Capability Amplifier

What business are you in? What do people call you? How do you introduce yourself? How many competitors do you have? If you don't have competitors, you’re what I call a “Category of One” brand.  How many people today would you consider to be a “Category Of One”?  Oprah? Elon Musk? Warren Buffett? Richard Branson?  I consider myself and my co-host, Dan Sullivan, to be a “Category Of One” because for the past 30 years, we have both been in the business of making dreams come true—for ourselves, our employees, our families, and our clients—and it’s something we’re both very passionate about.  It’s like this ... if someone asked me to create the perfect profession for myself, it is and always has been to make dreams come true.   In this episode, Dan and I dive into how we are able to accomplish making dreams come true for our clients. Bottom line is that we’re both in the same business but have different methodologies.  We’ll cover a few client case studies, including:   * Charlie Epstein, a mutual client who had been in the finance business all his life, who we helped turn his dream of performing stand-up comedy into a moneymaking, fulfilling reality. He “makes money funny” with a one-man show called “Yield of Dreams.” * Brett Kaufman, a very successful real estate developer and visionary, who we helped figure out the best messaging, launch a podcast, and decide on a platform for his greatest creation to date, The Gravity Project (an incredible live/work lifestyle facility that has affordable housing). * Both are in a “Category of One.” * Dan started Strategic Coach® because he was a horrible student who barely passed high school. He was incapable of staying awake in a classroom environment. He needed to TEACH in order to stay awake, or be really engaged with activities. * Thus, Strategic Coach was born—a place where performance is appreciated and the lesson materials are about YOU. You never get bored with yourself, right? It’s everyone’s favorite subject. * Dan created structures and processes so that everyone is able to amplify their Unique Ability® and have a community where they feel “normal.”   In our experience, most entrepreneurs feel like misfits, outsiders, or aliens because of their unique way of thinking, processing information, and just being in the world. Both Dan and I have been there, and it’s not fun. To have a place where you feel understood, welcome, and appreciated is life-changing, and that’s why we both do what we do. We’re thinking about starting a school called ALIEN UNIVERSITY! What do you think?   * True freedom is what most people say they want, but freedom is only created from the inside out. It takes A LOT of courage to be who you imagine you want to be and block out the people telling you that you can’t. * In order to lead a whole future, you have to start with a whole present, and you can’t do that if you have a half past. You have to go back and complete the unfinished business from the past before you will have confidence to create an entirely new future.  

There is no denying it. We are living in a world where we are inundated all day long with horrific news of the global pandemic and economic crash, and it’s unclear when it will end or how quickly we will recover. Needless to say, we are all navigating some pretty overwhelming emotions, so in light of the current situation, I wanted to send you a ray of sunshine, POSSIBILITY, and HOPE. My friend of more than 20 years and guest on the show this week is Arielle Ford. She’s known as “The Cupid of Consciousness” and “The Fairy Godmother of Love.”  She also represented Deepak Chopra and launched the careers of 11 New York Times #1 Bestselling Authors (when you actually had to sell books for real), including Wayne Dyer, Jack Canfield, Louise Hay (founder of Hay House), Don Miguel Ruiz, Neale Donald Walsch, her sister, the late Debbie Ford, and many more. For years, she was “the gateway” to get on Oprah.  Arielle is a leading personality in the personal growth and contemporary spirituality movement. For the past 30 years, she has been living, teaching, and promoting consciousness through all forms of media. She is a celebrated love and relationship expert, author, and speaker.  She’s also a gifted writer and the author of 11 books, including the international bestseller THE SOULMATE SECRET: Manifest The Love of Your Life With The Law of Attraction (published in 21 languages and 40 countries).  Arielle and I have been “career soul mates,” cheering each other on and supporting each other through every major reinvention in our lives. We’ve been in almost perfect sync for over 20 years. When one of us goes through a major reinvention, within six months, the other does too. It’s weird AND awesome at the same time!  Here are a few of Arielle’s many reinventions. How many of these mirror your own?  In 1987, she started her own PR firm, the Ford group, focusing on commercial real estate, residential real estate, art galleries, hotels, and non-profits. The business took off from the moment she opened the doors. She was hugely successful, making gobs of money. That lasted for three and a half years until a recession hit.  In the span of six weeks, she lost 80% of her business and it didn't look like it was coming back. In two months, she went from 4,000 square feet of office space on Wilshire Boulevard and eight full-time employees to a small 250-square-foot closet office with a half-time employee and a ton of credit card debt. She was depressed, her boyfriend dumped her, and she hit rock bottom.  But it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to her because during this time, she discovered that she hated her clients. She was only in it for the money, and she didn’t want to reinvent that business. Boom. Done.  So what now? She was lost, asking, “Who am I? What do I do? What's my purpose?” She struggled for seven or eight months until she went to lunch with a friend who asked, “If you could represent anybody or anything, who would it be?”  She said, “There's this guy. I'm sure you've never heard of him. He's pretty unknown, but I think he's the best-kept secret in America. His name is Deepak Chopra.” Her friend said, “Not only do I know who he is, my friend Penny works for him!” Later that day, Penny called and said, “This is so funny. Dr. Chopra called this morning and asked me if I could find him a publicist. And here you are!”  A week later, they met. Deepak said, “I've only got five minutes,” and she said, “Great. I only need two.” Then she said, “If you're half as smart as I think you are, you'll hire me,” and he said DEAL.  Suddenly, she was on this new path because her next client was Louise Hay, then Wayne Dyer, then Neale Donald Walsch, then Don Miguel Ruiz.

