(interview blurb)
David: We live in this vibrational reality and so anyone who truly wants to be creative or successful and live a life of joy has to understand this true nature of reality.
(intro)
Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is an author, speaker, entrepreneur, and CEO of David Bayer Transformational Programs, a global coaching and training company. He has been recognized as a leading expert on mindset and business strategy by Inc. Magazine. His book, A Changed Mind: Go Beyond Self Awareness, Rewire Your Brain & Reengineer Your Reality, is available September 26th. Please welcome David Bayer.
(Interview)
Alex: Hi, David.
David: Alex, great to be here with you.
Alex: It’s great to have you. Thank you for being here all the way from Puerto Rico.
David: Yeah, it’s pretty awesome that we get to do this now, isn’t it? You can be in LA and I can be out here in Puerto Rico and we can have a conversation — have coffee together.
Alex: I love it. It’s amazing. Used to be a dream, I remember growing up thinking about being able to see other people at a distance, have conversations, and now we’re here.
David: Here we are.
Alex: So let’s start where we always start at Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. What are we drinking today?
David: We are drinking my French press coffee over ice with a little bit of oat milk. So it’s sort of my own instant version of cold brew with a splash of non-dairy.
Alex: That sounds awesome. Yeah, I can’t do cold brew because it’s — you don’t want to see me on cold brew. No one does. So I’m doing a kind of like an iced Americano with a little bit of almond milk. Pretty similar.
David: Right, very similar.
Alex: So I know you have an upcoming book coming up in September, which is really exciting for you, I’m sure, A Changed Mind: Go Beyond Self Awareness, Rewire Your Brain & Reengineer Your Reality, and when I’m looking at the excerpt, you start in your book where we usually start in this podcast, which is really taking the audience through your journey, how you ended up doing what you do today, so I’m excited to hear your story, David.
David: Yeah, I mean, my story is, it’s very unlikely that I’m here right now in the work that I do. I think there’s sort of two types of people who are in personal development, there are the people who are really excited and aspire to teach self-help and then those who unexpectedly arrive here. And I was an entrepreneur since I graduated from Columbia University. I was like 21 years old, I started my first business on the internet. So I was building online businesses for a while. 2009, I was running my third venture-backed technology company and it was then that I realized there was some disturbance in my force. I thought I was just a guy who liked to have a good time but my life became unmanageable. I was abusing pornography, I was abusing alcohol, I was abusing drugs, I was a workaholic. And I was able to look backwards later and see that I was just pursuing the achievement of success to justify being good enough. But I had to address it. Fortunately, my brother was in the addiction treatment industry and so he said, “Listen, you got a problem, you got to start working on a 12-step program, go find a therapist,” and he actually recommended a therapist and she specialized in the neuroscience of addiction and so I went in to see her the first time and she said, “Hey, listen, for 90 days, there’s no cigarettes, there’s no drinking, there’s no sex, there’s no self sex, there’s no pornography, there’s no marijuana,” and I was like, well, first of all, that’s impossible. I was like that’s just not going to happen and she said, “Well, you’ve built these neural pathways that are moving you towards behaviors which behind them have these emotions that are unresolved and so we’ve gotta start breaking this pattern.” So I started seeing this therapist once a week. She had a men’s group that she hosted every week and she said you need to go to three 12-step meetings a week so I started going, working a 12-step program, getting a sponsor, doing the steps. And so my whole life became recovery. And I think my experience, I was really, really fortunate that I struggled with pornography and I think a lot of people don’t talk about this. I do talk about it and so when I’m out speaking, I have men who come up to me in the corner, sometimes women who said, “Hey, I’m glad you’re speaking into this,” and we know the stats, like 15 percent of people in a room are compulsive with pornography right now. But working a sex addiction program was very different than when I worked Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous because you had to work the program in your mind first. You can just imagine a fantasy scenario and continue to perpetuate the addiction in the neural networks versus staying out of a bar and not drinking alcohol or not calling your pot dealer and ordering marijuana. I was in these 12-step rooms with all kinds of people, educators, students, doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and they were like Jedi Knights, like their capacity to be aware of their own thinking and in tune with their emotions was so high because that particular program required that you stop the mental momentum of even moving into fantasy, let alone opening up the fridge and getting a beer. So that really was my introduction to personal growth. I got into personal growth after recovery. I went to Barnes and Noble and said, “Hey, do you have a section for people who wanna improve their lives and books that might be able to help them?” and the woman said, “Oh, you mean the self-help section?” I’m like, “Oh, that’s appropriately named, yeah, the self-help section,” and I walked up to the second floor, and I kid you not, I walked over to the self-help section, there was a book on the floor and I picked it up and it was a little book called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It was like it was waiting for me. And so that began this journey into personal growth and understanding that thoughts are things and that we could use our mind to rewire our own brains and down regulate our nervous systems and then that led me into not just psychological emotional work but physical work and fasting and meditation and chanting and cold therapy and extreme heat and all of these eventually into exploring with other therapeutic medicines. And so that was my story of a changed mind and it’s not like we’re at the last chapter, it’s a continued growth and evolution as we shed ourselves of the ancient nervous system and we step into becoming a more supreme man, a supreme woman, a supreme person. But that’s what got me to where I am today and I’m very, very grateful for what was a very difficult experience.
