The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Personal Power: How to Crush It in Life

Episode Date: August 8, 2020

Personal Power: How to Crush It in Life Check it out at: https://bit.ly/2XCgwe8 BIOGRAPHY: DAN E. SILBERBERG Dan is an evolutionary entrepreneur and the CEO/Founder of 1 Insight 2 Thrive, an evolutionary global education academy with courses serving people from all over the world to emerge into who they truly are. After 40 years in business as a CEO and having run businesses from $7-$400million, Dan is dedicated and committed to training the transformational leaders moving forward. Dan is a transformational teacher, leader, speaker, educator, coach and visionary. He is the creator of Personal Power Master Class 2020, a transformational course of personal empowerment, influence, and persuasion. Dan’s mission is to democratize and scales knowledge around the world to the advantage of others creating a world where everyone can thrive. As a lifelong learner and more than 40 years of personal development and men’s work, Dan credits this as the source of his own growth, success, impact, and development.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming here with another great podcast.

We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to give us a like, subscribe to us on YouTube. To see the video version of this broadcast, you can go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss, hit the bell notification button, ding, so you get all those wonderful notifications. Refer to the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Thanks to all the wonderful people who have been giving the five-star recommends. We picked up another one today. I believe it was from our blue-collar author.

You'll want to check out his book but uh thanks to everyone who does those so if you get a chance recommend the show and all that good stuff today we have a very intelligent brilliant gentleman as always all of our guests are always brilliant uh on the show i think you'll like him his name is dan silverberg dan is the evolutionary entrepreneur and ceo and founder of one inside to thrive of an evolutionary global education academy with courses serving people from all over the world to emerge into who they truly are after 40 years in businesses as ceo and having run businesses from seven to four hundred million dollars, Dan is educated and committed to training the transformational leaders moving forward. Dan is a transformational teacher, leader, speaker, and educator, coach, visionary. He's also the

creator of Personal Power Masterclass 2020, a transformational course of personal empowerment, influence, and persuasion. Dan's mission is to democratize and scale knowledge around the world to the advantage of others, creating a world where everyone can thrive. As a lifelong learner and more than 40 years of personal development and men's work, Dan creates this as the source of his own growth, success, impact, and development. So welcome to the show, Dan. How are you doing today? I'm doing awesome, Chris.

Thanks for having me. Awesome sauce. So give us the dot coms where people can take a look at your website on the interwebs. Yeah, so you can do bit.ly forward slash one insight to thrive, or you can reach out to me directly at dan.ly forward slash one insight to thrive, or you can reach out to me directly at Dan at one insight to thrive.com. Either way, I'd love to get in touch with you. That sounds great.

So check it out guys. There'll be a link on the Chris Voss show and in the YouTube video description to click on the link and check it out. So can you share a quick intro about you and your background for us? Sure. I'd love to do that. So as you said, I have done 40 years of business and have a fair amount of mastery. I ran businesses across multiple industries, the apparel industry, technology industry with Oracle and EDS, did merger and acquisition activity, the personal care industry and nutritional supplements and better for you products.

I created the first all natural, no artificial sweetened beverage in the US and opened Walmart and every major grocery store within six months. I had the first organic flavored sweetened water in the market. So a lot of depth in terms of products and channels and go-to-market ideas and that sort of thing. When I look at my genius and what I really want to do with others is to have them step into theirs, it's sort of a threefold stool. So one is the mastery of business all the way to the CEO level. The other is I have a master's degree in transformational

leadership and coaching with a very solid foundation in social, emotional intelligence, psychology, neuroscience, humanism, existentialism, and a variety of things. So I think those are skills sorely needed in business today. And lastly, I've done 40 years of personal development and men's work and currently am helping to lead a group out of Norway in the masculine archetypes. So when I put those three areas together, that's where I think I have something that not everybody in the world has. And that's the genius I want to deliver at this stage of my career, which is more the legacy and give back. So I've had enormous opportunities and experiences, and I think others deserve those same things.

So really to get them the skills and insights and vision to create those dreams for themselves. Awesome sauce. That sounds like some pretty interesting stuff, making the first, you said it was the first sweetener? It was the first all-natural, artificial, sweetened flavored water. And it was actually from my perfume and apparel background that I created this amazing bottle. And Walmart was my first customer.

