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Dan Sullivan:
The basic problem is that once you've had an achievement, how do you measure what you've achieved? It's all about measurement. So human progress is based on measurement. It's got to be between two points.

James Robert Lay:
Greetings and hello. I am James Robert Lay and welcome to the 136th episode of the Banking on Digital Growth podcast. Today's episode is part of Exponential Insight series and I'm excited to welcome back Dan Sullivan to the show. Dan is the co-founder and president of Strategic Coach and he's also the co-author of the new book, The Gap and The Gain that he has collaborated on with Dr. Benjamin Hardy, who has also been a guest on this podcast as well. In fact, Dan and I have also chatted before going all the way back to episode 69, which I do recommend listening to after you wrap up this one, because I'm really looking forward to the conversation with you today, Dan. Welcome back to the show it is good to have you.

Dan Sullivan:
Well, it's a great pleasure and you were talking about a time in the past and Strategic Coach where you showed up in the wrong room, but just being in the room for a short period of time before the guards came in and removed you and then-

James Robert Lay:
Escorted me.

Dan Sullivan:
... escorted you out, that you developed a goal to be in the 10x program in Strategic Coach, so it's been a great treat to have you in my workshops over the last year.

James Robert Lay:
Well I've gotten so much out of it and that's what you and I were talking about before, so I think it's just continuously looking for the good, which is why I always start this podcast off with this and I'd love to get your take on it. What is good? What has been good personally, professionally? It's always your pick here.

Dan Sullivan:
Well I'll tell you something, there's a way that you have to talk over the last year and a half like, "Yeah, it's very, very difficult times and we're all having to adjust in certain ways." And you have to talk that way though, sort of your public talk. And then here's your private talk and said, "These are two greatest years I've ever had in my life."

James Robert Lay:
They really have been. They really have been. And what has made that so great for you?

Dan Sullivan:
Well, one thing is that I had really mastered Zoom five years before COVID. So I had been using it ... We're in three countries. Organizationally we're in London, we're in Toronto, we're in Chicago, so three countries, so we went to Zoom just for teamwork and one of my main people that works with me on a continual basis is in Winnipeg, Canada which is about 1,000 miles west of Toronto, so all of our teamwork had been on Zoom. And I had just gotten really, really comfortable with the medium. The big problem is that you couldn't use it for marketing purposes, you couldn't use it for coaching purposes because there wasn't anyone at the other end.

Dan Sullivan:
So it wasn't a big change on our part, it's just that the world showed up in I would say 90 days after lockdown in March of 2020. By June the whole world had shown up and we were able to switch the coaching program from in person to virtual. And then because we had the opportunity we created a brand new virtual program where it will never be in person. It will never be in person for them. And we have, I think about 700 new coach clients who are 35 different countries.

James Robert Lay:
That's fantastic.

Dan Sullivan:
You know what was interesting about it and I think that probably corresponds to your experience is that none of them was coach new to new them. They had been listening to podcasts, they'd been reading books for years, and they had sort of this thing, some day if I get the opportunity I'm actually going to join the Strategic Coach program.

James Robert Lay:
Accessibility.

Dan Sullivan:
But the trip was just an insurmountable obstacle. The time away was just an insurmountable obstacle and then there's just the tax that you pay, which is the stress of travel, and I always say that the airlines have maintained their consistent marketing strategy from before COVID. And their strategy before COVID is we're not happy until you're not happy. And COVID of no COVID, they remained absolutely constant to their strategy.

James Robert Lay:
Well I'll tell you what, I'm so glad just getting back on the road a little bit to go speak in person and I do miss the in-person experience. Don't miss the travel one bit. I tell what, I'm so happy I'm not flying Southwest right now because the cancellations that they've had throughout. But you're right, a lot of this does come down to just continuously focusing the positive, continuously focusing on the good, which is where the new book The Gap and The Gain comes back into play and it's extremely important of financial brand leaders to read, to think about, especially those who are on a journey to maximize their future growth, not around a physical world, but around a digital world which can feel confusing. It can feel frustrating, it can feel overwhelming. What's the backstory here? What's the backstory of The Gap and The Gain? Where did the idea come from?