Alex: That’s awesome. Thank you for sharing. I think we all appreciate the candor. Growth is one of those things, personal growth that sometimes we don’t put into perspective, like we know there’s such a thing as personal growth but when you’re going through that process of being lost in these patterns, the way out of it never really seems like, “Oh, I need to engage in personal growth.” Once you were going through, it seems like you’re like, “Wow, okay, cool, I’m growing, I’m changing my mind,” and it’s very — just that agency that comes with being able to turn that self-awareness through behavioral change is so powerful. I like how you described that. How did you go from that person that was on the journey to recovery to really wanting to dedicate your life to continue to help yourself go through that process but also help others?
David: I think that when you’ve got the pattern of your personality that you’ve developed so predominant, which is really just a continual playing out in different ways, shapes, and forms of your early stage beliefs and your traumas, there isn’t any space for purpose or clarity to come in. And so as you begin to heal and transform those misunderstandings and those compulsive patterns of thinking and feeling, you start to tune into whatever you want to call it, your self, spirit, a higher intelligence, both internally and externally, you start to have guidance. And so, for me, there was a deeper knowingness of I didn’t really love to do what I had been doing and so I was like I don’t want to keep doing this, it didn’t have meaning for me at that time without getting into the businesses I was running, it didn’t feel meaningful. I felt drawn to personal growth. And I had this thought, I was like if I could just do personal growth and make a living, that would be amazing. It was kind of like if I could just go to 12-step meetings all week long and get paid, I would have just stuck on 12-step meetings. Fellowship, transformation, vulnerability, connection to spirit, right? That’s what I would do. And I made a decision. I had been single for about a decade as I was going through my sex addiction recovery, all of my recovery, but I was single for about a decade, early on, I was encouraged to not date because my pattern of selection and the way I was showing up in relationships was trauma based. So it was December of 2012 and I was listing out my goals and I wrote down, “I’m gonna meet a beautiful Spanish woman and make her my wife.”
Alex: That’s very specific.
David: Very specific. I was like, I just thought Latin women were so beautiful and I’m going to meet a beautiful Latin woman, I’m going to make her my wife. And 10 days later, through a series of extraordinary coincidences, I met Carol, who’s my wife and also president of our company, Whole Human. And so when I met Carol, she was watching this in-between phase where I was still doing the thing that I was doing before but I didn’t really love doing it and all I wanted to talk about was personal and spiritual growth and sharing whether the revelations I was having in my 12-step meetings or a book that I was reading or someone I was listening to, and then she started watching with my friends how I’d question them. Before I even knew what coaching was, I was not pushing myself on them as a coach but just seeing if they were open to other perspectives, and then offering those perspectives and she was watching, like, “Wow, this guy’s helping people change their lives,” and so she encouraged me to — I started writing everything out that I was seeing in terms of distinctions, because, at one point, I felt like I got stuck in personal growth. and I saw a lot of other people who were in personal growth who were feeling the same way. In fact, they were feeling even more broken because they were reading all the books, they were going to the events, they were using the different technologies that were out there, they understood the principles of change and personal growth but they were having a really hard time integrating and embodying it. They were making incremental changes but it was still like they were — most people were still experiencing more stress, more anxiety, more overwhelm, more anger than the promise of personal growth. So I was like starting to kind of figure out where the gap was and I was writing about it, but she’s like, “Hey, how about we go and do like a one-day workshop?” And so I did that in Winter Park, Florida, Rollins College. I rented a little classroom, I told some friends about it, I didn’t have an offer, they brought some other friends and we had 23 people show up in a classroom and I taught everything I had learned in terms of my own distinctions and integration of other great teachers and at the end of that conversation, there were four teenagers in that room, and at the end of that day that we spent together, there was a line of 23 people waiting to tell me that what just happened had changed their life forever. And so Carol was like, “You need to do this.” She saw me, one day, I came home in an Uber and she’s out front with the dog and the Uber driver’s crying and he gets out of the car to give me a hug and it was just because the Uber driver was basically confused thinking he had to do all these things in his life before he can be a great dad instead of realizing that by putting the time and energy into being a great dad, all these other things would happen and that he could have it all. And then we thrashed trying to figure out how to get our message out there. We took all the Brendon Burchard courses, the Frank Kern courses, all the expert stuff that was out there at that time back in 2014, 2015 and nothing really seemed to work and then we stumbled upon something and we had our first event in 2017 called The Powerful Living Experience with 350 people and it was just amazing. And then we became a seminar-based business where we built up to having 1,000-plus people at our annual event and now the business is evolving beyond the seminar-based business. And so it was a personal development or teacher by accident and I was pretty resistant every step of the way and, fortunately, spirit paired me up with a woman who saw in me what I couldn’t see because we’ve benefited tremendously from living in alignment and we’ve been able to help a lot of people.