And an interesting story that when I decided to go to Walmart, people in the industry said that would be the worst thing you could do. Because if Walmart buys it, nobody else will buy from you. Except I did the research. So that's what we call consensus thinking. Yeah. Yeah. Walmart, by the way, controls over 40% of the beverage market in the US. So when Walmart has something, everybody has to have it to compete. And that's how I opened every major grocery store and paid no slotting allowances, which is in the beverage aisle, absolutely unheard of, and was contacted by Coke, Pepsi, and Nestle within six months. Who are you? We've never heard of you, right? And how did you do what you did? my question was how could you not have done what i did given the length of time you're in the business and so there's this real opportunity

to think differently to think more as a visionary and to get yourself outside of the the group think in the consensus awesome sauce so you guys are doing this amazing thing with your company. Tell us a little bit more about it. Yep. So one insight to thrive was something that came for me that in doing my own work, that emerging to become who I could become, every time I could get an insight,

I could make a different choice. I could do something different. I could put a toe in the water. I could experiment. And that's how I got to mastery, is I kept experimenting. I kept living my life as an adventure. Life is about expansion. And for a lot of us, we live more in fear and anxiety and, gee, what happens if I make a mistake? And so one of my heroes, Buckminster Fuller said, the more mistakes I make, the smarter I get. And so I took that. So that was an insight. And what that allowed me to do was take more risk. Right. And that's how I got some great assignments because I was willing to take the risk.

The more mistakes you make, the more you're like, well, we know that doesn't work. Yeah. But also you find out what does work. And if you do more of what works quickly and get out of more of what doesn't quickly, better outcomes can show up. Most definitely. Yeah. And why are you doing this now? Well, I'm doing it now because I'm 70 years old.

You're looking good. You don't look 70, man. You look like 40. Okay, so there's, thank you. There's two kinds of people in the world, Chris. There's those who dominate and those who are dominated, right? And there's those who give headaches and there's those who get them. I think you can probably tell from my warrior which ones I am, right? And then the

other thing about emerging to your next best version of yourself is your own respect. So, what addictions do you have? Are food your addictions? Is porn your addiction? Is looking at your phone every seven minutes your addiction? And so we actually get to understand our yearnings. And when we get to our yearnings and we fulfill those, the addictions drop away. So I eat really well. I take care of myself. I exercise. I am my own, you know, best influencer. So we, I like working with, with people so that they can get the same kind of outcomes. Well, it sure sounds like you got it together, Dan. I need to go to your seminar. So you said, you've said in the past, these are the greatest times in history.

Let's talk a little bit more about what you mean by that. Yep. So for me, I've always thought if I was going to live in another time, the time I'd want to live in would have been the Italian Renaissance. This was the time of Michelangelo. This was the time of the great painters. This was the time of art and expression and just high creativity. And so, you know, COVID has brought a unique perspective for us. So I meet with a lot of people and I see

those people that are in fear, that are anxious, that are hunkered down, that are scared. And then I see a group of us that think we're at another renaissance. So from an archetypal perspective, we're in this space called liminal space. Liminal space is the space between the old, which we see, I don't want to say crumbling, but it's dissolving. And the old is no longer sustainable. Governments can't sustain, suppression of people can't sustain, locking people up can't sustain, religion, we've seen the immorality of that. And so our traditional institutions are faltering. And what I believe is happening with COVID is we all now have time for ourselves. This is time to be introspective. This is time to wonder, what am I really, who am I, what am I here for, what are my gifts, what do I want to bring into the world. And so the whole training and the impetus behind this is your old skills are commodities. Your old skills will allow Google to take over. AI and Google can take your old skills. So as we move forward, this is the greatest time because we're at the beginning. We have a death to a rebirth. This happens all of the time in Joseph Campbell, in Star Wars, in Harry Potter, in Tolkien, in The Hobbit, that there look at ourselves as the new visionaries, as the new

authors, as the new creators of the world, then we're going to move to much more from an industrial revolution to a planetary evolution. We are all interrelated. Dominator culture is not going to continue to survive. It's much more about how we work together. And so there's a whole group of skills that I believe I've learned and have deployed in putting together highly effective teams that will give my students opportunities to thrive, to excel, to bring this newness to their own businesses, if they're entrepreneurs in companies. So whatever it is that they're up to, it's a window of opportunity to go for it. And you bring up a good point.

We've talked about this on the Chris Voss Show, that this is a great moment to take and reinvent yourself, to become something new, to find out more about yourself. From the beginning of the quarantine, I was encouraging you know don't use this time to watch netflix and you know sit on the couch and eat and and eat your feelings um you know this is a great time to learn new skills to grow as a start a business to become an entrepreneur find what you love um educate yourself like you said, a lot of inspiring things there. And so this is a great time for it. And COVID-19 has really exposed the cracks in our society, the cracks and patterns,

like you mentioned, in our paradigms, in our world and stuff. And stuff that wasn't really working before is now just really, really broken. But this is a time of uncertainty. And you believe people can thrive in times like these? I do. So one of the questions that I ask my students is you're at the Grand Canyon, and you're right at the edge, looking down people will say the biggest fear you could fly which takes us right what would happen if you actually thought you could fly that you could become the greatest version of yourself so in the movie avatar james cam right? He's got the birds, the dragons, whatever. And the young man has to

