Change Your Brain Every Day - Why Every Entrepreneur Needs To Optimize Their Brain - Pt. 1 with Dan Sullivan

Episode Date: July 16, 2018

When Dan Sullivan, founder of the Strategic Coach Program, decided to come to Amen Clinics to learn about how distractibility affects the brain, what he discovered there changed his life. In the first part of a series on entrepreneurs and brain optimization, Dr. Daniel Amen talks with Dan about ADD, and what to do when it affects your learning process.

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, everybody. I am so excited for this podcast because I get to interview one of my friends and mentors and someone I've known for a number of years. Dan Sullivan is the co-founder and creator of the Strategic Coach Program. Since its inception in 1989, this lifetime focusing program has helped over 18,000 accomplished

entrepreneurs to reach new heights of success and happiness. has helped over 18,000 accomplished entrepreneurs to reach new heights of success and happiness. Actually, he's the coach to many of my friends, many of my most successful friends. He's a visionary, an innovator, gifted conceptual thinker. Dan Sullivan has over 40 years of experience. He's a highly regarded speaker, consultant, strategic planner, and coach to entrepreneurial individuals and groups. So why would I have him on the brain

warrior's way? People completely forget about the brain at work. And it was, what, seven or eight years ago, Dan, that you came to the clinic? It'll be eight years in November. So I was 66, and I came to the Newport, as it was then, the Newport office, Newport Beach, and went through, you know, I did the questionnaire, which, you know, I love the 200 question questionnaire online and then came in for the three days. And I so that it was a great discovery for me. I didn't go there to have a discovery for myself, but I came away with a discovery for myself, which has been phenomenal since I, you know, followed the Amen Clinic path. So why did you come?

Well, I have a lot of clients and I'm very conscious that if I have, you know, at any given time, we're in the 2,500 to 3,000 range of entrepreneurs. And these are all successful entrepreneurs. So we catch them when they've kind of achieved what they originally thought they were going to achieve. And now they're they want to jump to the next level. And I was conscious that one of the big issues that a lot of them had was the distractibility, which reading up on a little was, you know, we came across your books, we came across your videos. And I said, you know, I bet if I went to the Amen Clinic, I would get a much bigger insight about some of the daily burdens and, you know, that people carry inside their head that nobody

really knows about. And sometimes it's so bad that people are aware outside themselves. So I came actually to go through the testing so I would be in a position to advise other people. And what did you find? I mean, I know what we found, but what was the epiphany for you? Well, it was really interesting because I kind of breezed through the test and the image that came across, according to my consultant at the end of the three days, she said, you know, there's a real, real wide gap between who you seem to be answering the questionnaire and what our tests have found over the last three days. She said, you seem, your life is simple. It seems very, you know, kind of tranquil. It's kind of organized, lots of structure to it. You don't seem to have a lot of, you know, upsets.

But the tests tell me that there's a circus going on inside. So what gives? What gives? How do you explain this radical difference. And so just briefly for a coach, it's that we get people to think about their thinking. And we've created a whole series of tools, which are kind of question driven, they're open ended questions where they have to do a time shift, where they're the way they are now. And they compare themselves to where they were in the past and then they discover you know that some things have gotten better and some things have gotten

worse and that's their knowledge and we've simply asked them to go inside their you know their own thinking their own experience and then that we ask and put together a plan of things they've discovered through their thinking. Now they're going to make a shift over the next 90 days. And our main concept is called who, not how, which is that you're tempted when you see something bigger and better to do the how to get there. But you're no good at that. And all of your frustrations is getting involved in activities that you're not any good at. And who you have to do is you constantly have to identify who's.

And so just to make a whole point, I could talk to people about ADD and what I've discovered, or I can just send them to the Amen Clinic. So it's a who that does the how rather than me doing it. So just to bring it back to the A.M.N. Clinic, and I think I can count 25 or 26 that I know personally and just others that I've talked about. And it was actually a client who actually recommended the A.M.N. Clinic that he had been there. So what happened, the consultant, I'll just sum this up very quickly. She asked me what I do. And she said, well, I don't know who else you designed all these thinking tools, but I know the main person that you't your life. Your life is actually chaos. And you've figured out a means to kind of balance yourself.

And then you found out that it was valuable to other people. And so, you know, that was a great, great. I've never considered myself ADD. But your scan was very ADD. And so when we treated it, you know, with lifestyle interventions, but also medicine, what was the difference? Yeah, well, the big thing was getting off sugar. I mean, because I didn't realize how unbalancing sugar was. So between the time I did the scan, I didn't see you when I came in. Then I saw you at Genius Network where you pulled up this with, you know, you asked me if, you know, you could pull up the scan.