Dan Sullivan:
Well, just a little historical background, I started coaching entrepreneurs just one-on-one in 1974. I had been a copywriter with a big ad agency, BBDO, big global ad agency, Toronto office. But I had always had this knack in life of being able to ask people really great questions that I didn't know the answer to but they did. So it's kind of like, I'll ask a question of someone that if we're talking about where you are right now and you look back where you were 10 years ago, what would you say were the five biggest jumps that you made that got you from here to there?

Dan Sullivan:
Well, I don't know the answer to the question, but it means a great deal to them, but it's the first time anyone's ever asked them the question. And by answering the question they begin seeing things not just from their past, but they see that the way they've done something over the last 10 years gives them an 80% of a handle on what to do for the next 10 years, and I call that coaching. I'm coaching through questions. I don't need to know anything about what you do, but I just have to ask certain questions where you start taking one part of your experience and comparing it with another and you draw insights and you make decisions and make plans. So that's what strategic coaching is. And I'm 47 years into it personally, and our company is 32, so we've got a lot of different question and we've got a lot of different thinking processes.

Dan Sullivan:
Long story short, my market place are all high achievers and they're all now where we are right now the minimum personal income to get into Coach is 200,000 American, that's your ... Well, a lot of people say, "Well a lot of people do that." And actually a lot of people don't do that. It's about one out of, I don't know, it's about one of 4,000 entrepreneurs that makes $200,000 so we've got a very, very select audience and they're all high achievers. And James Robert, I think it's factory installed with them.

Dan Sullivan:
I think they came off the assembly line as high achievers. And it's very interesting and he doesn't mind me using this as an example, but the book that I created with Ben Hardy and we have a collaboration that Ben and I work together, his coach ideas, he writes them. Ben's just got a really great major market book style that just enhances the ideas that we have. And then we have an agreement with Hay House publishers that was put together by a man by the name of Tucker Max, and if you're in the publishing world or anything else, Tucker's a very prominent individual.

James Robert Lay:
So we're going to Tucker on the podcast, we've already had that connection there.

Dan Sullivan:
Yeah, and Tucker is at birth, he popped out as a high achiever. Big goals. Don't have to teach Tucker how to have big goals, big achievements, big capabilities. Don't have to teach him. But, he missed all the classes on being happy. So he was a four times New York Times best seller before he was 30 years. A movie was made out of one of them, and everything like that. But everything that from the outside you'd say, "He's got all the reasons in the world to be really happy." Wasn't happy. And what I notice is that all these high achievement skills aren't any formula whatsoever for being happy. I mean, can you not be the way you are James Robert?

James Robert Lay:
I am me.

Dan Sullivan:
So anyway, it's told in the story, but there was a particular individual, very talented. He was a movie maker, a video maker, and he had vast experience with Fox News, with the Mike Douglas Show and everything like this. And so in every workshop that we, live workshop ... and I'm taking you back to 1993 in the situation that I'm talking about here. And you come in and the first hour of an eight hour workshop you talk about your progress and your success and you get together in groups and you talk about it. And everybody's saying, "Wow, I didn't know I had achieved so much. Boy that really, that quarter really makes me feel good. That last 90 days, man that's amazing." When you're in it you don't realize how much you're achieving and everything. Not Chuck. This guy's name was Chuck. And Chuck, no. Nope. Nope. None of it matters. He said, "I missed this. I didn't do this." So his stress was all in what he didn't get done, not on what it did get done.

James Robert Lay:
Let's talk about because I think that's the important point here is I think about financial brands and they have these big goals of transformation of moving from the physical to the digital. There's so much to do. But then, we get stuck like Chuck. We get stuck like Chuck and we fall into the gap. And when I say fall into the gap I can't help think of the Gap clothes, but that's not what we're talking about. We get stuck in the gap. What is this? What is the gap here?

Dan Sullivan:
So I'm quite a good artist from the standpoint of doing diagrams and I've had it since a kid. I mean, I was born this diagramming capability and when people are telling me about their experience I see their experiences as diagrams. I see arrows and stars and circles. You can have an ability and not know that the ability is worth anything. But what I began to realize when I combined this with open ended question that I could actually structure out how a person was looking at it, so Chuck who was stuck, made me so mad, I mean I just ... I don't get mad very often, but when I get mad it's not in half degrees. I really get mad. And I said, "Can I show you what you're doing?" And I put up a diagram and the diagram is actually in the first pages of the book, the diagram. And the way you see it is exactly the way I did it in 1993.