Alex: What is the Whole Human Framework?
David: So we’ve been teaching a methodology, a framework since 2015 and we created a little digital program called Mind Hack and we created the program because the consultant we hired to help us build a seminar-based business said, “Hey, the way to fill your event is create a product and then go out and find speak-to-sell opportunities and then anybody who buys the thing that you sell, give them free tickets to your event,” and so that’s how we had 330 people at the first event. Well, Mind Hack turned out to be this unbelievable methodology. We’ve had like 3,000 people go through it, it combines neuroscience with behavioral psychology, metaphysics, first principle philosophies. It takes people very, very deep and then we built coaching programs to help integrate that and for a long time, we were working with entrepreneurs so we were teaching a business curriculum as well as our mindset technologies. And I had been feeling since 2020 that we needed to start just really focusing on transformation. We could still offer the great business curriculum, sales strategies, marketing strategies for coaches, consultants in our higher level programs, but I wanted to create something that anybody could access. And even back when I was in addiction recovery, I was like, “Man, everybody needs access to this, this fellowship, this step process,” and so, in 2021, there was a big update on the iOS platform, because we were running a lot of ads to coaches and consultants, they would register for a training, we would talk about, “Hey, to grow your business, you need the strategies, you need the mindset,” and they didn’t roll into our coaching programs and it stopped working when there was the iOS update. Lead costs skyrocketed, quality dropped, I had to get rid of my whole sales team, and at that point, I told Carol, I said, “Hey, we need to go all in on next level transformation for people,” because what we’re seeing in our programs is that the people who don’t even consume the strategy side find success when they have a changed mind and so mindset is really everything. And I said, especially with everything going on in the world today, we need to help more people down regulate their nervous systems, clear out their traumas, get clear on their vision and have a powerful living experience. And Carol said, “Yeah, okay, we can do that but we gotta get this funnel to work again,” because it’s the cash flow for the business. Well, fast forward 16 months, we tried all kinds of different strategies, nothing ended up proving to be significantly successful, but during that period of time in early 2022, I guess you’d call it a breakdown. Carol was pregnant with our first son, she was all chemically off kilter, I was experiencing some not serious but challenging health problems. The business, as I mentioned, was in this pivot, and I ended up one day coming home after trying to exercise off all the tension that was in my body and I couldn’t and I got in the cold shower and I just started yelling. And I had done a lot of somatic release work, I knew when my body needed to offload energy, when it needed to move to sort of auditory or movement, and so I was just following what my body was doing. But to anyone looking on the outside, I was just having a nervous break. Carol came running in, her mom came running in, they got my brother on the phone, got another friend on the phone, and after a little while I calmed down, but I decided to go back and work the 12 steps, not around alcohol or pornography or marijuana addiction but around worry. Worry is what we would call my core program. It’s in my lineage. And so as I got back into working the steps and as I started getting into the work of Louise Hay on self-love and healing and I started seeing even deeper distinctions in my own work, what emerged out of that was what’s called the Whole Human Framework and it’s a 12-step structure that we deliver over 10 weeks, we do it a couple times a year. In fact, I’m leading a group live after one of our free challenges through this here in the next month. And it’s a fully integrated process that helps someone identify what they want out of their life and all of the resistance that they have to that desire. One of the things Neville Goddard taught, who I think is one of the great new thought teachers in the 40s, 50s, and 60s of the 1900s was, and I’ve translated it into this, I want to give him credit, but that desire plus non-resistance equals desired result. So there actually isn’t anything we ever need to figure out. The plan will figure itself out through you if you’re non-resistant. Your job is to desire and to identify resistance and drop it. If you do that, you’ll produce the result. Your job is not to desire and then figure out how to produce the outcome. This is a very different way of looking at how you manage your life and how you manage creation. So the Whole Human Framework is focused on getting clear on your desire and then identifying all resistances that you have to that desire that come up as a result of that desire and transforming them. And so we’ve got four types of resistances. One is your old run-of-the-mill limiting beliefs and we’ve got some great technologies, money’s hard to make, there’s not enough time, whatever it is, you’ve just worn neural pathways that that becomes your go-to interpretation of the experiences of your life so those need to be transformed, let go of, changed. Number two, we discovered that — I don’t know, Alex, have you ever had like a limiting belief that like you’ve been aware of for a long, long time but you’re just still holding on to it?
Alex: Never.
David: Never?
Alex: No, totally kidding.
David: Yeah.
Alex: Well, I think some of those kind of live in the shadows and some of those you’re aware of — it’s interesting, there’s so many layers to what could be limiting and, sometimes, you actually think that something was a limiting belief and then you shed light into it, you work through it, but you may actually find that you’re spending a lot of energy trying to clear that through, so although you’re very aware of it, it doesn’t necessarily go away by shedding awareness or doing work. I mean, I think limiting beliefs are very interesting and I do think they’re kind of like this kind of special type of monster sometimes that changes its shape so that you think, “Wow, I’m totally over that limiting belief,” and it’s just manifesting itself in a different way because there’s so deeply rooted, I think.