decide, does he get on or doesn't he? Does he hold on or jump off, right? Well, isn't that what we're all facing in life? But he gets on and he gets to new worlds and he gets to new experiences and he gets new self-confidence. And all of a sudden, he's got a different perspective. And that's really what we're here to do. So we're born to struggle, but life is born to expand. And if we're in our comfort zone and we're going to sit doing the same old thing every day, that's not what we're here for. So let me give you a quick little view of how this works. If you think the same thing every day, you'll make the same choices every day. If you make the same choices every day, you'll have the same behaviors. If you have the same behaviors,

guess what? You have the same experiences. If you have the same experiences, you have the same emotions, then you have the same memories. You are living in your past. Our goal is to live present, right? Our goal is to live with aliveness. Our goal is to live play. Our goal is to live with intention, not reactively. So this is the world that I've been able to discover through all of my work and my experience. This is, I think I can translate this to others to have these similar kinds of outcomes. That's awesome. So your company has the latest program that you guys are doing. It's called Power, Personal Power Masterclass 2020. Who is the class for? So what I'm hoping is that the class is for, if we look at Maslow and we look at his triangle, he talks about people that are self-actualized. These are people who are influential. These are

people who are striving, right? These are people who can make a difference. But Maslow never got to finish what he was really after, was having man be self-accepting. So I want to take guys and girls, I want to take these transformational leaders. These are people that are fast-tracking corporations. These are evolutionary entrepreneurs. These are people that are fast-tracked in corporations. These are evolutionary entrepreneurs. These are mission-based businesses where people see a world different than what's currently out there. And what they're looking to do actually is to step into their greatness so that they become more influential, that they become more persuasive, that they get beyond their limiting beliefs, that the things that currently hold them back are illusions, right? So we work with you to go through in depth over a 12-week period,

48 different spheres of influence. And now what happens out of that, you get a toolkit. So if all you have is a hammer, right, everything's a nail, you now have a toolkit. So we know from the Harvard Business Review, 92% of effectiveness of high performing executives or entrepreneurs is social emotional intelligence. Without that, people aren't necessarily going to want to follow. They're not going to feel seen and felt and know they matter. So a lot of the underpinning of this is to bring those capabilities. If you have them now, great, We'll enhance them. And it's a very personalized program. So you will have ups and downs of skill set based on these 48 spheres. We want to spend time with you on the ones to build. If you've already got these, we'll take

you to another level on those as well. But it's personalized and customized so that you come out your greatest version of yourself. Awesome sauce. That sounds exciting as heck. So during a week experience of the program, what might it look like with further, you know, define with a customer experience? Yeah. So it's important to me that we're not teaching you theory. We're teaching you theory to apply to your lives. So when we tell you what your birth order is, is that what happened for you and your family? If it did, how did it impact you?

What questions might you have about that? How is that both what thrusts you forward? What is it maybe that holds you back? Chris, stop talking. Chris, go to your room. Chris, take a timeout. Chris, why can't you be like your brother? Chris, why can't you? Why can't you? Why can't you? And you're supposed to be this fully formed, beautiful guy who thinks that he's got the world by the tail, except that you actually think you're not good enough, you're not worthy, and you play small to fit the role that was downloaded in you, right? That you had no say in. So part of the week is this two-hour master class where no more than 25 people, and we actually work with you in this class. We pair you up so that you have a partner for accountability.

We have literature that you'll review through a week. There will be weekly assignments. You'll have worksheets to keep track of and make accountability. And then we'll also have what we call power circles. And during that week, there'll be a working environment. And if you want to come and you want to ask questions, get more coaching, you want to talk with others in the group. So in a way, it's sort of a power circle and a mastermind combined. So this is who it's sort of a power circle and a mastermind combined.

So this is who it's for. It's for people who are dynamic already and know that there's things missing that if they could fill in will absolutely catapult them. And so you're going to be holding this live with them, and then they'll have recorded access so they can always keep coming back to it and re-dipping their foot back in. Okay, what were the notes again? Because I do that a lot with sometimes courses that I take where I have to go back and just go back to the basics and go, okay, let's get back to what that was about. And so it sounds pretty exciting. People are unable to unlock their power and influence in the world.

And this is going to be pretty interesting that you've got going on um the 48 skills thing is pretty interesting over a 12-week program because that's a lot of skills and you know people have so many issues today like you talk about they're not present uh you know i remember struggling with that a few years ago where i just didn't feel like i was even aware of anything in my life i just didn't i had so much muck going on in my head with, you know, thinking about all the silly stuff that doesn't even matter. You know, like you mentioned earlier, I was, you know, thinking about the past, you know, and a lot of Eckhart Tolle stuff of the power of now where I was, you know, not in the present. And I would just fight to be like,

I don't feel like I'm accomplishing stuff because you get locked in this thing. And like you say, if you do the same thing or think the same thing, you get the same results. So you've got to change it up and redirect your life and stuff. So it sounds pretty amazing. Anything more we need to know about what you guys are doing there? Yeah, so let me just give you the idea

of what a first week might look like. So one of the things we know is that between the age, so when you're first born, you are not born with a fully formed brain at this point. You're actually a ball of energy. And when you come into the world, you are in sensing mode. So if mom is stressed, if mom's nervous system is on fire, if there's drugs in the family, if there's a lot of yelling, all of that gets picked up and downloaded into us.