You looked at it. And I'm going to say this for the record so that it's out there. And your response said, you know, I've heard you're really smart, but I don't know how you could be with such a shitty brain. I got the words exactly. And I didn't consider it an insult, you know, I mean, because I'd seen the scans and I grew up on a farm, took a lot of knocks. I was a real roughhouser as a kid. I was in lots of fights and I played football. And one game, I got knocked out in the first quarter, and they put me back in the fourth quarter, and I got knocked out on the first play. But the next week, I was back in, you know, so the protocols were a bit different in

those days. And, and, you know, you could see where the there was like lights out. It was like a part of the city that had lost its power. And I suspect it was on the opposite side where I got hit. But you could just see there was a non-functioning part of my brain. And it was overall, it was like, you know, smog. There was no brightness to it. And then a year later, when we came back, and the other thing is that I had started taking the consultant who I met with at the end of my clinic visit, she said, look, she said, I don't know if you want to do this or not, but you may find a pharmaceutical helpful. And here's the prescription. And so I didn't do it for three months because I didn't know whether I wanted to.

Did I need it? You know, I got, you know, I'm a self-therapy guy. And so before a workshop, it was Adderall, you know, it was very low dosage. It was five megs. And I said, you know, I'm just going to try it out. And I took it and it didn't act immediately. So it was about five minutes before the workshop, and I went in.

And literally, I don't know who's told you this, but it was like a bang, and everything went quiet. And for the first time in my life, my whole life had been about noise. You know, inside my brain was not and for seven and a half years I've had quiet first time in my life I've had quiet and the other thing is things slowed down and I could stay on track I could stay on schedule and I've had the quite extraordinarily the most productive creative seven and a half years of my life. And it shows. I mean, everybody around me and my team notices that my our clients stay a long time.

I've got I've got 40 people who have been in the program for more than 20 years on a continual basis. So they notice. I mean, they notice changes and everything else. So I said, if that can happen, you know, with the knowledge that you gave me, and if it can happen with the lifestyle change that I did, and a little bit of a pharmaceutical help, you know, this is really something that I want to make available to our strategic coach clients, because there's a lot of them, I would say 50% that are affected in some way. And I know all the different types of ADD. It's not one thing. It's a whole, you know, there's many dimensions to this. There's many, a lot of it's environmental. A lot of it is.

So it's super interesting, though, that that one you didn't know you're highly successful you're coaching highly successful people you developed great systems and your brain is nowhere near optimized it's nowhere near healthy um which is why I use the term I did. And when we gave you a stimulant, so Adderall is a stimulant, it actually quieted things down for you so you could better use the great brain you have. And so when the brain is sleepy, a lot of people don't know, especially the front part of the brain, its job is to settle things down. It's the brain's break.

We call it the executive part of the brain. And when it doesn't work hard enough, when it's low in blood flow, it's like there's chaos inside your mind. And it's not a choice. It's not like you ever wake up and go, well, I want chaos in my head or I want noise in my life. It's not a choice. choice and just balancing your brain can make a huge positive long term difference, which is why I'm so excited to have you on our podcast. Can I ask you a question about that? You bet.

Yeah. So, you know, I sort of compensated with things that I was doing outside myself with the structures and the tools. Is there also a sort of compensating that the brain does? You know, I'm not using this part, but I'm going to move some functions over here that was happening to me because I've always been known as smart. You know, like, I mean, ever since I was a kid, quick and smart. That's generally the reputation that goes around with me. And I'm just wondering, because I have a suspicion that a lot of the damage happened early.

Football certainly, I think, probably did it. I love tackling. I really love tackling. It's kind of funny. Do you know the politician Kucinich? I do. Dennis Kucinich, you know, he's a Democrat. He ran for president, but he, I knocked him out in a game. I actually knocked him out in a game when he was in high school. And I have to tell you, I really just love that activity, but I probably diminish some of my future prospects by doing that. You bet. And but when your frontal lobes are low, so probably they were low before the football hits, is people become excitement seeking, even conflict seeking as a way to turn their brains back on.

So if you become the missile, if you will, in football, that's giving you adrenaline. It's giving you your own internal juice. Unfortunately, you're hurting other people at the process where what Theodore does is it just balances. But he was a Democrat, Daniel. He was a Democrat. Not to talk about, not to disorient your client base. But so is everybody unique in this? I mean, you know, there's my case and thing of you, because you've got the greatest amount of

mapping of anybody in the world about actually what happens in the head and you know yeah yeah I think you're the one who said the statement that the psychiatrist and other people who are you know helping people with their brains are the only medical doctors who never examine the organ. It's a very famous line of yours. Yeah, craziness. I get a sense that you have like perfect pitch now about brain scans, you know, and you can look at a brain scan and you can see 25 different things, which 20 years ago, you might see 10 or 15 things. So what are you seeing now? Because you're the champ in this particular area of science. And it really is science because it's measurable and it's

predictable. Well, let's talk about that when we come back. Because the podcasts tend to be about 12 or 15 minutes. And that's very important. But what I also want to talk to you about is the people around you and what have they seen both personally and in your business. 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. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to get a free signed copy of The Brain Warriors Way and The Brain Warriors Way Cookbook we give away every month.