Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - Wanna Grow Your Income? Watch Your Dog - 070

Episode Date: October 24, 2018

Did you know some of the best business lessons...are lessons you can learn from your dog? In this episode, Bedros Keuilian and Craig Ballantyne discuss how dogs exemplify the discipline we often lack as entrepreneurs. Watch or listen now to learn why you either develop your purpose or struggle with anxiety. “The thing is (that) people are trying to find their purpose as though it’s lost. It’s not lost, you just have to develop your purpose.” - Bedros Keuilian Here’s what you’ll discover: 1:07 - How German Shepherds prove that you need purpose behind your life 5:25 - How to become a super showman and bring the energy on demand 8:01 - Why most entrepreneurs lack the ability to focus—and what you can do about it 9:57 - The power and freedom of being open-minded 13:41 - How repetition will turn you into an insanely efficient entrepreneur “Speak to somebody with love...(and your) message is gonna connect on a higher level.” - Craig Ballantyne Follow us on Instagram: @bedroskeuilian / @realcraigballantyne Buy Man Up and get Bedros’s High Performance Leadership Course for FREE: https://manup.com/ Make sure to review us on iTunes: http://bit.ly/theempireshow

We think that the first time I post something on Instagram, there's going to be a million followers. And then we get depressed when, gosh, you know, just my mom and my sister like my stuff. Well, guess what? Post something else and something else. And soon, through repetition, you find your voice, you find your rhythm, you find what you're good at, and people start finding you. Hey, friends, Bedros Kulian here with my friend Craig Ballantine. Welcome to another episode of the Empire Podcast Show. And this is the podcast that helps you grow your empire, make a massive amount of money and a massive amount of impact.

on the causes that are near and dear to you. And today, today's episode is a really special one, and it's about what we learn from our dogs that apply to your business and to your entrepreneurial life. And Craig, I want to first start off by saying my condolences, buddy, I did hear about the passing of your dog

and Bali's been around for a long time. He was 12 and a half. 12 and a half. 12 and a half. Good old pooch. Taught me a lot and taught the world a lot. He used to write a lot of emails to the world. So he actually made more money than he cost me,

which is funny, because I would write all these fitness emails back in the day from Bally the Dog. I remember that. Balli's three training tips of the day. And when he did pass away, I got so many Instagram messages from people like, oh, I loved reading those emails. I'm like, oh, I need to go back and, like, you know, revisit those. But he did, you know, Natalie made me money because it cost me a lot.

He also taught me a lot. But Cookie, your dog, is teaching you a lot. And I love, you have this story about dogs and their purpose. And I think that is so important for every entrepreneur to have his friends. Yeah, so let me tell you a little story. So the way I got Cookie, by the way, Cookie is a 95-pound, half-mastiff, half-German Shepherd, who is all love. And she's a big girl and she thinks she's a lap dog, and she's a sweet dog. And so when we got Cookie, it's because we saw that a friend in San Francisco had posted a picture of Cookie, who at the time was eight months old. She's now two and a half years

old. Cookie was eight months old, still a big dog, and said, hey, there's someone here in town who has this big dog, part Mastiff, part German Shepherd, and it's too big for their family, and they want to get rid of them. And for some reason, I fell in love with Cookie in the picture, and I said, hey, I'm going to fly out there with my son and see Cookie, and then if, you know, she seems like a decent dog, we're going to drive back. And that's exactly what happened. But when we got the dog, Cookie being a big dog, even back then about 65, 70 pounds, I mean, I put her on a leash, man, and she would just start pulling. And so we got her into dog obedience classes.