Up until about the age of seven, your brain is in formation. And so family, school, friends, all these different things get downloaded. So what's your view of money? Money's dirty. God's given us what we're supposed to have, right? Dad's allowed to be angry. You're not allowed to be angry. So there's all these things get downloaded.

This is childhood formation. What most of us don't do is by the time we're 14, 15, 16, our brains are doing pretty well by 21 to 23, they're fully formed. How many of you are willing to divorce your parents? How many of you are willing to say, these were the beliefs I was given. So children do strategies based on the environment they're in that are very clever. They're very good for survival, right? They're adaptive. In adulthood, they could be maladaptive. And so we actually take this time for you to take a look and bring to consciousness the family rules, myths, and beliefs. Yeah? And now we can see which ones we want and which ones don't serve us anymore.

One of the things we ask in the first week is, what's your relationship to power? When I say the word, you go, ooh, you know? Oh, those are bad people. Those are dominators. Those are whatever, you know? Oh, I love powerful people. I think I'm powerful. I don't know.

But we're going to go through that experience and see what limiting beliefs there are about power. One of the things we're going to do is have you pick a person that you're going to study for the 12 weeks. So is Nelson Mandela? Is MLK? Is Jack Kennedy, is it Abraham Lincoln, is it Bucky Fuller, is it Jean-Paul Sartre, whoever it is, because what we want you to see

is these are normal people who when facing adversities were able to thrive. They had grit, they had perseverance, they created values, they created their own principles. So this now gives you a way of actually seeing yourself in the arena with them. So I did this when I was like in the ninth grade and my guy that I studied was Teddy Roosevelt. And so man in the arena versus the spectator critic was so powerful for me when I was 15 years old. And so that's what a week is going to look like. And then what we're going to do is at the end of it, we're going to give you some literature to study. And we're going to give you some worksheets to actually map out those rules, myths, and beliefs. So did you have an absent father? Did you have mother wound? Did you, were you in a family that got divorced early? Were, you know, where were you? Because this

really under, bringing to consciousness this allows you once you see the pattern it's if it's disempowering you it evaporates it moves away because basically the things that hold us back is what they want is they want to be seen and when they're seen and known, they're good. Is it because they're asking us for us to resolve them? Well, so for me, one of the things that I do with my group in Norway is we go to the graveyard. And who do you think you see there? It's not your mom and dad. You go to actually excavate and bring back your inner child.

This is the innocence that you buried in order to survive. Yeah. Yeah. And so this is, this was really the whole Harry Potter idea with Voldemort and going down into the thing and the snake and the dragons and the, what is it about you that not only do you want people not to know, but it's so horrific in your own mind, you don't even want to admit it to yourself. When that gets known and resolved and accepted, that's the insight to thrive. That's one of them.

So this is a lot of what we do. It's hard work. It's not for the faint of heart, but it's for those who want to risk to have the greatest life possible. And this is a time of chaos, but this is the most important time to resolve these issues and move forward and create a new life. Because like you say, we're in this juxtaposition of where we're going into closing out an old way and people having to kind of relearn new skills and everything else. And I heard a long time ago that that's a lot of what we spend in our life doing is trying to resolve with the relationships and everything else, our childhood experiences.

Maybe our parents didn't get along and we get into relationships with people that are based around the same sort of brokenness. And then we're still trying to fix those things. And a lot of it's just what we're carrying inside. Exactly. And so one of the questions in one of the weeks that we work on is, are you living a life of intention or are you living your life in reactivity? So when you wake up in the morning, is it very clear what you're going to get accomplished for the day? Are you going to have a powerful day or are you just going to wait for

stuff to happen? And then when it happens, it's drama, right? So, and then we go and we work on things like the drama triangle. So we all know people who, that we work with or friends, and they have the same problem with the same people for months. Because they're afraid to actually be honest. So we work with you on how to have difficult and honest conversations because it's in your honest conversation that you get to be authentic, right? So for men particularly, you have two ways you can die. So if you're on your deathbed, if you're inauthentic, and you know that you didn't fulfill what you're here to do, you'll die in terror.

