[00:00:00] Michael Pacheco: And here we go. All right. Hello, everyone. And welcome once again to another episode of the remarkable coach podcast. As always, I’m your host, Michael Pacheco. And joining me today is Dan LaFave. Dan received life’s second chance when he survived a severe car accident that took three lives. He struggled through brain injuries, business failures, heartbreaks, running marathons and battles with fear and doubt so that he could have more Impact in the world.
This is also Dan’s encore presentation on the remarkable coach. His second appearance here his first appearance. I encourage you guys to pause this and go back and check out his our first podcast together, which was released on August 31st, 2021. So about two years ago. And that was a great one, Dan.
Welcome back to the remarkable
[00:00:50] Dan LeFave: coach. Thank you, Michael. It’s awesome to be here. Yeah. I appreciate you
[00:00:54] Michael Pacheco: making time to chat with me today, man. So for those of our listeners and viewers who haven’t had a chance yet to go back and listen to the, for our first episode together, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do in your own words and catch us up to speed?
[00:01:10] Dan LeFave: Sure. My business is all about. coaching founders that are hungry, humble, and smart that want to scale their businesses. And I help them remove the bottleneck. So I help them simplify in order to multiply. And that’s it in a in a nutshell, but you know what, the key here is that you have to break things down.
You have to. Simplify and standardize things before you can multiply. And I didn’t realize that I had done that in my past, but when I was starting back in the nineties, I helped my brother scale a business to over seven figures in a few years. And I did that for him and I didn’t know what I was doing.
I was just, winging it, bootstrapping. And and then later on I had the opportunity. To do it with something much bigger and I was hired to manage a commercial portfolio and there was eight sources of revenue and when I finished with it, we had a real estate database.
We had standard processes, standard agreements, all sorts of standards so that anybody who came to us, especially big corporations like wireless carriers. There was like, it was easy. It was just easy. They just said, yes, they don’t want to look anywhere because it’s hard. That’s hard, right? I just simplified everything and I grew that to about 24 million in revenue and it has since gone on to 35, 40 million.
I stopped checking in, but it’s still growing. So yeah, simplifying, standardizing, setting up processes. Because that’s the foundation. If you don’t have that foundation, scaling is going to be a grind. It’s going to be, willpower, which is if you’re doing it by on willpower, like that’s an energy vampire.
It’s going to suck.
[00:02:51] Michael Pacheco: You’ve got a big focus. Essentially. It sounds like on ops, and creating SOPs processes, things that can help scale.
[00:02:58] Dan LeFave: Yeah. I don’t necessarily the SOPs are part of the process. I’m helping break down where the bottlenecks are. There’s something called constraints theory and it’s, and there’s something called a singularity and singularity is the same thing as a bottleneck.
So we’re always looking for bottlenecks and most times with business owners, they are the bottleneck. And so then it’s about figuring out what that bottleneck is and then simplifying it, breaking it down and then finding the right team players, reverse engineering, designing it. Getting the right team players in place and then building from there.
And you also need to have standards like standards of excellence, like personal standards, team standards, and then everybody has to operate under those team standards. And if they don’t then, or if they break them, then. You come together as a team to solve it. And most businesses don’t run that way. Most times when things go wrong, it’s an emotional blowout.
Somebody gets blamed or fired, right? Instead of saying, Hey, John, that was a a code eight, right? According to our standards. And what can we do to fix it? Let’s all get together and let’s sort this out. And unfortunately, if John keeps repeating these habits, I don’t know if you believe that how you do anything is how you do everything.
Sure. Yeah. So if that’s true, then that person is going to repeat those habits and therefore either they have to find another team or they are let go. And so it’s it’s a process for building a dream team, which most businesses don’t take that kind of approach.
[00:04:25] Michael Pacheco: I like it. I like it. One of the things that we have at Boxer is we call it an error log, and it’s just a spreadsheet whenever we, whenever anybody, whenever we find a mistake, we’ll note it in the error log, and then we’ve got columns for what we’ve learned.
What processes need to be updated to ensure that, this doesn’t happen again and then someone to take responsibility for ensuring that what we learned gets implemented so that, the issue doesn’t happen again. Is that something that, that. thing that you would you would do, or have you had any experience with a system like that?
[00:05:02] Dan LeFave: Not necessarily, but it sounds phenomenal because obviously mistakes are going to happen and I don’t know if you believe this, but events are repeated until lessons learned. So you’re avoiding that by creating a system for tracking that. And also. The brain learns through making mistakes or surprises and surprises are not fun.
Typically. So yeah. So the ones that, hit you in the face, it’s it’s that Mike Tyson quote, everything’s fine until you get punched in the face. So a few punches in the face and you realize, Hey, this is recurring. And then, but then you have the data to fix it, which is awesome.
So yeah, if you’re collecting that information. Then you can avoid it in the future and it might mean changing processes or, a new system, or it might mean shuffling the team or eliminating somebody, but at least you have that information. So good. One of the things, one of
[00:05:52] Michael Pacheco: the things that I found is very important around.
Maintaining and keeping and implementing and using a system like this is to have a blameless work culture, right? At least in terms of mistakes. An honest mistake is an honest mistake. No one is ever going to get in trouble for an honest mistake. What is important for us is that we learn from those mistakes, right?
And that things. tHat when mistakes are made, that is a catalyst for a shift in thinking and again, a shift in processes or shift in S. O. P. S. whatever it takes them to ensure again, that we don’t repeat that same mistake, right? Because we did learn from it.