And this sweet old lady who ran the dog obedience class goes, hey, look, I need you to know something about your dog who is 50% German shepherd. And all shepherds, whether they're Australian shepherds, German shepherds, it doesn't matter. All shepherd dogs must have a purpose, she said, otherwise they will fall into anxiety and depression. Wow. And when a dog falls into anxiety and depression because they don't have a purpose, they start

kind of creating a purpose for themselves and they start digging a hole right and so these dogs will start digging a hole everywhere or they're going to get just super depressed and i said all right well so what kind of purpose you know they need to shepherd the kids around or they need to play fetch three four times a day i said don't worry i've got a big backyard i've got two great kids like the family and i will take care of this dog got it you just make sure that she doesn't jerk my daughter around right so anyway it and i realized very quickly as humans as entrepreneurs as just people walking on this planet. We need purpose.

Like, I believe that it's in our DNA to have purpose and some sense of significance. And that's what we're all looking for. Like, I need to know what my purpose is. The thing is, people are trying to find their purpose as though it's lost. Sure. It's not lost.

You just have to develop your purpose. And I was talking to someone yesterday. He's actually a professional MMA fighter who's retired now. Wow. And he goes, hey, man, I thought I'd found my purpose. And now that I'm retired, I don't know what to do. And I said, listen, buddy, that wasn't your only purpose. Like, if you decide to go be an auto mechanic right now,

as long as you put yourself in the top 5% of the industry, that will become, you will develop that as your purpose. If you decide to be a fry cook and be the best at it, you decide to be an electrician and be the best at it. You will find your purpose and the impact you're supposed to make doing that thing. Because as humans, we're pretty versatile. You know, we can be trained to do anything. Where we forget to find our purpose,

or when we forget to find our purpose, or develop our purpose, we begin to fall into depression and anxiety as well. Hey, can I interrupt you there for a second? You can. I noticed this last year. So as a coach, my thing is solving other people's problems. And there was a time either early this year or late last year when it was like three days in a row, nobody had emailed me for advice.

And I was like, why am I so depressed right now? I'm not depressed, but, you know, upset, you know, having a bad day. And I was like, I don't feel like I'm adding any value. And then if people aren't coming to me, that means they don't see me as that value at her. I'm like, man, I got to go and do something. Fortunately, it was, you know, it was a blip on the radar and all of a sudden I was getting some, you know, some problems that I could solve. But I've felt that. And I don't ever want to feel that again.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, that's your purpose in life. You were a great coach. You have these, you've been gifted with outside eyes to look into someone else's life and their problems and find the straight line to the results that they want. And so when there's an absence of that, you begin to go, again, back to the job. German Shepherd, stir crazy, you fall into a bit of a depression, even anxiety might hit. And the same for me. I love building businesses and I love helping out our franchisees worldwide.

And when I don't hear from them or when I don't hear from them often enough, I begin to get little funky and depressed and anxious and I start to get stir crazy. We are wired to have purpose and all we have to do is develop that purpose. That's an important thing. Now, there's something that you've learned from your doggy that I think is really cool. Why don't you tell our friends about it? Yeah. So my dog was Chocolate Lab, right?

And Chocolate Labs, they're the most loving, loving kind of dog that you can get. That's why everybody has a Lab. So the most popular dog. And so even from when he was a puppy to when he was older, he would go into any room. And he'd go in there and his tail would wag like crazy to be knocking things off the ground. But he would just raise the energy of the room. And, you know, he could have gone into a hospital or he could have gone into a family event. And, you know, if everybody's just kind of moping around or down or just calm, he elevated the energy in the room.

I realized, and I realized this through you and our old friend Steve Hockman that you started a FitBody Boot Camp with, that you need to bring the energy. Whether you're a personal trainer, you need to bring the energy. You need to bring that showmanship to life. When I'm on stage, I need to bring the energy. And I look back at my YouTube videos from 2007. Some of them have been watched two million times. And I talk like a monotic robot and they're really bad.

And, you know, it's just like that. And I watched them with almost a shame and embarrassment because I did watch them back then. And I was, oh my goodness, but I put outside eyes in my videos. And I said, listen, my performance needs to improve. What did I do? I went and watched the best motivational speakers in our industry. I went and watched pastors. I went and watched comics.