If you've brought your gifts to the world, if you've been in service to something higher than yourself, if you know who you are and you contributed, you'll be ready. Right? So it's actually up to each person. What do you want? Yeah. Being authentic is very important. You talk about this on your website and to tell truth, your highest vision. Um, there's a, do you want to talk about sabotage? This is one of the things you're going to deal with, people that are maybe sabotaging themselves. Sure. So sabotaging actually ends up in self-fulfilling prophecies.

So I know that if my boss asks me to do something, and I know I'm not really capable of it, and so I walk around and I tell myself, and I'll even tell some of my peers, I'm really worried that so-and-so wants this for me. And I don't think ultimately I can do it. And sure enough, I screw because I get fearful. I actually end up doing a poor job or less than what was expected. I was afraid to ask, right? Asking is a really big deal. Hey, Mr. Boss, I've got this thing from you. I want to make sure that it's done right. And sure enough, my boss says, Dan, this is like really average. What the heck? I thought, you know, this is what I wanted.

And so what happens out of that then is I created the thing so my boss could see that I was ineffective. And now I get, see, now I'm validated about it. So the next time I'll do the same thing over and over and over. Right? So the way we self-sabotage is I'm not good enough. If you talk to people that are in positions of power, ask how many of them have ever felt they've been an imposter. Yeah, imposter syndrome. Right?

I got this promotion. This is bullshit. I have no idea. Who am I to be doing this? Yeah? No. We're here to learn. So one of the things that is now missing in our education,

we don't have a high enough bar for our kids. We don't set a standard high enough that they're capable. So if you work with a child and you just put some scaffolding in place, not the whole house, a little bit of scaffolding, those kids can do physics. And Bucky Fuller, one of my heroes was teaching his daughter physics when she was seven years old.

Wow. Because he believed she could do it. Yeah. So we go through a lot of these examples and lots of heroes of these different categories that give you these opportunities, I think. So the self-sabotage is I'm not good enough and I don't know how to do it. You're more than worthy. And if you know how to ask for help, you can do far more than you're willing.

Yeah, and this is the perfect time to sit down and reanalyze, do an inventory of where you're at in life, and then to figure out what you need to work on. It's a great time. The quarantine was a great time for quiet time to sit down and go, what am I doing? How am I doing it? That's one of the things we did. One of the things I encouraged to do on the podcast, I was telling people, you know, use this time wisely. You know, I had to go through a lot of this same sort of crisis in 2008, 2009 during the recession back then. And there's ways to deal with this and get through it and build a better person

and come out of it the other side, like you say, powerful and present and resolving a lot of the issues that you've been carrying around. And people carry around their baggage like all their life, right? Yeah, and you know something? It's scary and it's not easy to do alone. And these containers that we create are really a group of allies. There's real security there. There's real energy there.

There's commitment and dedication. People don't let you fall off the wayside, right? And that's really what we all need. So, you know, one of the big things for guys today, are you tired of living the lie yet? Mm-hmm. Yeah? What's the lie?

Well, the lie is I have it handled. The lie is I don't have emotion. The lie is that I'm stoic. The lie is I have my big boy pants on. The lie is so this man box that we're in is going to blow up in this new world. Because if we look at what's going on with divorce, if we look at the megaphone that women are having now, what we're actually seeing is role reversal. We're seeing women become warriors, and we're seeing men become more the lovers. To be holistic, to be healthy, to be functioning,

men need to be more in their feminine, and women need to be more in their masculine, and we're not supposed to be the same. We're supposed to be equal, but we're not the same. So if you aren't connected, see, the lie is you're not supposed to be. Now you've got kids and a wife and a family who's going, where are you? You're not connected here. If you're not connected here, you're not needed. Men are disposable. In our needed. Men are disposable. Wow.

In our culture, men are disposable. We have two ways. We're either the ATM machine to be abundant, bring a lot of money home, or we go to war to die. That's our role. Women have a very different role. Women can be a stay-at-home mom. Women can have a hybrid.

They can be a caretaker to children and have a part-time. And women can actually become empowered full-time out in the world. Men don't have that option in the current model, right? So we have work to do as men. So how many women have heard a man say, I don't want to talk about it? How many men or women have, what is it I need to say to get you to react? So what's your style with your partner? Is it high anger and a loud voice? Is it I go to silence? Do I walk away and I hope it'll go away and come back later? These are not great skills to connection. This is not great social emotional intelligence. So for us, what we want now is to become more authentic.

We need to be more in our feelings. We don't need you as our wives to save us. But for a woman, the worst thing that can happen for a man is to fall off the white horse. So the whole model for us as men is a mess. This is a chance to rewrite that script. This is a chance to be whole. This is a chance to be complete. This is a chance to be complete. This is a chance for us. So Carl Rogers, who's another one of my heroes, you know, basically

said that what we're all looking for is to be accurately seen in the here and now with positive regard, consistently and unconditionally. Can you love your kids unconditionally? Can you get the distinction between bad behavior and I'm bad? So men grow up in shame. Ask them what their fathers were like. Ask them what their grandfathers were like. Most of them were depressed, angry, unemotional, right? Stoic. That's the world they grew up in. We have that DNA in us. Yeah. This is a time for us to chart a new path. And a lot of the skills that we teach will get you more in touch, again, who you truly are and how you can emerge moment by moment.