We talk about it as a group. We talk about it at our weekly meetings, anything that’s that we go through the air log every week. And instead of pointing fingers at people, what we do is point fingers at the problem and say, what happened here? Yeah. And what can we learn from it? What’s our takeaway?
[00:06:48] Dan LeFave: Yeah. What’s the breakdown? Yeah. Because I think what you’re describing, I don’t know if you’ve seen this model before, but there’s an accountability loop and a victim loop. And basically the accountability loop is where you take responsibility. You take action, follow through all those things. But if that’s not happening, then by default, people are in a victim consciousness during the victim.
It was the blaming, complaining, denying, lying, avoiding. So it’s you can’t have, one foot in the accountability loop and the other one partially in the victim, like you either are on one side or the other, right? So I haven’t heard
[00:07:21] Michael Pacheco: of those, but that sounds, it sounds in alignment.
[00:07:25] Dan LeFave: Yeah. Yeah. You want people to be self accountable. Taking responsibility, taking action, and when you have that, then nobody is getting into blaming mode, because when people do that, guess what, emotions go really high, and intelligence tanks, and then people make horrible decisions and say horrible things.
That they can’t take back. And so you’re avoiding that just by this practice alone. So good for you. Yeah. No
[00:07:52] Michael Pacheco: it’s a good one and kind of spoke. I think I thought it spoke a little bit to what you were talking about. But circling back to, to, to you, Dan, tell us what’s a, the last time we spoke, it was 2021.
Our episode was published. On August 31st of 2021. So I’m guessing you and I probably spoke in July at some point. What is new with your business since then? What’s on your radar today? Tell us a little bit about what’s been
[00:08:18] Dan LeFave: going on. Sure. The, I think the core thing is that really excites me is that there’s a principle that 10 X is easier than two X.
And one of my mentors is, he wrote a book about this, Ben Hardy. And the idea that you can 10 X rather than two X, because two X is actually doable and two X, two X actually gives you. Lots of options, 10 X is like a triage. It’s you have to solve this problem. You don’t have time to waste.
So you actually get really narrow on your focus and you only take actions because if 80 percent of what you’re doing every day is distraction, which there’s research on, then man, it’s an uphill climb, right? You’re really battling against something that’s maybe invisible, right? That you can’t see what the distractions are, the habits, right?
So that’s really that’s exciting me. And the other thing is, and I’m working with founders that are scaling their businesses. They have teams of people, they just haven’t built their business on a foundation, strong foundation. It’s built on a foundation of sand. It’s built like it’s an owner operator type approach.
So they’re scaling. And the other thing is that people don’t realize the power of Asking effective questions. Now, you might have heard this, but if you think about it you might have an Alexa or one of those, Google minis or something like that. So when we ask questions to those devices, if we don’t ask it properly.
We get all sorts of junky answers, like just, useful, useless information. And it’s the same thing on even chat GPT. If you played around with that, I
[00:09:53] Michael Pacheco: was just going to say, this is, I will triple quadruple down on, on that statement for AI, because if you. Are asking the wrong prompts to something like chat GPT or any of these, GPT for based AI models.
It’s, you’re not going to, yeah, you’re going to get garbage and garbage out.
[00:10:13] Dan LeFave: Yeah, so here’s what’s really fascinating and I mean, I don’t know everybody in the world in terms of coaching and so on But I know that most people are doing this like James Clear talked about it in his book So he’ll he said things like in atomic habits.
He said, who’s the type of person? So if you’re asking who’s the type of person again, that’s a prompt, right? That’s you’re prompting yourself Who’s the type of person and what does that person do? Or, if you, even like Noah St. John, he wrote a book called The Little Book of Affirmations.
Affirmations is a term he came up with. It’s basically an affirmation turned into a question. Because the principle here is that your conscious mind responds to statements, your subconscious mind responds to questions. So if the, so let’s just agree for a moment here that questions are the answer.
Which is what these guys are saying, then we should be prompting our subconscious mind better because Carl Jung said until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. In essence, we got to get into the subconscious mind and how do you get in there? You ask questions and there’s also another part of our mind called the reticular activating system, which is called the RAS or yeah, reticular activating system, RAS.
So it’s a filter that governs our life and here’s what’s governing everybody’s life. It’s self worth. So we won’t accept things that we’re not feeling worthy, deserving and worthy of receiving and deserving to receive. So guess what? Until we ask those questions, flip the filter around, like switch it, right?
Rewire this, get new software in there and make it hardware. Until we do that, until we ask better questions, we’re not going to get the solution. I’ll give you a perfect example. A client of mine had a son who spilt his. Coffee spilt his dad’s coffee on his chest. Big red burn, right? Hot, hot coffee.
So I get a message from him and he’s spilt hot coffee and my son don’t know what to do. And I said, Oh, I know what to do. A few months ago, my son spilt some hot water on his leg and we had to go through the same process. And what did we do? We contacted my brother in law who’s a doctor. We did all this YouTube research.
So in a triage situation like that. You’re asking dozens of questions, maybe hundreds really fast. And so why wouldn’t we do the same thing in business to solve our problems? We’re solving a problem that’s immediate. That’s maybe for somebody else, but in business, we should do the thing.
We should prompt our own subconscious mind. And the beauty of it, and I’m getting, I’m guessing that most people may not understand how the mind operates, but just trust that 96, 98 percent of our subconscious mind is running our lives. That’s based on research. So it’s there in the background operating, doing its thing, storing data.
