Change Your Brain Every Day - How To Make Your Brain Your Competitive Advantage at Work - Pt. 2 with Dan Sullivan

Episode Date: July 17, 2018

When it comes to success in the workplace, focus is the name of the game. In the second part of a series with Strategic Coach Program’s Dan Sullivan, he speaks with Dr. Daniel Amen about the importance of focus, not just in terms of moment to moment attention, but also in choosing to target the areas in which you have the most expertise.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Welcome back. We're here with my friend, business coach, strategic coach, Dan Sullivan, who is the coach to people like Joe Polish and Peter Diamantis and so many great entrepreneurs. And Dan and I met after he came to the Amen Clinics. We scanned his brain.

I told him he had a shitty brain. I actually don't remember that phrase, but Dan remembers that phrase. And so with a bad brain, you can do amazing things, but it's so much easier if you get it right, if you work on optimizing your brain. So in the last podcast, you asked me some of the things we've learned. And yes, you know, after almost 140,000 scans, I look at them and I immediately see what works too hard, what's not working hard enough. Yesterday, I got to see a very famous person on TV, and he gave me permission to use his name, but I won't right now, I will. And his brain was so bad when I first saw it, but just doing what we asked him to do, three months later, it's so much better. And that's the hope.

You're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. And my goal is to get people to love and care for their brains. But I wanna know what's different. What do other people notice about working with you, both in your personal relationships and at Strategic Coach? Yeah, I would say to sum it up, the extent and quality of my teamwork with other

people has easily gone 10 times. And that would be team members who are, we call all of our staff at strategic coach, they're members of teams. And the whole, you know know the whole central aspect is where people we have a central concept which is called unique ability that you're doing these this amount of activity but you're actually only great in a much smaller circle so your growth and coach is to focus more and more time where you're great and then we'll find other people to do the things that you're not so great at you know so it fits in I mean philosophically we're very much in alignment before I met you we you know the alignment approach technology is you know I mean the teamwork is really big the other thing is that I'm thinking longer. You know, in other words, now I'm,

I just turned 74 last week. And, you know, my, my framework ahead is, well, I have a project where I write a new book every quarter, and I'm going to do it for 100 quarters. Okay. And they're small books. They're not, you know, I mean, they're, they're books you can read in an hour and they're single topic books, but I feel very comfortable in making that commitment, which I've made very publicly for the next quarter. When you come in to your workshop, there'll be a brand new book. I'll have a brand new book for you. And so I'm thinking much longer, but the other thing is that I'm just conscious that I'm really, really good at certain things. And the things that I'm not really good at, I really shouldn't be bothering other people's time with not valuable activities for them that isn't going to move forward. And then on the client side, I think the other thing, my ability just to sit and listen to people and then ask them great questions about how they're thinking about something. And they'll

ask me a question and I'll say, well, I'd like to ask you something about your question. And then I'll ask a question which has a bigger scope to it. And they actually discover their own answer that they question me simply by my, you know, asking the question. I remember at the Genius Network, you explain what was going on, you know, with regard to your own future. And I drew you a diagram and I said, well, this is where you are right now, but you might be here later on.

And so I'm very graphically, so I see thoughts in terms of graphics, and I always have. I see diagrams. When people are talking to me, I see a diagram, and I can actually talk to them about the diagram. You know, I can draw the diagram out for them, and I can talk. And that's gotten probably supercharged since I went through the aiming clinic my ability to do these diagrams and listen to people and actually feed back to them what I'm seeing and then I'm asking questions about the diagram that I'm drawing so there's so much in here so your productivity is

better your insight into yourself is better your ability to say no so that you focus on what you're really good at is better. I love that. And what I'd really love for you to take a few minutes and teach people more about your concept of are you doing the right things and are you getting other people to do the things that you are not good at? Could you talk about that for a second? Yeah. Well, it's, yeah, I have to tell you, I had an experience once where I was a consultant on a project and it was to actually talk about all the different ways that society could be improved to help people who are disabled and handicapped and um you know i'm american but i uh i split i have um you know i have two passports so this was in canada and i want went across canada for about three months

and i was interviewing uh disabled people and um with the exception of autistics, you could actually, you know, there were extreme autistics and you really couldn't interview them. And, you know, so you would have to interview their parents. But let's say there were 40 and I did 39. When you read the transcripts of the interviews, you couldn't tell that there was anything wrong with them. You know, they, and I had one woman who said, she says, you know, I'm very, very slow. She said, I want to tell you, Mr. Sullivan, I'm very, very slow. So you're going to ask me a question. And it may take me five to 10 times longer to answer the question, but I'll give you a good answer. And so it was, you know, the interview, I had to change tapes because in those days there were tapes and everything.