David: Well, on one hand, I wouldn’t agree with you. On another hand, if you’re someone who wants to actually free yourself of the influence of your limiting beliefs, believing that they’re deeply rooted is not going to support it. So that’s how nuanced beliefs are, right? Our beliefs about beliefs become our reality too and that’s why a lot of times when we use the word “trauma,” we make sure people understand that when we say that, we’re not saying that it’s some big hairy monster that is never going to change because it’s called trauma. What we have found is that those limiting beliefs, because you and I have both transformed the way that we think in our growth, we’ve changed some beliefs, but then, as you mentioned, there’s some beliefs we’re aware of that seem harder to change, what we found is a significant number of those are tied to resentments. So if you just look at the formation of beliefs, most of them are formed in interpersonal dynamics and so we hold resentments for people who have offended or affronted us, but in that offense or that affronting, oftentimes, a belief was formed and we can’t let go of the belief if we’re still holding on to the person that was part of that belief formation. And so this sort of second element of dropping the resistance, which is an extrapolation from 12-step technology, this is why, one of the reasons why the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and other anonymous programs has the capacity to liberate someone from the most addictive, compulsive, unmanageable chemical biological behavior because Bill W channeled, “Hey, we have to inventory our resentments because somehow they’re entangled here.” Now, they don’t expressly articulate that in 12-step recovery, but what we found is that some of those beliefs that are harder to dislodge are because there are resentments associated with them.
Alex: You mentioned earlier the lineage for you was worry. Were you referring to like that’s a pattern that you see in your family?
David: Yes. So it’s actually getting to the third element of resistance, which we call the core program. What we found is that if you were to take the beliefs that your mother or whoever represented your mother or even the absence of your mother and the interpretation you gave that, if you were to take sort of the core limiting belief that you either observed of your parent or that they propagated into you and you took the core from your paternal influence, that intersection becomes your core program. So, for example, my mom always believed she wasn’t doing enough, she wasn’t good enough, and that bad things were going to happen. My dad believed there was a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things and was very critical of the way other people did things if they didn’t do things the way he did them. That combination is conducive to worry, to always being concerned that you’re not doing the right thing and that you’re not good enough. Now, my wife’s core program is control. So she had a trauma happen to her when she was younger where the reaction to that experience was, “I’m not gonna rely on anybody, I’m gonna do it on my own and I don’t need anyone,” so it’s control. My brother’s is shame or guilt through the experiences that he had. The core program is really interesting because it becomes the nucleus of your personality. You literally start to shape your entire perception around it. And it has value because if you were to look at the things that you do best, like I was a critical thinker, I was always thinking eight steps ahead, it contributed to what people would view from the outside as my highest level of skill or my uniqueness, but what happens is by the time you hit around 35, 40, 45, 50 years old, it’s become so over-utilized that it’s the thing that you start to feel suffocated around. You’ll notice that if you have a business, your business is beginning to fall apart because the core program wants to be transformed. You’re ready for your next level and whatever you’ve created, whether it’s a relationship or health or business out of the prior consciousness, starts to get really shaky because it’s ready to be changed. And so the interesting thing about the core program and what we’ve seen is that you can’t transform it, you can’t use the same tools to shift your limiting beliefs, it’s not tied to a resentment, it goes back to powerlessness and unmanageability. In Alcoholics Anonymous, you have to actually surrender your core program to a power greater than yourself. So we teach a whole process of what surrender is, we explain what surrender is, we give steps around surrender, and in that letting go of the core program, you actually deepen your connection with yourself and with spirit. And so the core program is almost like a seed that spirit plants in us to bring us back into deeper relationship with spirit itself later on in our life. It’s almost like if you’re familiar with Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, this is like the full complete cycle of the hero’s journey is that the transformation or the letting go or surrender of the core program, which does not come from your own doing, it actually comes from a non-doing, it’s a very kind of Daoist woo way type of approach, is what unlocks your next level of capability, faith, courage, freedom, everything.
Alex: So question about spirit. You mentioned spirit a number of times and different people see spirit differently. Some people talk about God, a higher power, like there’s different ways to express similar ideas. For you, when you talk about spirit, what does that mean for you?
David: The word we most commonly use in our work is “intelligence.” I’d give you a couple of ways to look at that. My first mystical moment was a lucid dream that I had back in around 2013, 2014, what I would call the beginning of the universe, and I saw the void, which is different than outer space, it was just nothingness, and there was a light in the void. The light was life. I could feel it, just like I can — if I’m really present to you, I can feel your soul. But it had no container and so I would just describe that as intelligence. It was unembodied intelligence. And so spirit to me is intelligence and it takes a variety of forms. So I believe that intelligence exists outside of a physical container. Some people would describe this as the ether or the unified field or the Akasha. It’s the non-material form of all that is, which I’m calling intelligence. Some people call it God, Allah, Jesus, spirit, the universe, the force be with you.