It’s not doing any thinking though, cause that’s our conscious, right? And so we got to get in there. And so the easiest way is hit it with questions and do that consistently. And you probably heard it, like there’s talks on Mindvalley where a guy said, he kept asking himself, how can I make a hundred million dollar business out of this?
And he just kept asking and asking, and even Einstein, he was a good asker. He asked tons of questions, right? So if we get better at asking questions and attack it from different angles. Guess what? The answers start to show up. Evidence starts to show up.
[00:13:33] Michael Pacheco: And that’s where you’re talking about the reticular activating system where when you ask that question, then your brain is going to be subconsciously looking for the answer.
[00:13:43] Dan LeFave: Yeah. And the beauty, you don’t have to, you can ask it, set it, it’s like a set it and forget it. You ask the question, go on with your business and it’s going to keep working on solving that. And even just a little side note as well. At night is the best time because when you ask it before you go to sleep, then your mind marinates on that all night trying to solve it.
And it’s unencumbered by your conscious mind because you shut it off, right? You went to sleep. So
[00:14:09] Michael Pacheco: there’s a great, there’s a great book. I don’t know that it is worthy of being a book because the concept is so simple, but it’s written by the guy who Was the show runner for MacGyver, remember the TV show, MacGyver, the guy could, get out of any situation and make a bomb out of a toothpick and a roll of toilet paper.
And so obviously the show writer for this has to be incredibly creative because they have to come up with these difficult situations for him to get into and really creative unique ways for him to get out of those situations and what he. I’ll give you the summary of the book in a couple sentences.
What he would do is he would write down on, a notebook here. And he would write down the question, how, here’s here, he would write down the scenario. MacGyver’s in this situation. How does he get out of this? How do we resolve this? Whatever the question is that he had, he would write it down and then he would leave the office and he’d go on a walk.
He’d go for lunch. He would just leave and let it do its work. And then he said every time, if it wasn’t the same day, maybe the next day he’d come back and the answers would just would present themselves.
[00:15:23] Dan LeFave: So he’s turning a problem. Sounds like he’s turning a problem into a question, which is exactly what needs to happen.
If we don’t do that, then we usually ask questions that are taking us further into the problem that take us. backwards. That’s what most people do. They’re like, how come this isn’t working? How, how much more should I put in? How much, how much more money do I have to put into this? If Elon Musk asked that about the 200 million he put into space X, we wouldn’t have rockets landing, autonomously.
[00:15:53] Michael Pacheco: Yeah. So what you’re saying there then, correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s important to frame the question. As though we’re moving towards a solution and not facing the problem itself.
[00:16:06] Dan LeFave: Yeah. Like outcome based. So you have the problem, flip it and turn it into a question. So you can do that with any situation, but again, most people don’t think like this or look at the situation like this because they don’t understand the science and brain science and psychology behind it.
They don’t get it, but if they did and they realized, wow, is this how all these. Major, hugely successful people are accomplishing what they’re doing. Is it because they’re just flipping things, turning into a question? Because we know through psychology, there’s confirmation bias.
That’s evidence. So guess what? We say we’re going to buy a Tesla. Next thing you know, we’re seeing Teslas everywhere. And we don’t question why. We’re just like, wow, I didn’t notice all these Teslas before, but they’re out there. They’re everywhere. That’s confirmation bias. So guess what? If you ask the question, now your mind starts looking for evidence.
So it starts bringing you opportunities and situations that will prove that correct. It’s, I know it sounds miraculous or hocus pocus or woo, but.
[00:17:08] Michael Pacheco: There’s the woo side of it, right? Is in, in my opinion, is we’re talking about the secret, right? The book. For those of you guys, I’m sure most people are familiar with this by Rhonda Byrne, this is totally what this is.
And this is, again, this is like the woowoo side of it, but there’s, it’s all backed by, it’s all backed by behavioral science and cognitive science and everything.
[00:17:30] Dan LeFave: The point of all this, though, is becoming aware because if we don’t, then. Habitually, especially if we practice self doubt and self criticism, and most people do that naturally, if you don’t like, and if you don’t do it with like kind of ritualistic approach, like generative, it’s, there’s a term called generative thinking as well.
So generative thinking could, you could practically put it into context here. So you could say, okay, generative thinking is like, when you get out of bed, you could say, this is going to be amazing day. I don’t know what’s going to happen today, but there’s some wonderful things. I’m going to be interviewed.
It’s going to be awesome. And that’s generative thinking, but also you can just take those questions about the problems that you have and just fire them at your mind because otherwise it will do the same thing. The familiar past is what happens every day and people don’t recognize that. But if they looked at their future and ask questions and let the future pull them.
It’s likely going to happen. There’s a better chance unless you really want to just work hard and use willpower, which like I said, is an energy vampire, then do that. But you know what? Most people burn out and probably ruin their relationships and maybe their health all at once. So why do that?
Sacrifice themselves and their family and their relationships for business.
[00:18:47] Michael Pacheco: Yeah. I Dan, I’d be curious to know if you have any. Kind of routines or tips or tricks for how you go about doing this. I know for me I keep a little, tiny legal pad on my nightstand and a pen there.
And when I am as part of my getting ready for bed routine, I’ll just. Think back about my day, think about tomorrow any problems that come to mind and I’ll write down things usually in the form of a question, although not always but most often in the form of a question, problems that I want to solve and that I maybe had difficulty solving during the day or something like that.