Yeah, that's really powerful. I mean, a lot of fathers disconnected. You know, I mean, you and I probably grew up in the age where, you know, we were taught men don't cry, you know. We're cut off emotionally. We just power on and carry the you know the man on the white horse like you said and and yeah people men are having a hard time figuring out what manhood is again and the balance and and how do we keep from being the bull of the china shop um where uh you

know we're just upsetting everybody and everything and And, yeah, a lot of fathers really struggle to be connected with their children. And you get so busy. Like I've had friends that have gotten divorced that they're so focused on making money and bringing home the paycheck and trying to do that and tune out when they come home that they miss it all and they don't't understand there has to be that balance. And even as men, we tend to hold everything in. We just go, we'll just keep on trucking. And I even get chided by that with women in my life

where they're just like, you just put it behind you, and you just keep, you know, just making your mess. And so, yeah, it's really important people learn these things. You know, I like the idea of the coaching of what you guys are doing and having the group think there because – and people advise you and watch you and help you because a lot of people don't realize their scotomas are their blind spots. They don't – you don't see them. You don't see outside of your own box a lot of people don't realize their scotomas or their blind spots. They don't, they don't, you don't see them. You don't, you don't see outside of your own box a lot of times. And so it really helps to have people give you advice and to coach you because they can go, Hey, that thing you do. And you're like, ah, what thing did I do? I didn't know I did that thing. And like, no, you do that thing. And then you go, oh, well, I had no idea. And so they help you coach through those things.

And a lot of people's lives are like that. They've been living with their blind spot for so long or their scotoma where they don't even recognize it anymore. And once you have somebody point that out to you or help you in group settings like this, you can help resolve your issues. Yeah, thanks. Well, and it's one of the great things is that if I'm working with you and there are seven other people, even though I'm working specifically with you,

everybody is relating to their own life, their own story, and they're all doing their work. So each person who's contributing really contributes to the entire group. So what you're talking about really are our false selves. So what are the masks that you wear? And so we all have a public persona, we have a private persona, and then we have that persona we don't even want to admit to ourselves, right? So I, in my work, I actually grew up at the knee of an expert on how to deflect, obfuscate, and be defensive. I have a PhD in it.

I actually have more than a PhD in it. I can do it at such a high level. And so in my schoolwork, my assignment for a year, because I'm not, I'm what they call a smart rat. So I don't give up easy. So for a year, everyone in my school was allowed to say whatever they wanted to say to me. And I couldn't defend any of it. Not a thing. And then find the kernel of truth in what was said and then get to the humor of it. Now, I think I'm a quick study. Seven months before I could even start to think what they were saying was humorous. Yeah.

But what's interesting out of it is the things that you think you're most hiding are the things that are most obvious to everyone else out there. Yeah. You can put that on a shirt. That's a great saying. Is that great? Yeah. Well, I'll give you an example.

So a man is 27 years old, and he goes to his mom, and he says, Mom, I'm gay. And you know what the mom says? I've known it the whole time, right? Yeah, I've just been waiting for you to tell me because i knew when you were four yeah yeah so these things so what mask are you wearing are you wearing the athlete's mask are you wearing the know-it-all mask are you wearing the i have it all under control mask you know all of that stuff one of the things that I think is a superior skill

is my ability to hear what you're saying, but more importantly, to hear what you're not saying. And that's where I go to dig. And the other thing is that I'm very good at provoking and confronting because my goal always for myself and for you is to get you to your highest truth. So you can help people identify it and recognize it and go, oh, so that's what's going on with me. So most people are afraid to say what they really think out of what emotion? Fear. And what's the outcome of that fear? Rejection. If I told my mom and dad what I really think, I could get thrown out of the family. So when I'm 40 and I go home for Thanksgiving or Christmas and I see my siblings, the same crap that happened in the family when

I was 14 is now happening and I'm 47. Yeah. So when we're more authentic, when we're more in our truth, we actually give other people permission to do the same. So one of the things that I've done with my students also, I have a process. It's not a part of this class, but it could be indict your parents. Oh,oh. Yeah, indict them. Like seriously have this discussion with mom and dad because when you indict them, they actually get a chance to respond. And what comes out of this is a level of forgiveness,

a level of empathy, a level of understanding that, yeah, they may have done these things and maybe that's the best they could do. But now I'm more curious. So dad, tell me about your dad. Tell me about grandpa. Tell me how you were raised. Tell me what was the environment, what was valued in your family most of us never ask these questions so what in your lineage would you not want your children to carry forward alcoholism domestic abuse sexual abuse womanizing because it's's that DNA that comes from this lineage. I'm the one who said to my kids, these are the deceits in my family. No more skeletons. We're not doing that game anymore. And that cuts it off. That's an opportunity for us. So this idea of really, your parents have never really been asked about their lives, most of them, right?