I watched all these people to learn how does a pro communicate? You know, how do these people who are outliers who put 10,000, 40,000 hours into their business, into their gift? How do they communicate? And so I started incorporating that and taking that from my dog, you know, how can I be that energetic person? Because you can't be around a high energy person and be mad at them for too long. Like we have a good friend, Dan Long. Yeah, Dan Long. He is high energy.

Kill mode, baby. Kill mode. All the time. And man. All day, baby. All day, you know. And even if you're around, I'm like, man, can you just like tone it down a bit? You can't get mad at him.

You have this smile on your face because he's bringing that energy. He's making you feel good. And that's what my puppy dog did for me. And it really changed me. Because, you know, like, I guess I would have, like, a melancholy sort of disposition. Like, I'm very low-key and, you know, just don't say much. And the dog, you know, changed that mindset for me. It's like, okay, I got to put a little bally into my day here.

But you know what? That's such a good observation, dude, because, again, you are introverted. You are melancholy. You are low-key. But you know you have a great message and you want to impact 100 million lives with it. Yeah. For that to happen, you have to wrap that melancholy. and introverted ways with energy.

Energy and love and excitement. That's the only way to deliver it. Otherwise, people are just going to bypass you, right? Right, absolutely. And so one thing I learned from my dog, another thing I learned from my dog, Cookie, is focus. And really, all dogs, right? Locked on. I mean, she will lock on to anything.

Every single night while I'm watching my episode of billions or ballers, I'll watch one episode, hit the hot tub, go to bed. She brings a little tennis ball and she puts it right on the footstead in front of me. I've seen this look. Yeah, yeah, she doesn't even look at me. She puts the ball on the footstool and she just stares at the ball and she's focused. I mean, our house could be on fire. She's focused on the ball until I pick it up and throw it towards the TV and she catches

it in mid-flight, brings it back. And we have to do that several times before she just lays down and relaxes. So one, she has a purpose as part of her purpose. And two, she's relentlessly focused on the thing that matters to her the most. What I like about that is, as a human, God, I hate to say this. we're fucking dumber than animals. We're dumber than animals, and here's why. We can be.

Here there's a dog who's focused on the thing she wants most, this tennis ball and she's just staring at it. In fact, I'll look at her and I go, do you want the ball? And she'll sit down, even lower. Like, okay, if I do this thing, can I get the ball? Can I get the outcome? Just focused on the outcome. Yet as humans, we start joking about it.

Oh, yeah, squirrel. Oh, shiny object. Oh, the idea fairy came. Yeah. Listen, if you want something in your life, you want it bad enough, can you focus, like a dog focuses on a doggone ball? If you can't, how are you ever going to get it? If a dog can focus, you should be able to focus. And I think it's a very critical piece that's missing today, not only for entrepreneurs who are trying to build empires, for parents who can't focus on their

kids, right, on their relationships, on people who can't focus on their health, on kids who can't focus on anything, any kind of schoolwork, because they've been taught through parents who lack focus and are screen sucking instead of focusing on their children. And so to me, focus is a big thing that I've learned from my dog, and I think it could be applied in life and a business. Oh, absolutely. It's a game changer. I mean, focus in the gym, focus and focus and work, everything. So one of the other things that my dog taught me was to be open-minded. So when I was younger back in college, I was an exercise physiologist, and it actually served me to be skeptical, cynical, you know, to look at these new ideas and, you know, look at somebody's

research study and kind of tear it apart. Okay, that served me then, but then going forward in life. It's actually a terrible skill to have to not be open-minded, to judge people in advance. And so the thing about a dog, you know, most dogs, except those little yappy dogs, you know, most dogs, man, they cannot just, they're just open-minded, they'll go up and, you know, they're sniffing every crotch that they can and, you know, licking everybody and just wagging their tail and they're open to everyone. You know, they're open to everyone. They have such great energy. And you can't have a dog and go to a dog park and really hang back too much. Eventually, you have to pull your dog off, another dog that is humping.