And I’ll write it down and then I will go to bed.
[00:19:28] Dan LeFave: Yeah. You’re doing something phenomenal because most people don’t do this, but asking that question before you go to sleep, lets your mind marinate and percolate on that, which is exactly what you want to do instead of trying to do the heavy lifting with your conscious thinking.
And and logic usually doesn’t solve the problem anyway. It’s using emotional, deeper problem that needs to be solved by a higher, more powerful mind. So to tap into that, I’ve taken it a step further. I have a, if you want to call it a vision board, but I call it the wall of obsession. So it’s a wall of obsession and that wall is right over here behind me Or here and it is full of questions in great big text And so basically I can’t avoid it if, unless I’m blind, it’s there staring at me, yeah so that’s part of a morning ritual that I have, and my morning ritual is bigger than what I’m talking about, but one of the things I do every morning, and I’ve actually, I have a bathroom of my own, so I actually did the same thing, I covered the whole mirror, except for a little spot in the middle but the whole mirror is covered, and this wall is covered with questions that are pointing me in the direction.
Of the things I want, right? It’s solving the problems. And so basically, they’re constant reminders and they’re, and I’m hitting my subconscious mind with it repetitiously. If you think about building muscle, you go to the gym, three times a week, whatever it is, right? Those reps after months, you realize, wow my wife’s noticing these muscles and man, I can feel them.
And I actually can’t even get my toothbrush in my mouth because I worked out so hard. And yeah, have you had that problem? I have. Cause it’s you have to take your arm and like literally pull your elbow. But, so that’s the thing. If you think about getting your reps in, which atomic habits talks about that, then this is an easy way to get your reps in.
You just have to have this front present. If you stick it on a computer screen somewhere or on your phone, it gets buried. But if you have it out there, and I’m, vision board, maybe people don’t know what that is, but a vision board is where you put images and text and different things up there that really matter to you.
I just figured, hey, let’s make it simple. Nice and big text. And if my eye catches it, I’m reading it. So there’s that and even beyond that, there’s something called the optimist creed. Have you heard of that? I have not. So the optimist creed, I’ve gone ahead and modified it because I thought it could be better and surprising.
And then so I took it and stuck it on my pantry door. Okay. So when I’m going to get water in the morning, I’m reading it. It actually has a sign there because I put it there. It says, read me, right? So I read it and it’s just these are affirmations more or less. Cause it’s I promised myself to be so strong that nothing can disturb my peace of mind.
These are statements. So I’m doing statements and then asking questions in other parts of my day. So it’s that constant, you think about this if you really want to solve a problem bleeding neck, burnt skin, you’re going to hit it with whatever you need to. You’re going to figure it out.
You’re not going to just sit there and say let’s see what happens, right? Let’s see, so let’s see if my son stops crying, with that burn on, like maybe in a few hours. Yeah, let’s see if his skin doesn’t stay hot pink okay, no, we’re going to solve it.
So I’ve taken the really acute approach to dealing with this and so I’m testing it and we’ll see what happens. I’ll mention 1 other thing that I’m doing, which is cool and I learned this from Dr. Benjamin Hardy. He’s written a book. 10 X is bigger, easier than 2 X. Be your future self.
Now, some really good books, gap and the gain. He’s some gap and gain is
[00:23:06] Michael Pacheco: amazing. That book is good. So
[00:23:09] Dan LeFave: good. So I’ll say something about that and then I’ll say something else. So I came up with the term gain mode. How do you play gain mode? How do you stay in gain mode? I have this planning system, this planner, and I’ve showed you before, it’s a 12 week planner.
All we’re doing is measuring against last week, measuring against the, a few weeks before. How are we, what’s the progress? What’s the, what’s, and then the other part of, the other flip side of it is reflection review. Every 30 days, reflection review. That’s, again, playing gain mode on a 30 day 30 day span.
Then the other thing that I’m doing is this, Ben talks about building time capsules. You’ve probably seen Jimmy Donaldson’s Mr. Beast video. Have you seen that one where he was talking to his future self? Okay.
[00:23:51] Michael Pacheco: No, I have not. I know Mr. I know of Mr. Beast, but I haven’t, I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a Mr.
Beast video.
[00:23:56] Dan LeFave: So he was making prediction as to where he should be. And he’s saying I should be at least 40, 000 or whatever. He was like millions of right. And he was just. projecting outwards, right? So I learned from Ben that we should do 30 day projections. So basically it’s a video that I record either for my present self to talk to my future self or vice versa from future to present.
So guess what? I decided to play at a high level. Every morning I shoot a video that’s a daily time capsule. And so every morning it’s my 9 p. m. version talking to my morning guy saying here’s what we did today It was amazing day and I just make it up and I know I have things going on and I can talk about those Things but it’s a daily time capsule.
So I’m projecting What’s going to happen that day just by going forward into my future talking to my present self So when 5
[00:24:47] Michael Pacheco: p. m. rolls around, do you go back and watch that video and evaluate success or failure? Or is that beside the point?
[00:24:55] Dan LeFave: It’s, I guess it’s beside the point. I’ve actually never watched the videos back.
But I probably would surprise myself if I did. And then, but yeah, I guess there’s a point to it, but I haven’t done that yet. I’m too busy just making the videos and doing other things. And just, I’m like this forward thinking. Machine that’s just sure go. I’m I’ll go anywhere as long as it’s forward.