This gives them permission. You actually now get to know these people in a way that's not parent to child. It's actually peer to peer. It's adult-to-adult now. It's a scary game because they could say, we're done. You have to leave now. You're out of the will. And I would say, thank God, because now I actually am who I am. But if it's done with grace and elegance and, and goodwill and caring, you'd be shocked at the outcome that comes and the release that happens for these men and women to really step into who they are with acceptance. And I, I, and I, I affirm that.

I agree with that totally. I know that in talking to a lot of parents, you know, we, we come from an age back in the great depression, of course, that had some psychological aspects to parents and people that were born and raised in that era on what their fears are and what their struggles are.

You know, you know, a lot of people that came from the Great Depression, you know, they were always worried about happy and going broke. And then back then, you know, we were kind of a different society, too. And a lot of that emotion was cut off. I mean, even going back even further, I mean, people were just trying to survive. And a lot of times just being together and married was was more of a survival thing than it was like a convenient thing where you're like well i think we should get married and and uh or maybe we shouldn't um and so and so it seems to me that as generationally um you know more and more we're becoming better connected with ourselves and

understanding ourselves where you know even with my parents or grandparents, you know, they were just like, just do it and just go through it. I don't know what you're thinking about. And then, you know, you have, you have parents that experience alcoholism from their parents and, and that's really emotionally damaging and crippling to a child because they carry it through the rest of their life. And until they resolve these issues, the impact on them is horrendous.

Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, what's interesting is that we call men who are stoic, who aren't emotional, who aren't in their feelings, who aren't embodied. You know what we call them? We call them the greatest generation. That's true. Isn't that unbelievable? Yeah. They were the greatest generation because they went to war.

And what that cost was, was significant. And so that DNA is within us. And so one of the things that we're going through now with COVID is what I see is this global trauma. We have the global trauma of Nazism. We have the global trauma of genocide in Africa. We have the global trauma of slavery and what we did to Native Americans here. We have the trauma in Australia with the indigenous people and in Brazil, right? And there is this collective consciousness. In point of fact, we are all actually connected.

And so there is this opportunity for healing. So one of the things we know from science is that the five people closest to you create what they call mirror neurons. Yeah. So if you look at any particular subset of people, you'll see that they all kind of react alike. They all kind of look alike. So I'll give you an example. I live in a communal house with five or six people. Oh, wow. Yeah. I have my own space, but I found that to be really

an awesome way of living. Every one of them is at least 50 pounds overweight. You know what it takes for me not to be 50 pounds? Oh, it's enormous because I get invited to dinners and the food's fantastic. And, you know, there's alcohol and there's all this, but I don't, that's not who I want to be. And so I modulate, but basically in a family, the functionality of a family, the family is a system. The government is a system. Our culture is a system, yeah? The whole idea of a system is homeostasis.

It's to keep it where it is. I don't know what your politics is, and I don't really care, but if you want to know what's going on in our current political world, it is the rejection of homeostasis and what a system will do to keep it stable. Yeah. I don't want to go into personalities or any of that because it's not even interesting to me. What's interesting to me is to see to what depth the system will go, right? The, quote, deep state, the, quote, intelligence agencies, the media, Hollywood, the universities,

all of these are a part of our ecosystem. What's interesting is what are each of them doing to keep their space, to keep their sovereignty, to keep their stability and safety. That, to me, is what's interesting about what's going on now. And what we're seeing is that the more this dissolving is happening, the more intense their anger, their outreach, their... This is why it's an exciting time. The system is to be able to keep surviving, keep operating their systems.

You're going to see it get a whole lot worse about trying to keep it. Ultimately, it's not going to survive, but it's not going to go down easily. So in a family system, you have a couple of siblings, right? Chris is the good boy, John, therefore, that role is taken. He becomes the good boy, John, therefore that role is taken. He becomes the bad boy. Julie is the baby of the family and she becomes needlessly helpless because she's the baby and everybody wants to do everything for her. Dad's the only one that can be angry. Mom is the only one allowed to cry. Now that's five roles that I just laid out. To the extent that you you have this awareness now, if you have this

capability now to recognize moment by moment where you are, what you're feeling in your body, what emotion is catalyzing you, now between stimulus and response, there's a choice. This is the existential principle. You say something to me, I'm offended. I react. I get angry. I come back at you right away. And that just cost me my job because you're my boss and you didn't appreciate me doing that. Yeah. So between stimulus and response, could I just breathe and grab a sense of what's going on with me? What you said is not what triggered me. What triggered me is that what you said happened. If I keep tracking it back to my previous life and experience, I will find where that actually came out of.