You have to have a lot of interaction there. And so it just made me more open-minded. And from there, that elevated confidence. And from that, it elevated confidence in business and in speaking and in going to events and just being open to conversations, deep and difficult conversations, emotional conversations that I always used to run from. And so having the dog, man, having the dog, if you lacked some social skills, having a dog is really, really great because it forces you.

you into so many more communications. I mean, if you walk your dog in a big city like I did when he was a puppy, man, you interact probably with 12, 15 people every walk and like all types of life, too. You know, I got the old people who just want to talk to somebody. You got people who love dogs. I remember this Portuguese builder, like a lot of construction in Toronto, a lot of Portuguese and Italian guys work in that industry. Walking the dog real early one morning, he's going to work, and I'm walking by and he goes, listen, when you give the dog a treat, you got to stick it in your mouth or spin on it and give some of your saliva to put into his mouth. And I'm like, really? Like, like, you know, so that he, you know, what was his logic? Like, so it is, it's more attached to you.

You know, and I'm like, okay. You know, I, I didn't do it, but I thought, you know, this, here's this weird conversation. You have that weird conversation. You meet all these guys, all these characters, and it makes you more open. And the more open you are, that helps you become a better leader, because in this day and age, we have very diverse workforces. We have the millennials, we have the boomers. We have every ethnicity, and it's great. But you have to be an open-minded person to manage that. I mean, here at FitBody Boot Camp, you have everybody from all over the place, and it's a fantastic workplace.

It really, really is. And so that is one of the big lessons that I've learned from my dog. And he was open-minded every day, and he was repetitive at it. And that's another one of the messages that you got from Cookie. And part of being open-mindedness is really about being curious, right? I mean, that's the thing that dogs have is they're curious. And if we're closed-minded, we're not curious about things. And true, maybe a dog's curious and they start smelling another dog's poop or their ass or their crotch.

We don't necessarily as humans need to go around doing that. But you ought to be more curious, which then forces you to become more open-minded about things. And I recently finished reading a book, and I forget the author's name, but the title is called Mindset. And it's by a female author. Great book. And open-mindedness is being growth-minded. And closed-mindedness is being fixed-minded. So is that Carol Dweck?

Yes, Carol Dweck. Exactly. And so really what you're talking about is the more open-minded you get, the more growth-minded you're willing to be, right? Holy cow. And again, going back to if you're building an entrepreneur, you're an entrepreneur, you're building an empire. Let me guess. If you're fixed-minded, you're going to go, the way we market is the way we're always going to market and you're going to die. If you're open-minded, which means you're growth-minded, you're going to say the way we market now needs to evolve as society, technology, economy, and people evolve, right? Absolutely. And that's very important. That's a great lesson. And so another lesson I got from my dog, is repetition. And this goes back to what you were saying earlier. You know, you said, hey, look, I wasn't the most confident in the greatest speaker. I was monotone from stage and in front of the camera. But then what did you do? You started getting in repetition. And I saw you because I've known you for almost a decade now. One, you just kept getting yourself in front of the camera and on stages more. That's repetition. And then through repetition, you were listening to pastors and other thought leaders and speakers, motivational speakers to sales speakers on stage

and really writing on their repetition as well until we started to model their patterns. Repetition is key, and what I learned from Cookie is, listen, I throw the ball over the fence and she goes into the grassy field to get it, and each time we do that, I see her getting faster, more efficient, more precise.

Yeah. Well, the same thing happens to us. We think that the first time I post something on Instagram there was going to be a million followers, and then we get depressed when, gosh, you know, just my mom and my sister like my stuff. Well, guess what? Post something else,

And soon through repetition, you find your voice, you find your rhythm, you find what you're good at, and people start finding you and actually reposting your stuff and you build a following and you turn that following into dollars. You know, it's funny that you use that. Your mom liked it. You know, last week we had Mike Geary, a guy who runs almost a nine-figure company in at our Empire Mastermind. And at one point in his life, he was a struggling hydrogeologist. I always call him an engineer because it's probably easier to understand. But he would work nine to five. Then he'd go be a personal trainer for a bit.