So I’m just doing that for momentum. And then whatever evidence is showing up like crazy lately, which is mind boggling. And anyway, but I’m now realizing, okay, I asked for those things. So I should shut up and say, high five myself.
[00:25:27] Michael Pacheco: Why are you clapping, Dan? Why are you clapping?
[00:25:30] Dan LeFave: Mel Robbins said, high five yourself in the mirror. And so I guess we just do that, right? Hey, good on you. You’re awesome.
[00:25:36] Michael Pacheco: Right on. Very cool, man. I love this kind of stuff. I am the biggest believer in this stuff. And I’ll, I want to I’ll share a short story that I may have shared once or twice before on this podcast.
But when you know three about three years ago now my wife and I We’re sitting around our kitchen table at a little rental house in Vancouver, Washington. And we sat down at the kitchen table together with a notebook and we each, uh, wrote down our perfect average day and what that looked like. On our average day, what does a perfect day look like?
And it was it was a vision board. It was our forward projecting, right? And she had her version and I had mine and we read them to each other. And they were very similar in a lot of ways. And in some ways they differed a little bit. And one way in which there was a definite confluence was us having a property in the mountains where we love, where we can go hiking, where there’s fresh air.
Having animals and starting a family. And it took us about nine months after we did that exercise to close on this property, where we live now. So
[00:26:56] Dan LeFave: just like the birth of a child, there was a gestation period. Yeah,
[00:27:02] Michael Pacheco: totally. And all that it was in, in retrospect, and what we did after that, by the way, I should add this is.
I’m not sure about her. I can speak for myself. I read my perfect average day every day, every morning as part of my morning routine. I would read that as a reminder, which then triggered the reticular activating system. And it opened me up. So whenever I saw, uh, for sale sign a land for sale sign or something like that, or, looking on I would start looking on what’s the website Zillow for things.
And we found the, we found a few different properties. We must’ve looked at maybe half a dozen properties, give or take. And we found this one and fell in love. And it wasn’t nine months after we sat down at that kitchen table that we closed on it with the bank and started building our dream home up here.
We now have a 15 month year old baby girl and another one on the way. And I can’t. This stuff might have fallen into place if we didn’t do that exercise, but doing, running through that created so much clarity for both of us. And it just it seemed like everything, it was like an avalanche.
It just all just came at once and all just happened right away. It was amazing.
[00:28:17] Dan LeFave: Yeah. Look at you at your reps in and you said it clarity. So again, that hard drive the subconscious, it needs images to feed the possibility. So you were plugging into the words and likely you were getting images in your mind.
And then when you started live, you started seeing live ones, then it actually solidified it even more. But also know this, the imagination is the scissors of the mind. So as you imagine things, you start cutting out it. Other possibilities, right? So other things that are not what you don’t want.
So yeah, the imagination scissors is the scissors of the mind. So you imagine things and then just like Tesla, he said, Hey, I know I’m going to build the alternator. Why? Because I imagined the whole plant, the manufacturing, everything from start to finish, it’s just going to happen just a matter of time.
And so getting your reps in like you did is critical. Most people don’t have that kind of mindset or that kind of training or that kind of commitment, but if they did, can you imagine how fast they could progress and then get to the point where they feel more in a state of flow where they’re not like pushing and pushing.
That’s you what you did is you took the future and you let it pull you forward you worked from the future backwards Which is most people they don’t do that They work from here and then climb the mountain with a bag of boulders on their shoulders, right? Trying to get up there and the bag of boulders is their history and all their habits and practice and beliefs Like that’s the self worth right?
That’s the governor on people’s lives that they don’t realize that’s there Impeding them and, trauma and drama and all that stuff that’s back there. Because until you, here’s what has to happen when you start forgetting your past and remembering your future more, which is what you did, then your past just goes away.
The rental and whatever else went away and the house in the mountains came, right? You made it happen, so we call it, you call it manifesting. So you did, you manifested it, which is you projected and you you made it happen. And you’re likely standing there in your environment saying, wow this is, I’m pretty powerful.
Yeah. But you know what? And it’s amazing. Like when my wife and I, we did the same thing by the lake. We wrote down what we would like our house to look like. And then we moved in and we said, Wow this is it. And it’s unbelievable. There’s many stories like this where people actually do a little bit of a design or drawing of what they want, what their home looks like, their environment, and they put their attention, their focus on it, and then they get it.
There’s no, it’s not a, magical thing that, wealthy people are doing in the world. It’s just a question of. How consistent and persistent they can be, because it’s all patterns of thought, patterns of action, patterns of awareness, and and the evidence starts showing up, then we can’t be like, Oh, I can’t believe this is more ah, that’s, that is it.
That’s what I asked for. It’s perfect. Even, Florence, do you know her work? Nope. She wrote a book called The Game of Life. It was written back around Napoleon Hill time, 1920s, 30s. But yeah, she just, she put things in the context. So if you’re asking for something, asking outwardly to God or the universe, she just says it like this, open the way for the perfect plan and the perfect pathway.
Open the way, eat what you want and just say, open the way, ask for it, right? Plug into your subconscious mind, get the images in there, the words, thoughts, right? Get it full so it’s clear, then it knows what you want. It’s like me asking my wife to go to a restaurant. I’m not going to say, do you want to go for Indian?