Wow. Right? That's just amazing. So now I, instead of being reactive, are intentional. You say something to me and I'm offended or you hurt my, I hear this all the time, he hurt my feelings. I'm not in charge of your feelings you're in charge i'm in charge of truth to my highest vision and i'm going to tell my truth how you choose to interpret it from an

adlerian perspective that's your task we have different tasks yeah so what i said to you you're offended but when i said that to jo, he just laughed because his wounds aren't where your wounds are. So we work with you on what triggers you. What triggers you are the disowned parts of yourself. The disowned parts of yourself. I like that. Yeah. So how do we know this? Well, one of the movies we all watch as kids is The Wizard of Oz. Yeah. Yeah. So that's Dorothy. So Dorothy goes to Auntie Em and Auntie Em goes, hey, there's a tornado coming and I'm busy and I'm counting chickens and I'm doing. And Dorothy goes, I'm rejected. I'm hurt. And so she goes into her own mind. And as she goes down the yellow brick road, who does she meet? She meets the tin man who doesn't have a heart guess what that's the integration of her having a heart of compassion

and empathy and understanding and the lion who doesn't have courage and she now has courage to walk further into the thing right and now she gets to the wizard and she realizes i want to go home and she goes home integrated in her fullness and so life now is over the rainbow because she's integrated all these disowned parts isn't that beautiful That totally went by me in that movie. That makes sense. Yeah, totally. So I'm an English major, so it's either archetypal or it's sexual. So this may be a family show, so we're going to do archetypal.

But these are the things that we look at so in the hero's journey right we we know that we sit in in this eternal city of slumber this is us doing the same thing every day this is us asleep this is us you know uh in our addiction this is us just blah and we know there's more and then we get the call. So Luke Skywalker with Obi-Wan, I want to be a Jedi. Great, that's the call. So Obi-Wan, what does he say? No problem, dude, I'll do it. What does Luke do? I'm not ready.

He refuses the call. We always refuse the call, right? Because it's uncomfortable. It's unknowing. It's uncertain what could happen. But ultimately, we can't. And he becomes a Jedi. Yeah?

So we see this. These are the archetypal patterns of Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey. My goal for all of the folks I work with is that they become the hero of their journey. And it's usually a magnificent ending. That's what we're looking for too, right? Isn't it? Self-acceptance. So anyway, that's kind of my thing, and I'm sticking with it.

And you can tell I'm passionate. I want the best for people. I'm here to be in service. And I actually think that the world is going to raise its consciousness with us or without. And I think if you're going to remain an ordinary, you really are going to get left behind. I don't think we're in a world anymore of linear and incremental. I think we're actually in a world anymore of linear and incremental. I think we're actually in a circular world of exponential and quantum.

We're starting to see that in quantum physics. We're seeing that in quantum computing. And we have a chance to create that quantum experience in our own lives. It's definitely a time for that because because uh i mean it's it's it's it's a time where people are going to have to redesign their lives uh everything like you say a lot of things are being disrupted a lot of things that are that are they're going to be fading out of our lives a lot of the systems and everything else uh they may not survive and and there's going to be new truths and new evidence that comes forth and in new ways that we're going to have to think about things and new paradigms, and there may have to be new ways to redesign our lives.

I mean, there's a lot of parents that are having to be teachers now, which is, you know, that's a whole new thing on top of parenting as it is. So when is this going to be going on? Yep, so it starts September 9th, and it goes through November the 25th, I believe. So it's a 12-week program. And if people are interested, like I said, they can either contact me at Dan at OneInsightToThrive, or they can do the bit.ly forward slash one insight to thrive.

There you go. And the link will be on the website and the YouTube video. So you guys can do it there. Anything more we need to know before we go out, Dan? The only thing is I hope that I've been inspiring enough that this might be the kind of a life that you want for yourself and for your family and to deepen relationships and to deepen relationships and to step into your greatness.

So I'm totally committed to working with, with those of you who want to take the journey. Definitely. I mean, I feel more cerebral alive, right? Cerebrally alive. No,

just what we talked about. Cause it inspired because, uh, I mean, you, you, you covered so many great topics and so many things I've heard over the years. So thanks to my audience for being here.

Thanks to Dan. You've shared a lot of wonderful stuff. Be sure to go to his websites. Check him out. Once again, you'll find the links to the chrisvossshow.com. If you want to see the video version of this conversation, go to youtube.com forward slash chrisvoss. Hit that bell notification button. For the show to your family, friends, neighbors, relatives, tell everybody to

tune in to chrisfossshow.com and all nine of our podcasts at thecbpn.com or the chrisfosspodcastnetwork.com Thanks, Miles, for tuning in, and we'll see you guys next time. Thanks, Chris.