And then he'd try and sell his e-book, Truth About Abs, on the Internet. And he didn't have any success for months. And then one day he woke up to that sale. And that's that tipping point moment as an online entrepreneur. when you wake up and have made money overnight. And he went and he looked like, oh my goodness, who bought? And it was his mom's friend. So we will get those people.

But then he was like, he had that moment of if I keep doing this, I'll probably get more people to buy. And he did repetition, repetition. He learned so much. He went through the feedback loop. I call it the virtuous cycle of getting feedback, trying something new, getting feedback, trying something new. And that's how you get better through that repetition.

That's powerful. So what else have you learned from your dog? Oh, it's all about love. It's all about love. So my dog was about 75 pounds. I think he was 74 pounds of heart. and one pound of fur, well, and then 10 pounds of stinky breath. But, you know, he was just absolutely the most loving guy. And he just, you know, it's a combination of the open-mindedness and the energy to go and love more people. And I just, I thought, you know, okay, he loves our family. He loves every single stranger he meets.

I mean, I don't think he ever met a person he didn't love. He met a lot of cats he didn't love. But other than that, you know, he loved. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to go be more loving person to, first of all, my friends. And then that was easy and a more loving person to my customers. And that was a huge tipping point. So back in the fitness industry, when I was selling all the time, there was almost like this adversarial thing.

You know, people couldn't download. And you were selling like a thousand programs a day. There's going to be those 10 people that couldn't download. And that's all I focused on instead of the 990 people who loved me back for what I was giving. And then I realized, you know what? The dog is teaching me here to go and do stuff with love. So now I go and create all my messages with love. All my Instagram videos.

I teach my clients. every message you say with love. Because a lot of people, they're very scared by that camera, right? And so they get in front of the camera, and they're nervous, they're angry, they don't smile. And I teach them, hey, you've got to step back, you got to slow down. As you said, you've got to have that James Bond-Haafcock smile as you talk to the camera, right? That was so good. I know, I know.

It's a little bit of Matthew McConaughey, right? A lot cooler if you did. And so, you know, you slow down, you have that message, and you speak to somebody with love. You speak to somebody with love, and it's like, now my message is going to connect on a higher love. I had a friend, an old friend last week who's known me since 2002, Chris Lopez, kettlebell expert. He sent me a message and he said, I don't know what the shift has been in your videos recently, but I feel like you are talking to me, man. You are kicking my butt with these videos.

And it's because I'm saying them with love. Every single video I'm saying it's a, you know, now 25,000 people on Instagram, but I'm talking to one person at a time, just like as I am when I'm doing this podcast. So listen, guys and gals, those are the six lessons that Craig and I have learned from our dogs that we can apply to life and, of course, to our empires. And listen, if you have a dog, you have a cat, you have any kind of animal, they will show you feelings, they will show you actions. And maybe you can be growth-minded, open-minded, and actually study them

and see how you can use the traits and abilities that they have in your life, in your business, to make a bigger impact and, of course, to generate more income. Thanks for watching and listening. We'll see you on the next episode. Thank you so much for joining us for another amazing episode of the Empire podcast. Now, the greatest compliment that you can give to us is liking, loving, and sharing this episode with all of your friends. So please go to iTunes and give us a five-star rating and then share it online and social media with everyone that you know. And make sure to tag us because we love hearing from Empire listeners.

And if you own a business that's doing half a million dollars or more in annual revenues and you know it's got massive potential. And you like myself and Craig Ballantine to help you scale it by 5x, 10x, and 20x in the shortest amount of time possible, then you might be a great candidate for the Empire Mastermind Program that we have. To learn more about the Empire Mastermind Program, go to bedroskulian.com forward slash empire.