I know she likes that. I’m going to say. Do you want to go for Italian? No. Do you want to go for Chinese? No. Okay. All right. And then we, we get the no’s out of the way. And then we, now she’s getting irritated and I’m actually going to get the answers I need. So the subconscious is the same way.
You got to ask questions that are going to take you where it needs to go. Yeah. Yeah, it’s just, we don’t think about this. Like we’re in a binary universe. Night and day, in and out, up and down, right? So we have to have contrast, okay? If you play the game of self doubt, self criticism, worry, guilt, fear, then, what’s on the flip side of that?
it’s faith, it’s intention, purpose, passion, meaning. Those are the things, right? And if we give our attention to that and then ask questions, then yes, things are going to show up. And then people are going to say, Hey, man, how did you do that? And then you tell them, and then they’re going to say, Oh, I don’t know if I could do that.
That’s pretty, that’s a huge commitment, man.
[00:32:49] Michael Pacheco: So Dan, how does all of this, so this is all fascinating again, this is stuff that I love, three years ago. I didn’t believe in any kind of, in any of this stuff because I thought it was very woo and I was blessed at the time to have a coach who knew better and who guided me to do some of these exercises and who guided me towards the science of it to help me realize that it’s not all BS, that it’s not all woo.
How does this play into your coaching? How does this play into your simplifying the complex and breaking down bottlenecks and so forth?
[00:33:22] Dan LeFave: What I’ve done is I, and I’m using a system for coaching. There’s a coach that built it with his team and other co founders up coach by Todd Herman.
He’s, you probably know who Todd is. He wrote the 90 day year and alter ego. Anyway, they built the system. So I basically took everything that I’m talking to you about here and I put it into one platform. So I love 12 week sprints. So I took the 12 week year, built it into a model. And so then it’s based on goals.
Motivations. Those are what pulls on your heartstrings. So I have that. And it’s always measuring performance backwards. So it’s always managing tactics, things you can control, nothing that’s out of your control. Otherwise, you’re playing not to lose. And then so then that’s the ultimate focus is to build that goal or those goals.
And it’s business health relationships. We’re measuring all three because if you let health go The other two can go if you let relationships go affects your health and then your business gets impacted. So yeah, holistic approach But then we’re playing gain mode. So I took the gap in the game I Planted that on top of my process So now it’s all about what can we stay in gain mode because what progress is a process and what’s the greatest progress?
Or what’s the greatest motivation, sorry, progress. If people are making little incremental progresses, they feel good. It doesn’t matter how small, right? Little incremental progresses. And then we’re doing regular projection and reflection. Every month, reflect and review. Actually, every week we’re reflecting and reviewing because that’s part of the planner.
But every month we do a broader reflect and review. Why? Gain mode keeps people in the gain mindset, right? And projecting forward, which is, Always thinking, what’s the future like it’ll blow your mind. Like I wrote down projections for my brother and I, for us to grow his business. It went from 200, 000 to 400, 000 to 600, 000 to a million, and I was just putting numbers on paper to give to the bank.
A P and L statement. I didn’t know what I was doing and we’re hitting these targets and I didn’t even realize it until I connected the dots. And I was like, man, all he did was project. So that’s part of my system as well. But also there’s a lot of mindset and psychology and brain science involved in it.
So the other thing I’m doing is I mind map. So every time I have a call with a client, they tell me what their challenges are. I basically break it down into problems and solutions or obstacles and opportunities, and I boil it down and give them simple, they find the way out. They find the solution, and then they have tactics, and those tactics are pathways.
They’re called pathways thinking, so I give them those tactics as takeaways. They put them in their calendar and go to it. And then next week we review, how did that go? Did you crash and burn, or did you get it done? And then, so that’s the process I’m using. But I’ve taken all of these.
Beautiful systems out there, marry them together. Then the final thing is standards. Most people don’t know what their standards are. They don’t know what they stand for. So I help these founders build their personal standards, team standards, business standards, and then everything matches the puzzle.
So that way there’s no wiggle room. They know that their standards are being lived by in their business. Because everything filters down and you get buy in from your team, but those standards help police things that way. There’s less heavy lifting because I have some clients that they have they’re psychologists.
They’re dealing with emotions all the time and excuses and blaming and complaining, man. You can’t 10 X your business like that. So I’m removing all these obstacles, right? Simplify, standardize. Multiply that’s the process and I’ve done it and I didn’t know, but I did it and now I’m teaching others and I help them do it too.
There are standard operating procedures in there as well. It’s what do they need to simplify things and get things off their plate, help other people be self accountable, self reliable and take action.
[00:37:19] Michael Pacheco: Nice. Very cool, man. Obviously at Boxer, we do marketing for coaches. So I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you what are you doing for marketing these days?
How are you marketing yourself? How are you getting new clients? What’s your plan around that?
[00:37:32] Dan LeFave: I’m actually using a little more of the universal power than I am things on the ground, but I do have things on the ground as well. So I have a combination of go high level. And Flowchat is for LinkedIn communications and pipelines and so on.
So that’s to engage, but really I’m sifting and sorting for hungry, humble and smart people. That’s who I’m looking for. That’s from the Ideal Team Player, this book that I just love the concept though. And I like working with people that are hungry, humble and smart. And so in terms of marketing on the ground, it is Flowchat combined with high level.
And, whatever I need to do in there, but I am not like, breaking my back trying to do that instead. I’m basically looking for people by referrals. And so I, I seek that. So now that I know the power of what I’m teaching and talking about today, then I’m just going for that. So humble, and smart founders out there by referral.
