if we hold that decision through the transition period, our life will change. There's a passage in scripture, I think it's Matthew, I'm not like a expert in scripture that says something along the lines of, to he that hath even more shall be given, and to he that hath not, even that which he has shall be taken away. And that's an articulation of the mechanics of the system, or what some people would call law of attraction. If you have abundance and prosperity, that's an indication that you have a prosperous mindset and more prosperity will come to you. And if you don't have a lot of stuff that's an indication of a scarcity mindset, and left to its own momentum, even that which you have will be stripped from you. Wow.
- [33:19]
A
If y'all aren't taking notes, you should re. Listen, get a pen, a paper, and, like, change your life, bro. This is gold. So you.
- [33:27]
B
You have a.
- [33:28]
A
A large coaching company. You work with lots of different folks. They have lots of different problems. You have to get into them very deep. And. And I've done some coaching, and you can't coach somebody without feeling their pain. Like, if, If. If we're real, you have to get radically authentic to where you have to live and walk a mile in their shoes and, And. And have a piece of their life in your day, which means you carry a lot. I would love if you would give us three. No names, but, like, three of the leading things you see holding the super producers back and three things you find in common with all of the super producers.
- [34:02]
B
Oh, wow, that's a big list. We'll see how far I can get through it. But just. Just starting with what I see in common, one of the big resistances I see with high performers is still a feeling that they don't belong. It's this feeling of not belonging that has actually motivated them into doing something different, into stepping into the unknown, into. Into being willing to be different because they feel different. And feeling different can be a really constructive experience. It can lead us to identify our unique traits and our skill sets and to believe in possibility for ourselves where other people don't believe in it. But it can also be really damaging because it creates a hyper vigilance of personal insecurity and it really catalyzes a false Persona that starts to take over in our lives. You know, at the dinner last night, I mentioned and encouraged people this weekend to just be okay with who they are. And I shared a story of how, and I didn't even close the loop last night. There was a guy attending the dinner who I met years ago. And I remember not being present and posturing when I met him. And I had such a wonderful conversation with him last night because at least in that moment, I was okay with who I was. And so this feeling of not belongingness is really destructive for an entrepreneur. And it's also reinforced through the experience of entrepreneurship, isn't it? Right. Like, it's a lonely experience. You feel like you don't belong. You feel like nobody understands you, your family doesn't understand you, your friends don't understand you. Like, why don't you just have a 9 to 5? So there's this, like, material right in front of us to reinforce that feeling of not belonging. I think another thing that I see a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with is time constraints. And this is where I think our work is really special and gets really nuanced because most people think about limiting beliefs in terms of I'm not good enough or I can't trust people, the examples that I've given. But we actually have a lot of beliefs about the fundamental relationship we have with existence or reality that are dramatically off. So I was talking to a gentleman earlier today who was telling me he felt like he didn't have enough time. Sure, we could come up with a decision that he does have enough time. And I guess that's better than feeling like you don't have enough time, because feeling like you don't have enough time leads to overwhelm and stress. And now what? You're in a primal state. You're not productive. You're problem oriented. In the revelations that I've had over my own journey over the last 10 years, I realized, like, time's not even a part of the equation. From my perspective, for entrepreneurs, it's a metric that should be thrown out. If you're trying to play the game with time and you think that's important, you're never going to have enough time because there's only 24 hours of it in a day. But what I think is much more important is timing. Like, you can't have enough time for timing. You can't outwork timing. There are coincidences and synchronicities. In fact, every experience we have is a miracle in and of itself that it even occurred. When you look at everything that had to happen in order, like for you and I to meet, right? Like cause and effect, cause and effect, cause and effect. This long chain of cause and effect, that's like, it's statistically impossible. And yet here we are in this miracle. Those miracles move us forward exponentially beyond time. And so I'm not interested in time. I'm interested in timing. Well, what produces beneficial timing? Non resistance. So it goes back to the same conversation, right? When you're not entangled with limiting beliefs and operating from a primal state and operating from fear, you're available for the miracles. You become a part of this natural, highly intelligent structure that's unfolding, that's always working in ways to try to support you in producing extraordinary results and achieving your vision. But many of us have a limiting belief that time is important, right? So that's a very different perspective. But like all of my private coaching clients, it's not that we don't have the habit of time coming up in our nervous system and we have to remind ourselves, but we do get fundamentally that time isn't even in the formula. The things that I think are beneficial among high performers and overachievers, common traits, just what you see for those who are aligned. Sorry to leave so much dead time in my thoughtfulness here on the show.
- [37:54]
A
Are you kidding? This is cool, bro. Like, take all the time you need. You're literally giving gold.