Dan Sullivan:
And then I just absolutely nailed it on the first thing and I said, "This is your brain Chuck. This is your brain. And I want to show you what you're doing to your brain." And so I showed, there's what you're doing and it never makes you happy and then I'm going to show you what it looks like if it was making you happy. And I said, "This side I'm going to call the gap, and the other side I'm going to call the gain." And this all came to me. I mean this, I don't know about you, but a lot of breakthroughs just come boom fully formed.

James Robert Lay:
Some call it infinite intelligence. You get a digital download in your mind. Whatever it is it works.

Dan Sullivan:
Yeah, but usually I have to get riled up. There has to be a high emotional, somethings really getting to me and it can be very positive but it could be also negative. Here it was negative. And I just didn't want to put up with this anymore so I said, "Here's what you're doing. You have an ideal of how you should be. What it should look like. And the ideal actually throws light on what you can do during the next 90 days and then there are specific things which are achievable, they're actually goals. And you set off and I know you're very productive. I know you knock out a lot of videos. I know you've won a lot of prizes. I know you've got really big clients. So those are really goals that you achieved, but when you get to the goal, you do something weird. You measure it against your ideal and the ideal is still way off in the future. So you've been at this for 40 years since you could remember and always when you achieve a goal, really big deal, big new project, big new contract, big new paycheck, all goals you measure against the ideal and you say, 'I didn't do anything'."

James Robert Lay:
Well it's like when you get into a car any you're driving towards the future, you're driving towards the horizon line. You're never going to reach the horizon line because it's always going to keep moving ahead. And you're talking about Chuck, and I can think about someone at a financial brand or at a fintech, they have these big goals, they have these big ideas and ideals, and they start moving towards that, they check things off the list. But then, new things go on the list and they never take time to celebrate where they've come from, the progress that they've made. And so they keep looking up the mountain and they're like, "How am I ever going to climb that mountain? It's too high." I'm curious who is most at risk for falling into the gap and maybe getting trapped there? Is there a personality or a type that maybe the dear listeners should be thinking about, either themselves or others that they're working with?

Dan Sullivan:
Yeah. And you know, since I work with a very specific type of target market, I don't know if this is generally true across the human race, because I only deal with entrepreneurs. I only deal with entrepreneurs at a very high level of achievement, and they're not new entrepreneurs. Either they've got five years, 10 years, some of them have 30 years in experience. So that for the last 47 years that's my entire life and it's not that I have great answers for them. What I have are great questions for them and they have the answers. And then I create really useful diagrams about how I think.

Dan Sullivan:
So I said, "Now Chuck, this is always going to make you unhappy." And I talked to the other people in the workshop. I didn't make it all about Chuck. And I said, "How many of you, this is what you do, you have this ideal, which throws light on what a goal can be and you achieve the goal but then you take the goal achieved and measure it against the ideal and it's like nothing happened? And you've been doing this for your entire existence as a human being."

James Robert Lay:
You're working with entrepreneurs, we're working with financial brands and leadership teams, marketing and sales. I will tell you, there's a lot of similarities.

Dan Sullivan:
Oh yeah.

James Robert Lay:
And then once again I can't speak for the larger scale-

Dan Sullivan:
No, I mean, there's high achievers in every field of life. High achieving actors, high achieving athletes, high achieving politicians.

James Robert Lay:
... So someone gets stuck in the gap, they feel failure. They're focused on that failure. Even if it might not be failure, that's their perception.

Dan Sullivan:
Everybody on the outside said you'd succeeded.

James Robert Lay:
Yeah. And I've been there. I know you've been there-

Dan Sullivan:
Oh yeah.

James Robert Lay:
... but we make a conscious choice to not stay there. So someone who is listening who might be feeling this way, frustrated, stuck in that failure mind, depressed, how might they be able to escape and get out? What can they do?