[00:38:27] Michael Pacheco: For referrals. Do you have a specific referral process?
[00:38:30] Dan LeFave: For referring me? Yeah.
[00:38:32] Michael Pacheco: So if you were working with a client and you get a big win. With that client, do you then go to that client and say, Hey, we just had this big win, do you have anyone, do you know of anyone that you think might also benefit from something like this that you could introduce me to?
Do you have a system for? Asking for referrals.
[00:38:51] Dan LeFave: Yeah that’s one of them and I learned a little something from Eben Pegg and the same thing. So it’s or maybe it was it was I don’t know, maybe it was another book I studied, but, the same thing. So it’s about, I don’t necessarily ask the question of, them directly always for a referral.
But ask who they know and then ultimately it gets their mind tuned in to thinking about who they know. And then they will probably send those people to me. But but I’m just, I’m really, I just have a faith and it is it’s working phenomenally. So if I keep doing that, then I guess I can just trash all the other marketing.
So that probably doesn’t sound good to you because you’d probably be like, that’s not going to work. But
[00:39:26] Michael Pacheco: I would recommend a metered approach
[00:39:29] Dan LeFave: to both. But the thing is what I’m doing is it’s organic and it’s communicating with people, it’s providing value, it’s commenting on influencers posts and engaging with them.
I’m fortunate, like my wife studied with a guy named Gabor Mate. I don’t know if you ever heard that name. Absolutely. Absolutely. So she studied with him. We went to an event, saw him. I met his son, because Gabor and his son wrote the book, this last book together. And I’ve been connecting Gabor with these big podcasters.
Somehow I got to know them. So I’m guessing sooner or later I’m going to be on these big podcasts because I introduced them to some phenomenal people. So I’m already setting up the groundwork for bigger and better things just by. So I’m all about providing value and and contributing where I can, but, looking for the kinds of people that have the heart where they’re, they wear their heart on their sleeve and and they’re out there to do good things.
They want to create a better world, a better place. And it’s easy to resonate with people like that in the world. You don’t have to hunt for them. They’re not. Millions of them, maybe there are, but they’re scattered. So you’re probably like that. Yeah. That’s the thing.
Like most people are just drifters, like from Napoleon Hills, outwitting the devil. So they’re drifting. They consume garbage TV. They consume garbage food. They abuse substances. So there’s self abuse, substance abuse, all kinds of abuse. And then there’s a small percentage of people that are actually aware and thinking about making the world a better place.
And so I’m really searching for those people. I don’t really want to work with, I couldn’t work with somebody with a big ego or somebody that’s doing harm to the world or society or our youth or something, I’ve had opportunities like that. And. It’s tough. It’s that’s business right there.
I could just say yes, but then I’m like, man, how can I support that? Ethically, morally, my standards.
[00:41:20] Michael Pacheco: You gotta be, you gotta be authentic to yourself, man. If it’s there’s definite, I can see how that could be there could be some pull. Toward that direction because it is, it is business, right?
And you got a mortgage pay and a family to take care of. And at the same time you’ve, really you’re blessed to have a
[00:41:37] Dan LeFave: conscience, but here’s I got really clear on this with Bob Proctor. He was one of my mentors. I started with him. He’s the one who certified me and I remember him saying this clearly you have to let go of something That’s a lesser value for something of a higher value and I didn’t get it until you know the past Dozen years or so, It’s like that is critical because you always have to let go of something to make space for something better He calls it the vacuum law of prosperity so in a vacuum like a closet full of clothes if my wife’s Closet is full, which it practically is are we going to fit anything else in there?
Do we have to find another closet in the spare room? If we are, that’s an issue, right? So it’s let’s get rid of some stuff, make some space. And so the mind is the same way and your life is the same way. So you have to take stuff that’s low value, make space for higher value. And sometimes it means letting, I let go of people you can fast on food, you can also fast on people.
And people fasting, new term so I fasted on my grade 10 friends cause I, I went to a higher level of education and made new friends, but sometimes that’s, that’s necessary. Like you have to let go of stuff that just isn’t going to move you where you want to go.
[00:42:48] Michael Pacheco: Yeah, definitely. I think that’s that’s a good, that’s a good piece of advice for anyone who’s listening to this and is, maybe working or in the midst of, or just beginning, like turning something around in your life what’s the I think it’s Jim Rohn said you are the average of the five people.
Who are most around you, you surround yourself with and I know there was a point in my life where I was bartending, I was a high functioning alcoholic and just, floating around being a drifter and and it was fun, but it wasn’t going to. It wasn’t, it was fun and it wasn’t going to serve me in the long term.
And at the time that I decided that it was, time for me to upgrade my life, there was there was a definite distancing that had to happen between a lot of my very close friends from that period of time. Yeah.
[00:43:45] Dan LeFave: I did the same thing. There was a point in my life where alcohol was just too much to handle, a lot of bad things happening.
And yeah, I just had to say no more. And then fortunately I met my wife who was running marathons who couldn’t drink because some sort of enzyme in her gut or whatever. And I’m like, all right, I guess no more drinking. And then you can’t do all this training for marathons and drink. Yeah, so that’s 23 years ago.
Your wife, yeah, she’s Asian. Yes.
[00:44:10] Michael Pacheco: My wife’s Chinese. I think that she has similar thing with the lack of the enzyme. Yeah.