Alex: Look, I have a similar experience my senior year of college and I remember coming up with this conclusion that the whole experience of everything that ever was and before there was even time itself, I would summarize it as intelligence is the driving force behind it all and it is fueled by understanding. I remember just getting that and coming into words with it and it’s like, wow, I was like, I could just understand evolution itself from the perspective of that which you’re referring to as spirit. My favorite philosopher of all time, barring maybe Ken Wilber because I love Ken Wilber, that kind of follows the Hegelian kind of way of thinking, so Hegel is my favorite philosopher because he takes spirit and does the phenomenology of it so like what is the experience of spirit coming into itself and understanding itself and differentiating itself from the absolute and he takes out all the way to human history and how it unfolds. I mean, the level of genius to put yourself in the driver’s seat of just the evolution of spirit as like — when you read Hegel — I don’t know, have you read Hegel?
David: When I was in college, I read some Hegel.
Alex: You have to read it outside of college because if someone forces you to read Hegel, you can’t tap into it but if you do it for fun, and every time the way you’re looking at spirit, when he talks about consciousness, you put that frame that you have on to that, suddenly, it unlocks, it’s like this puzzle and the most difficult book in philosophy is really undecipherable sometimes, suddenly, actually, it’s kind of like you get the key and you overlap those concepts and, suddenly, you see that opening through Hegel and reading it, it’s just like, I have it right here, I’m never too far away from my Hegel book, honestly, I just love this book. I would read you a paragraph but I think we would lose all of our audience, but, sometimes, people are shocked when they see this side of me because I’m an entrepreneur, I don’t talk about spirituality a lot, some entrepreneurs do, I really don’t talk about this too much. I work with a lot of large global companies, talking about spirit is not something that comes up all the time, but what you’re talking about is totally my jam so wanted to let you know that I love it.
David: Yeah, no, I love that you love it. In fact, in A Changed Mind, which is both the name of our podcast and my book, I share this lucid dream and it was really inspired by something I heard Deepak Chopra say to Oprah Winfrey and Oprah Winfrey had asked Deepak Chopra how everything started and he said in the beginning, all that is divided into two so it could have experience of itself, and everything that I had been learning at that point led me to believe that there has never been a moment of separation. Everything must have evolved out of one. And so how do we have a physical reality where we perceive separation when there truly is no separation? And so I had been thinking about that and it was sort of in my studying how quantum theory and quantum strangeness functioned and I went to bed one night and I had this experience and what I saw was this light expanded in 360 degrees, which created the Big Bang, and the outward form of the energy, which is represented by one arc, began to collapse once the universe reached its outer limit onto itself and it created a symbol, which is known as the ichthys, it’s the Christian fish, but it’s known as the womb of the mother and what I saw was that it was the moment of creation because as the outward arc met the inward arc, where the two met, torque came into existence and out of that torque was the spin and I saw electrons spinning. I saw how the physical world actually emerged from the no thing, which was consciousness or spirit itself. And all of this ties back into Euclidian geometry. You can explain all of existence through mathematics. All of the ancient symbols around the world that represent this moment where the inward met the outward or the Yin met the Yang, literally a crossing and the symbol and the language we use of the cross of Christianity or the swastika in Jainism or the Star of David. So it’s always these opposites because the two expressions, the male and the female, of energy or the immaterial world combined to create all of matter or what exists and then you can go to Noah Harari’s book, Sapiens, which opens up how that evolution then took place since the Big Bang and how we evolved into human beings. And so all of this is one conversation around how unembodied intelligence is able to transmit into life forms, giving us life through this technology called the brain, whether it’s my brain or my Chihuahua’s brain or a plant’s structure, which is similar, as a receiver. So it’s a wonderful conversation and then we want to be able to take that conversation, say, “Okay, got it. So what’s happening now in personal growth?” Well, what’s happening now in personal growth is that we’re actually learning at a very high level how to use our mind to rewire our brains and our nervous system, which reconfigures our entire electromechanical system and we live in this vibrational reality and so anyone who truly wants to be creative or successful and live a life of joy has to understand this true nature of reality. Our senses interpret reality. You’re not actually seeing me right now, I’m a bunch of rapidly moving particles that are 99.9 percent space, but this incredible suit that we have is able to interpret reality. The challenge is that we interpret reality through the traumas of the past and the meaning that you give the experiences of your life is the way that you will start to create your life moving forward. And so we’ve got to learn. That’s why the journey of life is heal the misunderstandings of the past and create the possibility of a new future and that is also sort of another way of explaining what I think is going on, which is an evolution of the human species where we’re learning how to reclaim control of the autonomic nervous system and down regulate the fight or flight mechanism so that we can move into being a more powerful human being.