- [37:59]
B
You know this and I, but it sounds cliche, but it's desire for impact. It's desire to actually materialize a real change in the world. And that often comes out of the challenges that we've experienced. You know, I think about the story of the woman who founded Mothers of Drunk Driving. Her daughter was killed by a drunk driver. So, you know, we, we have these long, dark night of the soul chapters in our lives, but they, they motivate us to want to actually be the change in the world. And that's so important to entrepreneurship. We teach a concept called spiritual vision. You know, my spiritual vision to end all human suffering came out of my own experience of personal suffering. The spiritual vision is actually the largest container, the next level down, in that it is your life vision because you're entitled to an extraordinary life. And then actually the next level down Is your business vision when you can become passionate about something which is your spiritual vision, and then render it down into a business that's really, really powerful. Because now you're doing what you're passionate about. You've burned the boats. There's no going backwards. Because it's not like I could go back and get a job like, you know, I feel called to something now.
- [38:58]
A
You're definitely unemployable.
- [39:00]
B
I'm unemployed.
- [39:01]
A
You would not find a boss that would be smart enough to handle you.
- [39:05]
B
Which, which you know that no. Going backwards is what's required in order to dig deep and find the resource to overcome the challenges that we're going to experience in entrepreneurship. I don't know if you ever saw the. Well, Arnold Schwarzenegger had a great keynote speech where he talks about Plan B and he says, I hate Plan B. People have Plan B, which is the safety net. But the problem with Plan B is rather than putting all of your thoughts and energy and attention into Plan A, every, every thought that you deposit in Plan B, you're taking away from plan A. He's like, so you have to get rid of the safety net. And I think the spiritual vision does that. It's a little bit like what we heard our friend Molly Pittman talking about today of like, hey, she took it upon herself as her mission to help with the problem of euthanized dogs. Right. It's beyond us, and that's what motivates me. Yeah. Our coaching business is helping entrepreneurs eliminate their personal suffering so that they can achieve their full potential and make a difference in the world. But since 2015, I've also had an aspiration and a commitment to run for and become president of the United States in 2032. Because I want to be able to support the ending of all human suffering, not just psychologically and emotionally, but practically in the world. You know, I'm present to the fact that, you know, we went on one of the retreats with our coaching clients to Buenos Aires and I'm so, we're in Argentina a couple of weeks ago. I've never been to Argentina before and I'm with my 2 year old and, you know, my love for my 2 year old scares me. Like, it's so unfamiliar, that level of love and it's so vulnerable and I'm, you know, he's going down the slides in the little park and there's. It's Buenos Aires. I don't know if you've ever been there, but it's beautiful. It's like this like integrated European city and nature and green. And here we are in a park. But I'm sensitive, so I'm also present to the fact that I'm not worried that a bomb's not going to be dropped on us. We're in a park with trees, not a concrete jungle. I'm thinking about people in war torn parts of the world and the moms and the dads. And so that's an acknowledging my privilege. And my point is that's my spiritual vision. And so when you have a spiritual vision and you can find a way to render that into your passion and into a business through the tactics and the strategies and the structures, then what you get in between is this beautiful life. You know, I live in my dream home right now on the mountains of Puerto Rico. Literally, the front of my house looks like what was on my vision board.
- [41:21]
A
I want to frame this.
- [41:22]
B
Yeah.
- [41:23]
A
And man, I wish we had like 12 hours today because I would love to just keep pulling nuggets out of your head because, man, if I could like bottle you and sell you, I'd be a billionaire. Okay.
- [41:35]
B
From your lips to God's ears.
- [41:37]
A
This podcast is problems to profit. And what you just framed on the way to turn a problem into a solution. I mean, how do you grow flowers? Guys like, you know, and pardon my lack of political correctness with this, but, you know, I am definitely a part of the body of Christ, but I'm probably in the middle finger. So, you know, take my analogy for what it is. The first thing you need if you want to grow flowers is a P of. After that, you need a seed, throw some water in it, you create something new and beautiful. And bro, like whatever garden you came out of, I had a lot of.
- [42:09]
B
I get your point.
- [42:09]
A
There was a lot of. But wow, bro, like the flowers you're growing and the people you're changing.
- [42:14]
B
Thank you.
- [42:14]
A
I, I, I'd love to have you back on the podcast. I know we're a little time limited today, but, you know, people need more of this. Can you share a little bit of where people can find you, where they can follow you, where they can get, get like a Daily Dose of David.
- [42:28]
B
Yeah. Thank you for that and thank you for the opportunity to be here with you today. Yeah, I think, I think a good Daily Dose of David is our podcast. It's called A Changed Mind. I was recording an episode about every week for about a year and not a lot of people were listening. And I shared last night that then all of a sudden in one month we had a million listeners. So it's a gathering place for our community and to have authentic conversations about reconnecting with our own certainty and the goodness of the future. So a lot of my teachings are on those episodes, and the other is my book by the same name. It's a Changed Mind. It's on Amazon. So it's got the core of our frameworks for people to get into so that they can support themselves and then put the mask on other people.
- [43:12]
A
Bro, I just gotta tell you, I heard about you a week ago. Consumed a bunch of your content, got to meet you and feel you in person. You are the real deal. You're absolutely amazing.
- [43:21]
B
Thanks for being here.
- [43:21]
A
I'm a fan. Thanks for taking my podcast virginity.
- [43:24]
B
Yeah, brother, I appreciate it. Happy to do it.
- [43:27]
A
Have an amazing day on purpose.