[00:44:15] Dan LeFave: And I’m grateful for it, but also, you just can’t handle, you can’t manage both. So it’s either you’re training a high level or you’re drinking at a high level.
And so there was going to be no drinking. Otherwise I would have been separated. But but the thing is, yeah, we were just, we were training and training. few times a week doing all these classes and stuff. And the focus just became so clear that’s what needed to happen, but the discipline to run marathons, we did 10 years of that.
And that’s just you don’t. You don’t have time to mess around. You’re like, this is train time. It doesn’t matter. Rain or shine, snow, blizzards, we did two, two hours on a treadmill one day. I’ll never do it again, but two hour is boring. Sure, sure. Two hours, because that was our commitment.
We had to do two hours that day as part of our training. But we put it in.
[00:45:03] Michael Pacheco: Dan, I want to be, I want to be respectful of your time. I know we’re coming up on the hour here, but one thing, one story, a real quick story I’ll share with you, there was another coach on the podcast that told this story and essentially there was a, it was the Australian Olympic rowing team.
Stop me if you’ve heard this and there, they were the, yeah, there were the Olympic rowing team in Australia. Their coach had this this motto that everyone on the team had to ask themselves before they did anything, does it make the boat go faster? And that, and this is obviously like a clear metaphor for life.
This can be applied to absolutely anything. And this is something that we say at Boxer all the time. And we use the boat metaphor, right? The boat being boxer. Does this make the boat go faster? The boat can be your life. The boat can be your business. The boat can be anything. The boat could be your marathon.
You want to go out for, you want to go out to the pub for a pint on Friday night? Does it make the boat go faster? If the answer is no, then you’re not going. And it’s just such a, it’s such a great way to approach it. I think it’s a really great way to break habits. It has been for me anyway, because it’s just such a simple question.
And it’s very easy to answer.
[00:46:17] Dan LeFave: Yeah, you can do this with a multitude of things. You can even look at food and say, will this help my brain? Is this good for my brain? Give yourself a moment. Yeah, is it going to make the boat go fast? Is it going to make my brain go faster? Corn chips? Probably not.
Okay, put it down. And that’s it. Talk yourself off the cliff, right? It’s
[00:46:37] Michael Pacheco: such a simple question that’s so quick and easy to answer. It has been invaluable for both me and my personal life and for us at Boxer. So I thought I’d share that with me. That’s a really good
[00:46:49] Dan LeFave: one.
Yeah. Just think how it narrows your focus, right? It’s there’s no way out of it. It’s either, is this Going to help or not.
[00:46:56] Michael Pacheco: There’s no gray
[00:46:57] Dan LeFave: area. Yeah. If it’s a no, then it’s a no, then dump it. So no, that’s it.
[00:47:02] Michael Pacheco: Awesome. Dan, this has been a fantastic conversation, man. I love talking about this stuff as you can tell, because I’ve been probably been talking a lot this time.
I appreciate you making time to chat with me. Where can our viewers and listeners connect with you online?
[00:47:15] Dan LeFave: The best place is LinkedIn. I live on that. A few days a week, and I have a weekly I have a weekly newsletter. I put out. So I’m always providing insights. I’m basically taking everything I’m studying and learning and watering it down and putting it into articles.
So I’m giving everybody’s Coles notes of all the different things I’m learning. And I fuse things together because, there’s just too many systems out there. And I think some of them make too much sense to put together like my plan or in game mode, right? It just but yeah, great research, great teachers out there.
I’m just I’m the student that’s putting it together and making it easy for everybody.
[00:47:49] Michael Pacheco: Love it man. So we’ll have links to your LinkedIn on the show notes page for this. Do you still have Instagram and Twitter? Are you still active on either of those platforms?
[00:47:59] Dan LeFave: No not nearly.
I am occasionally, but you know what, LinkedIn is really my, my home, the
[00:48:04] Michael Pacheco: big one. Awesome. Good to know. Good to know. And then we, you brought up, gosh, I’ve got notes here on about a dozen different books. So we’ll link to those books on the show notes as well. Some of these I can definitely speak to alter ego effect by Todd Herman was amazing.
The, what was the other one? Gap and Gain, Ben Hardy. That was my wife and I listened to the audio book together and loved it so much that we each bought our own copy of the actual book so we could. Scribble in the margins.
[00:48:33] Dan LeFave: Yeah. Yeah. There’s, and Ben wrote another one called be your future self now, which is really good.
Cause it’s all about future thinking. And he just came out with one that’s called 10 X is easier than 2 X. And again, it’s on the same train of thought. And it’s all about 10 X in your life and your business. Narrowing your focus, singularity, removing bottlenecks all those kinds of things. So that’s brilliant.
There’s so many great books, but the little book of affirmations that is turning your problems into questions and the psychology and science behind that is, is simple, but once you get it and you start turning your problems into questions, then, it’s going to be like, you’re just manifesting like crazy and eventually you’ll probably have to stop because you have too much.
[00:49:14] Michael Pacheco: That’s a game changer. That’s a game changer. Abundance is life. Awesome. Dan thank you again for joining us. I really appreciate you making time to chat with me again after so long. It’s been great catching up. Thank you to our viewers and listeners. This show means nothing without you guys.
You’re fantastic. Be sure to please like subscribe and share this with someone that, who you think might appreciate some of Dan’s messages here. So that’s it for me. Thanks everybody. We’ll see you guys next time.