Dan Sullivan:
Well, I said there's another way of say the basic problem is that once you've had an achievement how do you measure what you've achieved? It's all about measurement. So human progress is all based on measurement. It's got to be between two points. But they have to be real points. They can't be an imaginary point.

James Robert Lay:
Not arbitrary.

Dan Sullivan:
Can't be arbitrary. So I said, "Let's go over to the other side." And we look at it the other way and we go through the same thing. You have the ideal, and the ideal is just a mechanism that we have in our mind of seeing ourself in the future. That's what they ideal is. We have an ability, humans, and I think we're uniquely good at this, of actually seeing a new version of ourself in the future that's bigger and better. Producing bigger results and it's a higher quality experience. So when people talk about goals, it's a bit confusing because it's not a thing, it's yourself in the future with superior results. That's really what a goal is. So I said, "Now, we do the same thing that Chuck who's stuck is doing right here." And I used him.

Dan Sullivan:
I mean, and he disappeared from the program shortly after this, but he had caused me so much grievance up until then I had to get some reward for all the grievance. So I said, "Here's the ideal. You have the goal. And you get to the goal and instead of measuring against the imaginary ideal, you turn around and measure where you started." And they said, "You mean measure backwards?" And I said, "Yeah, measure backwards." "Well, that's not progress." And I said, "Of course it is."

James Robert Lay:
What happens when instead of measuring against where we need to go, which can often lead to the confusion, frustration, overwhelm, you measure backwards? And I think that's the secret. That's the secret how here-

Dan Sullivan:
That's what I tell them.

James Robert Lay:
... What happens?

Dan Sullivan:
Progress can only be measured backwards. I don't care-

James Robert Lay:
What happens though?

Dan Sullivan:
... Well, you immediately feel this sense, "Oh, this is where I was and the achievement I just had, I couldn't have done it three months ago, but now I've done it." And you feel this, "Oh, this is really great." And the thing is, a lot of people say, "Yeah, but if you do that you'll just get satisfied with your" ... And I said, "It's a theory, but I've never seen it actually proved." I said, "Everyone that I know who's experienced a jump in progress wants to have more of it."

James Robert Lay:
And I think you're right. It's that, oh, well you're going to get satisfied and I would agree with you. It's like you go to the gym, you're running. You see transformation in your body. Your cadence picks up. You put some muscle on. That makes you feel good, but you're measuring the progress by where you've come from instead of thinking, "Oh, I've got to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger." No. It's like, "I'm better off than I was 90 days ago." Which I'm curious about why 90 days? Because it's an interesting model and I've been thinking a lot about this when starting to frame out banking on change, seasons. Seasons work in 90 day quote unquote sprints. Why don't we do the same in business?

Dan Sullivan:
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, there are some things I just accept that it works. And you and I are, there's a particular profile that we use in Strategic Coach and we're called quick starts. And quick stars the way a quick start starts something is that they start it. In other words, they don't do a lot of research first to figure out whether they should do it. They don't create a lot of system ahead of time to do it. If you want to start something you just start it. And then you have to be very, very alert very quickly whether you've made the right decision. So with quick starts all the research is done after you've gone into motion.

James Robert Lay:
I'm glad you're bringing that up because for context for the dear listener, episode 124 Audrey, and Dan, Audrey is our certified Colby consultant, so we're now utilizing this to help bring awareness into financial brand teams. And what we're seeing they typically over index in initiating fact finder, in initiating follow through-

Dan Sullivan:
Follow through.

James Robert Lay:
... but the opposite side is true on that quick start. And so I think going in there and creating a bit of a balance, that's where they dichotomy comes into play-

Dan Sullivan:
Well, I'm surrounded by people who have great fact finder skills and follow through skills. Because it's really-

James Robert Lay:
... Right. Well, you have to be.

Dan Sullivan:
... Colby is the secret is to put together a great team where all the capabilities are combined. Not for your individual. I mean, it's useful for you to know, but it's really the payoff is in the kind of teamwork you can do.

James Robert Lay:
You've talked a lot about Chuck, but I want to get personal here with you. Gap and gain, is one of the things that you say is like, "I'll give myself five minutes and then I'm done. I'm out." Like, "I'm moving on." What's been a story, a situation in your life where you've fallen into the gap? What happened? You got out of it, and I think the important part is what did you learn from the experience?