Alex: You know, one of the frameworks that I find the most helpful to think about human development is integral theory, Ken Wilber’s work, and one, I think, of the very powerful distinctions that I was able to understand through some of the work in that area is the distinction between state and stage and the stages of development unfold and the only thing that’s been proven to help people go from one stage of development to the other is meditation, which is fascinating, and it turns out that you can have a state experience at different stages. So, without getting into the whole complexity of integral theory, I think a lot of the experiences that you might have going through a very interesting course and following someone’s insight into some of these very deep truths or doing substance or medicine, however you want to define that, and having a state experience that can then — then the work really begins where it’s like, okay, how do you use solidify and codify that into a stage experience so that you can actually be there most of the time? And it is fascinating that you can have a very high level of state experience that connects you with the higher bounds of spiritual development, but then it brings you back down to that stage development structure which is kind of where you generally reside. I find kind of like the way of breaking those concepts down and kind of understanding stage and state super helpful when it comes to personal development and the fact that those stages of development, there’s different models, but I think Jean Gebser’s is one that Ken Wilber uses a lot, so interesting to see kind of the unfolding of different stages, archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, integral, and what those all mean at the individual level, what those means at a societal level. You may be at a very high level of development but if your society is at a lower level, then it kind of pulls you in that direction so there’s the interplay between the individual moving through the stages and where society is. To me, there’s no more fascinating topic than adult development. And when you hear adult development, I think a lot of people are just — sounds like school, right? But it is really the core of everything we’re doing, both at society at large and as individuals and the intersection of both. So, to me, there is no topic that’s more interesting than development.
David: And by the way, I’m certainly biased but more valuable, like if you look at Aristotle’s first principles and you look at the real cause of things, adult development is the cause of everything else that you’re trying to create, whether it’s your business or your relationships or your health. We’re seeing the miraculous power of a liberated mind, but it’s not understanding how powerful a liberated mind is, it’s actually going through the process of freeing your mind. And to your point with state and stage, there’s a lot of talk right now about psychedelics and psychedelics is state, so people are doing Ayahuasca or they’re doing psilocybin or they’re doing MDMA therapy and I’ve done some of those things as part of my process but it’s not a cure all, then you come back right into, once you’ve had this state experience, you come back into your stage and then I think I would agree with Wilber, I might have a more expansive definition of it and I’m not studied on him but all change takes place through meditation but it’s a living meditation, like right now, there’s an opportunity for you and I to be in a meditative engagement together, for me to be conscious of my thoughts that are taking place, for me to allow the different experiences that I’m having. I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that transformation is going to come out of them sitting in a room for 20 minutes twice a day observing their thoughts and that can be really, really helpful but it’s when we’re out in life and we’re experiencing the experiences that we’ve been experiencing in a particular way for a long, long time and then we have within that stage a state change. It’s where you say something that historically would have made me angry and I actually experienced that differently. That’s real change. There’s a neurological rewiring taking place. And so there are a lot of people who go and do — I had the opportunity to hear this woman, Suzy Batiz, speak. She created this brand Poo-Pourri. I wasn’t familiar with it at the time, I guess a lot of women are hip to it, it’s this essential oil spray you spray in the toilet to kind of cover up your stink and she built a billion-dollar company and she was saying that she had gotten exposed to doing medicine ceremonies in the in the jungle and doing Ayahuasca and she was going — she always had really, really challenging experiences, a lot of purging and just very, very difficult, and she said she’d done like 50 different ceremonies and she came back to work and something happened in her work environment that was very uncomfortable and it reminded her of the discomfort that she was experiencing in ceremony and then she had this enlightening moment where she realized that life is ceremony. Life is about experiencing these contractive moments and learning how to breathe through and relax through them. And when you do that, you change. But your capacity to actually experience those experience differently comes through a series of integrations. Of course, you have to have the philosophy and the knowingness and then you’ve got to have some tools and some practices and then you work that over time and I think it’s important to work it with a group of people who are all working the same type of practice. You want to get good at jujitsu, you go into a dojo and you practice with a bunch of other people committed to jujitsu. You want to get good at adult development, you got to understand adult development and then you got to go do adult development. And you go do adult development with other people who are committed to developing as adults.
Alex: So a lot of your work sounds very practical and you’re weaving in a lot of entrepreneurial concepts, both from your own experience and it seems like a lot of the people that you work with are entrepreneurs. I think, ultimately, to your point earlier, development needs to be manifested in the world, right? Why do you think entrepreneurs are typically attracted, and let’s not typecast all entrepreneurs, but I think in both of our experience probably, entrepreneurs are very development driven. Why is that and how do you work with entrepreneurs, taking them through this growth and development journey?
David: Entrepreneurship is a unique experience, that’s sort of stating the obvious, but it’s unique in the points of reflection. The unique points of reflection. In other words, not everybody’s an entrepreneur. So everybody, most people are looking for relationships. Everybody, most people have some health, good health or bad health. Everybody, we all have this engagement with money. And so like in the other areas of our life, because it’s common, it’s very easy to externally associate and externally blame. “I’m broke because of that.” “I’m not in a good relationship because of that.” “I have health challenges because of that.” I think that when —
Alex: The when-if, the if-when kind of process. “Well, if I had this, then I wouldn’t be able to do that.”
David: Yeah, there’s certainly that too. When you’re an entrepreneur and you’re wanting to grow your business, you can stay in that lower level of awareness of blaming externally. “My business isn’t growing because I don’t have the right messaging, because I don’t have Facebook ads, I don’t have enough resources, I don’t have the right certification,” whatever it looks like.