And when we got the transcript back, she was completely lucid. And she says, my biggest problem is the world won't wait for me. Wow. And so I was thinking about this. And I said, you know, these are visibly disabled people. These are visibly handicapped people. And you can tell when you interact with them, they're missing a limb or they've got some sort of paralysis. So I was coming back on the plane and I said, but I'm disabled in a lot

of areas. I said, you know, I'm good in certain areas, but anytime I go outside my circle, it's frustrating. I have conflict. You know, I, you know, I don't interact with people. I have personality problems. But once I, when I'm in circle, and I've got three things that I do. I'm a good coach, and I can create brand new concepts almost at will. I can listen to a conversation, create a concept out of it that other people find meaningful. And the other thing is I'm good front stage. I have eight podcast series. I do videos. And, you know, I really like the front stage. And that's my value in the company. But outside that, that's 95% of my time in the year.

You know, the other 5% are just, you know, it's just unscheduled time. But the scheduled time, I just do that. So, but I, we do this for all of our teams. So everybody, and we use Kathy Colby, you probably know Kathy Colby with her Colby profile, which profiles how you take action to get results. So the way I take action to get results is I take action and then I do the research in motion. Some people have to do a lot of research before they'll go into action, but doing research before a decision or research before an action is wasted time for me. You take action and then you figure out real quick whether you've done the

right thing or not so that's the research so what we show the entrepreneurs and this is prior to them actually coming to grips with add or thing we simply say you're you're continually putting yourself in zones where you're um you're sabotaging yourself And what we want you to do is just identify, and we have a whole process that we take people through to identify where they always feel confident, where they always produce good results. And we say, quarter by quarter, the amount of time you're spending in the bad zone is going to be reduced. The amount of power that you're exerting just to the unique ability zone is, is going to increase, but then you're going to see as you understand your own unique ability,

you're going to start seeing other people's unique abilities and you can do teamwork with them. And so you're only going to ask them to do what they're great at and you're only good doing great. And then you're going to do teamwork. And I said, you know, as far as I can see, this is how the world works. It's unique ability, teaming up with unique ability. Do you have a story about how you helped someone do that and it transformed their life? Well, Joe, I mean, I've been working with Joe for 20 years and I say I said to Joe, anytime you're not front stage, you're doing harm to the world.

So you're talking about our friend Joe Polish, who is the founder of Genius Network. backstage and how are we going to do this and how are we going to do this? And I said, I said, Joe, you being a backstage expert is like a rice farmer in Nepal telling a Sherpa how to get to the top of Mount Everest. And I said, you have no comprehension how organizations work. You have no comprehension how you can make things recur, set up systems. I said, it's not your thing, but your ability just to create front stage realities and create things. I said, it's unsurpassed. Your ability to connect with strangers. And I said, I've not seen it's equal in my entire life with 18,000 entrepreneurs. I've not seen the equal of you as a connector. And he's just unfailingly gracious. He's generous, you know, I mean, and everything else. But I said, you can't organize your life where you

keep putting yourself in a minefield. You know, you've got to get into this. So when I came across your videos and I came across your books, I said, well, this is the scientific side of what I've kind of developed as a craft. And that's why it was so valuable to me is that you have the scientific measurements which verify why people get into trouble when they're not in their unique abilities. So that you've been extraordinarily valuable to us. Thank you. When we come back, I would love, Dan, for you to talk to us about what are the big four or five lessons you've learned from coaching all these people for a long time that our listeners can put in their lives starting right away.

You can learn more about Dan's work at strategiccoach.com. And Dan has a podcast and lots of videos. He's just an amazing mentor. Stay with us. Use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or on our supplements at brainmdhealth.com.

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