Dan Sullivan:
Yeah, I think I had some really hard hits in my 30s and this would have been the 1970s. And I had a divorce. And depending on our upbringing in that, we think that a relationship that you really have to work at all the time is a really good relationship. And I failed, it ended up in a divorce. And then my first attempt at having my own business, I went bankrupt. And it just happened that both legal proceedings happened on the same day. It was August 15, 1978. And I could arrange the schedule so I did the divorce in the morning so I could keep my credit card and celebrate at lunch before I had to give my credit card in, because when you go bankrupt in Canada, you have to relinquish your credit cards.

Dan Sullivan:
And it was like two really, really bad report cards. I mean, divorce and bankruptcy are report cards. And so I say, "Most fundamental relationship of your life, you just failed. And business, most fundamental economic activity that you've attempted in your life, you just failed." And it took me a couple of years, a couple of years where I was really down on myself as a failure. And people say, "Well how do you look at those two experiences now?" And I say, "I just look at it as extreme market research."

James Robert Lay:
Right. Well, and that's I think the best way to approach this because I think we attach ourselves so much it's ridiculous-

Dan Sullivan:
Yeah. Yeah. Well that was obviously the wrong relationship. I mean-

James Robert Lay:
... Right.

Dan Sullivan:
... I mean-

James Robert Lay:
Don't do that again.

Dan Sullivan:
... Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the bad news it could still be going on.

James Robert Lay:
Yes. Right.

Dan Sullivan:
And the same thing that what the bankruptcy told me is I can only do certain of the things that are involved in having a successful business. And then I found my partner for life that as it turns out had handled both problems, both failures, and we're married, but she's the person who actually runs the company. And she's got great feel, she's got great skills for putting an organization and teams together and everything like that. And I'm freed up just to create the content of the program.

James Robert Lay:
That's a great point that you make because you had a failure, that can then lead to that low self-esteem, that depression, which then ties into guilt and it's just this negative cycle loop. But you just said something that I think was key, freedom. Which is another concept that you write about in the book, the freedom to versus the freedom from.

Dan Sullivan:
From, yeah.

James Robert Lay:
What's that?

Dan Sullivan:
Well, I think there ... and it's two stages of an entrepreneurial career, and I think that most entrepreneurs when they first become entrepreneurs, it's to get away from things that they don't like. And the biggest thing they don't like is having someone else in control of their time. I would say hands down the greatest motivation for becoming an entrepreneur is that you don't want your hours controlled and be the property of someone else. That you're basically paid for your hours. And so your entrepreneurial career is an attempt to get away from a lifetime of employment.

James Robert Lay:
Yeah. And I think the same is true though when I think about what's going on in financial brands. We're trying to create this freedom from the physical world where there's an opportunity to really, the freedom to create something new. Something that it's almost a first principal's approach to creation. But another concept that you touched on in the book is comparison. I mean, comparison is a killer. I see a lot of this through the work we're doing with financial brands, they compare themselves to other banks, other credit unions, other fintechs what's the opportunity to transform the thinking from comparison and really focus on the idea of just unique, which is I know a big area for you here?

Dan Sullivan:
Well, the big thing is about measurement. All human progress in any area of human activity is based on measurement. How do you know that what you're doing now is better than what you were doing before? You have to have measurements. And I would say here I just finished a book that's coming out. It's our next quarterly series. And I think this going to be a big seller, it's called American Happiness. And it's the eight mindsets you have to have if you're going to be a happy American.

Dan Sullivan:
And it really plays into I would say that the field that you're in and the focus that you're having is right at the cutting edge of the financial world, but also the technological world. And these are areas that Americans are unsurpassed in. I mean, if you take a look at where Americans really dominate it's in the total financial world. Not any particular branch of the financial world, but the ability to move capital as a resource very quickly from one area to another. And then enhanced now and accelerated by technology. This is made for American kind of stuff. But the other thing is that it creates bat crazy dreams and goals that you then measure yourself by.