Alex: Or the other side of that is you are super successful and then you don’t find any meaning. So there’s always that spiral, there’s always different places you can be at.
David: That’s a really great point. I think both of those create an environment that enables someone more easily to go, “Oh, my gosh, it must be me. It must be me. It’s not all these external things. I mean, I achieved all the success but I’m still not happy, it must be me, I must have to go inside,” or, “I’m trying to do all these things and make it work and it’s not working, it must be me,” and so then it opens up the entrepreneur to the developmental conversation.
Alex: All these people are coming to you and there’s all these broken funnels because of all the BS sometimes that Apple does and changing their ecosystem, it does seem like sometimes when that happens, it really is about rewiring things so that they can optimize their own side of that ecosystem versus the users. That’s one issue that I have with platform businesses in general, they seem to rely on the users and creating all these notes and the notes get value and everyone starts growing and then the master platform has to go and kind of suck the life out of the ecosystem they’ve created. So, for me, we should have a lot more understanding around how platforms work because I just see a lot of big, large-scale platform businesses shooting themselves in the foot and getting in problems with regulation and their users because they don’t respect that. But let’s leave that one for another day. So, when you have all these people that go through their funnel and they’re sitting right there in front of you or virtually in one of your courses, what would you say is one or a few of like the driving force behind that person kind of being there? And what is driving them to kind of want to be better? Are there some patterns that you’ve seen in the people that come to you and look for your help to navigate through those courses and ultimately find what are they looking for and why are they there?
David: People are at different stages. Ultimately, everybody wants to be happy. Some people understand that they are in all degrees, I was going to couch it. You’re creating your own reality so — I mean, we launched our podcast recently, on episode 3 of our podcast of A Changed Mind, I talked about how thoughts become things. It’s not woo-woo. If you understand behavioral psychology, you understand how belief becomes an action and becomes a result. And if you understand metaphysics, you understand that every time you have a thought, you experience that thought as an emotion and there’s an electrical, a very specific vibrational reaction within your body and we live in a vibrational reality.
Alex: I mean, that’s fact. It sounds very woo-woo but it is fact.
David: It’s fact.
Alex: You can extrapolate those truths into things that may or not. That’s my problem with New Age thinking that, at some point, you leap from the fact into a new sort of like manufactured reality.
David: Yeah, I think depending on how you want to teach, you want to be judicious as you progress from that conversation.
Alex: And you do want to leap at some point because it’s so exciting and it is based on science too, and then you get to that point and you’re elevated by the science and its understanding of existence —
David: I’m with you.
Alex: — and then you’re looking around and it’s tempting to go and jump into this — you’re kind of back into the dark ages when you do that, but if you follow that thread of science, then you can get to some really, really interesting places. But it seems like a lot of where we are in terms of talking about development is getting there, I think, where people are less — and guides and people that kind of guide people through this process, they seem to be kind of wanting to follow that thread a little bit more and I wish we had more time to talk about psychedelics because I’m not a very well-versed person around psychedelics, I know the essence of what they do but I really haven’t had too many experiences with them but it’s interesting. I’m going to bring you back to kind of where you were.
David: I think it’s okay to entertain a hypothesis too and then see how that hypothesis plays out in your life as you start to get into — as you go beyond the scientific explanation and then you have to evaluate, well, is this correlation correlative or causative, right? So we can play on the fringes of it and so we have people who come, entrepreneurs who come into our world who go like, “Hey, I get it. I’m the cause, my business is the effect. Help,” and we have other people who come into our world because they just want to heal what’s causing them personal angst and pain. It has nothing to do with their business. They just know that there’s the possibility and the promise of having a better emotional experience of life. Or we have entrepreneurs come to us because they know that it’s not all about their business and they’re experiencing friction in other areas, whether it’s their relationships or their health or they’re doing the thing that you mentioned before, which is, “Hey, once I get this thing in place then I’ll go do this other thing,” and even though they’re intellectually aware of it, like, “Once I get my business sorted, I’ll be a better parent,” that doesn’t make sense. They can’t change their behavior.
Alex: It’s a great excuse, though, right?
David: Right.
Alex: What a great excuse. It’s like, well, it really is deflecting the blame on to this other circumstance. “Look, if I have that, if I was in that position, I would totally be that other person,” and what happens is you sometimes ultimately end up getting to where you wanted to go and you’re still that same person and you’re going to latch on to some other excuse not to do what you should be doing. Like the Uber driver story that you mentioned. He just had to reframe the way he was relating to kind of where he wanted to be, and if you do that, sometimes, you’re already there, right?