James Robert Lay:
And that's what I want to touch on because I want to flip the script here slightly because when I look at financial brands and the opportunities for them to create a new future, a future that puts the transformation of people over the transaction of dollars and cents, that's a whole different way of thinking. And from our research, people want three things. They want to feel healthy, they want to feel wealthy, they want to feel happy. But money is that, ... it takes a toll on health. It takes a toll on wellbeing. It takes a toll on happiness. And you note in The Gap and The Gain 14% of American adults say they are happy. Only 14. So what does that mean? 86% are not happy. Happiness comes from something outside. When looking at the role a bank, a fintech can play in this conversation at a larger scale, it's beyond dollars and cents. It's truly transformed. I mean, I'm just going to riff on where is the alternative?

Dan Sullivan:
I want to bring a brand from another industry in to tell you how the fintech, if it's going to be a positive and it's going to be a value creating part of the financial world, of the transformation from in-person banking, or in-person financial transactions, anything, into the digital world is going to work. The human being has to be at the center of it. And they think that digital means impersonal. I mean, that there's this notion that we can in switching from in person, we can get rid of the human beings. It's just numbers. We're just numbers. And I said, "That never works in any other industry. Why should it work in your industry?" And I said, "And yours is more intensely, personally emotional than most other industries." I mean, money and the loss of or the lack of or the sudden abundance of is an intensely emotional experience.

James Robert Lay:
Absolutely.

Dan Sullivan:
And one of the great, one of my favorite brands that I've learned a lot from is the Four Seasons Hotels. So the Four Seasons is in 40 different countries right now, but it started in a motel on a backstreet in Toronto, which was the red light district. And it was, the motel was where you could get a room for an hour at a time. And this architect in Toronto got the idea that he traveled in Europe and he really liked the small hotel concept, the luxury small hotels. And he did about a two year taking notes. I think he was good on fact finder and good on follow through.

Dan Sullivan:
And he came back with a formula of how you could put together an entirely new hotel concept in the United States. And he bought this motel, dirt cheap. And he converted it. It was still a motel. It still looked like a motel, but he used it as a training school to test out methods and he did it for two years. And that's the start, and then it's got a glorious ... And it just became one of the great luxury hotels. I mean there were luxury hotels that were just one hotel, but he created a network of hotels around the world starting in Canada and then the United States and then went around it. And they have a concept that hold their whole hotel together, and said, "Systematize the predictable so that you can humanize the exceptional."

James Robert Lay:
I've studied a lot of Isadore Sharp-

Dan Sullivan:
Issy Sharp, yeah. Issy Sharp.

James Robert Lay:
... as part of this, and even the Four Season's experience boils down to three things that they've written about. Number one, democratizing innovation. Number two, eliminating the fear of failure. So really empowering that frontline to take control and make decisions. And then number three, powering people with data. I mean, this is kind of how they've gone through this transformational evolution into moving here. And I'll never forget, my wife and I, when we got married, true story, we wanted to go to Bora Bora. Four Seasons Bora Bora. Something that we'd been looking up before we got married, but I mean we were 24, the business was still getting started. I was in graduate school doing an MBA. I don't have a lot of regrets in life, but I want my money back for my MBA. Total aside.

Dan Sullivan:
How many Four Seasons could you MBA pay for?

James Robert Lay:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Dan Sullivan:
And you would have learned more. You would have learned more.

James Robert Lay:
Yes. And I'll tell you. What we did is we got pregnant in 2009 and I was like, "We have to go to Bora Bora Four Seasons. But we've to do this now, otherwise we're going to start having kids, it's going to be much more difficult." So I think she was maybe four or five months pregnant and we took that trip out there, and ... I mean, that's a brand experience too that I've learned a lot from and have studied over the years, because it is about people. You put the people at the center of all of the thinking, all of the doing, and I think that's where this idea of the concept of the gap and the gain, it's about people. And more importantly it's deeper. It's about the mind and the conversations that we have with ourselves. As we wrap up, I mean, so many practical lessons they can apply. What's the best way for them to get the book? Where can they find it?