David: Yeah. The other thing, Alex, too is I don’t think all the business things that we look at, we teach messaging, blue ocean market positioning, we teach funnels, we teach speaking from stage, selling from stage, we teach presentations, we teach enrollment, we teach all this stuff, but if you’re carrying so much inside of you that isn’t yours, it’s the stuff that you’ve just adopted and the misperceptions that are the resistance that’s covering up the fully expressive you from emerging, how can your messaging be what’s really resonant? How can you show up powerfully in an enrollment conversation? How can you be even designing offer structures in your business or have a vision for your business that’s truly authentic? You can’t. And so, a lot of times, I had one of my clients say, “Hey, I wanna get on more stages, how do I do it?” I’m like, well, we got to work on you, right? I can give you all the strategies in the world for how to go speak more but if you’ve got unconscious fears about it, you’re going to sabotage the process. And so these two pieces really go hand in hand. If I had to put one over the other, I’d say if we help someone have a vision and be non-resistant, they’ll figure out the strategies, or they’ll somehow implement something that you and I would look at and go, “How the hell did that thing work?” and it’s like, well, they just had enough energy moving forward and no non-resistance that it worked out but you could give someone the perfect business plan but if there’s enough resistance there, no matter what they do, they can’t produce the results. So the two go together but I really think the first principle or first priority is your mindset and then you build the business strategies on top of it.
1; I agree. I experienced something similar the other day. I’ve been playing tennis for a long time and I’m a pretty decent player but it’s been a long time since I went back to the basics and I’ve been jacking my wrists lately for the last couple years so I got this guy that’s really good, used to be a professional tennis player, and we went back to the basics. I felt like I was six years old kind of relearning all these and after two very painful hours of I just want to play, I’m there and the only thing I want to do is play and just hit the ball like I usually do, because it feels good and I’m pretty good, and it was painful just to relearn and then he was looking at my form and after about two hours, I unlocked this new level of play and without jacking my wrists, because once you go back to understanding form and the foundation —
David: That’s a great way to put it.
Alex: — then you can actually then go back and speed up and it was so powerful. I was like, wow, this really is something I want to bring back to all of the things that I do, because I just want to go and smack the ball and it’s so fun but there’s all this friction that comes from doing it without kind of spending some time realigning, like why is my wrist hurting? It shouldn’t be hurting.
David: What a beautiful metaphor.
Alex: Honestly, it was so powerful because I play tennis a lot and I felt like I was like a five-year-old again. And, sometimes, I think feeling five is not a bad thing and I think a lot of our conversation today takes me back to that. It’s like be vulnerable, put yourself in like — and there were people watching and I was like, “Shit, I rather than watch me just do these great moves,” but those moves are hurting my wrists so it’s like don’t be ashamed of — people probably thought I’d never played tennis and I’m this 39-year-old guy that — well, maybe they think I’m 33 years old. I’m this guy in my 30s learning how to play tennis. I felt so much shame. There’s nothing wrong with that but I was like, “No, I’m really good.” All those feelings, a lot of our conversation today takes me back to that and it’s a nice analogy for a lot of the conversation we had today.
David: I love it.
Alex: You play tennis, David?
David: I played in high school and so I get it and it’s that idea of you got to unlearn first and then build better.
Alex: Totally.
David: But there’s hesitancy to that process because, number one, it’s not comfortable, and, number two, it’s uncertainty. We’ll do everything we can to avoid uncertainty but everything that you just talked about was like, yeah, man, that’s what it feels like to be a business owner when you got these underlying resistances that you haven’t addressed, you’re just banging the ball around and you can’t really figure out what’s going on.
Alex: Another thing I love about Ken Wilber’s work is looking at the quadrant of development and looking at the lines and there’s so many different lines of development. So you may be hyper-developed and let’s say we’re talking about the kinesthetic line of development, like movement, you may be a great athlete, but maybe your moral line of development is very underdeveloped so you’re going to be a really great athlete that has very low morals so there’s probably going to be a lot of broken hearts around that guy. So there’s all this mapping that you can do when you look at all these different lines and everyone has their own line and I think, sometimes, when you’re really good at something, by default, and we ascribe this to other people too, we ascribe this kind of almost like super highly developed person that is developed across all quadrants, all lines, all levels, all types, and the reality is we may be good at something but we may not be good at something else. But our society is not wired like that. You assume Elon Musk is super hyper-developed in all lines and then you look at one of his tweets and it’s like how can someone that is so good at certain things be so childish? And I think mapping those out is super powerful. So, yeah, it’s one of the things that I really like about development. It gives you the pieces of the puzzle you need to kind of figure out yourself and those around you. And as an entrepreneur, you’re trying to understand how to go through that journey but also how to serve others because, ultimately, that’s how you make money, right?
David: Yeah, and you’re speaking into a really important piece of it, which is go easy on yourself. We’re all different. We’re all on a different journey. We’re in your process. The easier you can be on yourself, the easier all this stuff unwinds.
Alex: And others.
David: Yeah.
Alex: Right? Have empathy because, sometimes, we don’t have empathy for ourselves. I do think we are a reflection — the way we treat ourselves is how we ultimately treat others and I think you’re tapping into that beautifully. Well, David, thank you so much for a great conversation. Time flew by. I’m sure our listeners are really going to enjoy the conversation so let’s keep our dialogue going. I know you have a full Coaching.com summit session coming up in a few months so thank you and looking forward to staying connected.
David: Likewise. Thanks, Alex.