Dan Sullivan:
Yeah. It's just gapandgainbook.com. And Amazon has it. You can go Gap and Gain on Amazon. We're big fans of them, they don't know we exist. It's one of those things, we're a pebble off the side of an ocean liner. But Amazon really moves books. I mean, if you got a good book Amazon ... So I have no problem with Amazon whatsoever. It's like electricity, you want electricity, or don't want to have electricity. You get Amazon. And the thing is that we find that everybody the moment they read this book said, "I know 20 people who should read this book, because I can just see what these other people are doing to themselves. I can see what I'm doing to myself, but I can see we're all doing this." And it's just that our parenting, our educational system doesn't teach people how to measure their progress.

James Robert Lay:
I will tell you this, I will give you some positive hope. My son was in fourth grade. My daughter's now in fourth grade, and the spent the first 30 days of school, in this particular program, studying growth mindset with the works of Carol Dweck. I'm telling you I have seen so much transformation with their thinking to where they're able to take a negative or a quote unquote failure, not let it bog them down, learn from it, apply that going forward, so-

Dan Sullivan:
That's great. Where is this? Where is this?

James Robert Lay:
... This is right outside of Houston, Texas. That program's called Connect, which I think is actually out of California. It's a hybrid based learning to where the pandemic was honestly an easy transition because they were already digital, computer based, but it was 100% computer based. Then the teacher becomes more of a mentor coach and then they do collaborations with students as basically peer to peer teaching. So it's really, really good to see what they're doing, I would say taking the traditional education model, transforming it a bit to where it's more collaborative and helpful all the way around.

Dan Sullivan:
Well, I just think that this one life skill of recognizing that when you set a goal you have a picture of yourself that you're projecting on the future. And then that allows you to establish achievable goals and you do the goals. And when you achieve your goal, don't measure against the image, turn around and measure where the starting point was. If a kid learns that at four years old, or five years old, they can learn anything else in their life in a way that's uniquely valuable to them. They'll select their own unique goals, they'll have their own unique progress and they'll measure and get their own unique measurements. And it just makes them happy. I mean, all this talk about mental health, you can chemically enhance people or use shock waves any way you want, but at the end of it they don't know how to measure their progress. You've made someone wealthy, but it's not the person who's receiving the treatment.

James Robert Lay:
Yep. And I think that's what it boils down to for the dear listeners. We wrap up. Always keep in your mind progress is greater than perfection. And get the book. Learn how to number one see if you are in the gap, and then if you are, don't beat yourself up over it because there's-

Dan Sullivan:
And the big thing, just as [inaudible 00:39:37], at the end of every day, just look back at your day's experience and pick out the three wins-

James Robert Lay:
... That's it. Write them down. Celebrate them.

Dan Sullivan:
... three wins. And then before you go to bed anticipate tomorrow in terms of three wins that you can do tomorrow. When you teach a child that and they're off and running.

James Robert Lay:
Which we actually do. My kids have gotten condition now at dinner time to where if I don't say ... they say, "Dad are you going to ask me what was good about my day?" If I don't do that they're calling me out on it, so it's really, it's a beautiful thing. So for the dear listener, grab a pen, grab a piece of paper, write down your three wins. Onwards and upwards. Dan, great conversation. Always good seeing you. Always good having you on. Looking forward to doing this again soon, okay?

Dan Sullivan:
See you at the workshop.

James Robert Lay:
Absolutely. As always and until next time, be well, do good, and make your bed.


Brief Summary of Episode #136

How do you know when you’ve achieved something worthwhile?

You look back on your life before achieving it, as a comparison.

Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach is constantly having this discussion with his high-achieving entrepreneurial clients across 35 different countries.

The world is filled with contradicting information about the healthiest way to approach future growth.

In reality, you don’t need to sacrifice any of these things to be a successful leader:

   -Sleep 

   -Quality time with your loved ones 

   -Your mental health 

Sure, there will be hard days.

But not every day should be a hard day.

That’s a red flag. 

One of the simplest ways to stay motivated and continually reach milestones is to regularly reflect on what you have achieved over what you haven’t.

As for the gap between those two things, you’ll have to listen to the full episode to find out what to do about it.

 

Key Insights and Takeaways

  • How Dan leveraged virtual tech during the pandemic to reach amazing growth
  • Focusing on your successes instead of what you haven’t achieved yet
  • The gap and how to avoid it

Notable Quotables to Share

How to Connect With Dan Sullivan

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