I know. Crazy times. This episode is really special. We know these are challenging times, and if you or your business isn’t doing well, it’s going to be extremely relevant.  How are you using or spending your time right now?  Amplifying anything requires amplifying time, and one of the things that amplifies time is getting VERY comfortable with what you do. But the moment you think to yourself, “I don’t want any more risk or fear in my life,” a message goes up to the universe and they put you on the list for pickups.   On this show, Dan Sullivan and I focus on the importance of fear, courage, and commitment in your business and life in general, especially in uncertain times like we’re experiencing now.  I recently read a statistic from Harvard Business Review about men in particular. It said that if they retire at around age 50 and they’re not back in the game within 18 months, their chances of succeeding ever again go down into the single digits.   What I believe is that without enough tension, hunger, and fear, your courage disappears. When you’re comfortable without anything to do, sitting around and not taking risks, your courage dissolves. You almost need to have fear on your side to amplify your courage.   Dan relates courage to goal setting. Lots of people have goals, but they’ve got the process of how you achieve goals backwards. Ninety percent of people say, “I can’t achieve that goal yet because I don’t have the confidence to do it.”   Confidence is a result of doing the thing you think you cannot do, and it’s the process of achieving the goal that gives you capability. You have to start BEFORE you actually have the confidence or capability. You have to take a risk when you’re not guaranteed up front you’re actually going to pull it off. That’s when FEAR pops us and wakes up the whole system.   How do you do that? You make a commitment. Whatever you have to change or go through to make the commitment to get to your goal is what you need to do. Is it scary? You bet. This is where courage is required.   Courage is a skill that grows through practice. It’s like a muscle you have to work out. There WILL be a resistance that’s going to scare you because you don’t YET have the confidence and capabilities, but if you commit to being amplified, even though you’re not sure how that’s actually going to happen, you’ll reap the rewards in the end.  Okay, I’m gonna get a little metaphysical on you here: the way that I view the universe is that the universe loves life and whenever it has a chance, it’s gonna pack and fit and squeeze life into every crevice it can find, just like moss.   There are UNINTENTIONAL thoughts and INTENTIONAL thoughts.   I think of ideas and thoughts as objects, and the clearer they are, the faster you can realize them and make them true. When you’re on target, on task, and doing what you’re meant to do, the universe will help you find ways to make things happen. The right people and opportunities show up.  On the opposing side, when you’re not specific about what you want, the universe is going to give you what it thinks you want, which could include pollution and noise. Specificity is really key.   The way I would build my courage when I knew I had to sell something in order to survive or get to the next level was to imagine myself performing the speech in front of the audience. I would VISUALIZE it. I would smell it, taste it, touch it. I could look inside the audience’s eyes and see their souls. And it works. Every. Single. Time.  It’s the combination of commitment and courage that creates a new capability, and confidence is the reward for doing that.   

What do the pope, Andrea Bocelli, brothels, maximum-security prisons, and Elton John all have in common? They’ve all been a part of Steve Sims’s cutting-edge luxury concierge business. Wait ... WHAT?! My friend and guest on this week’s episode is Steve Sims, the creator of “Bluefish,” the internationally famous company that makes once in a lifetime events happen for the rich and famous. Steve is in the business of making the impossible possible. With his help and expertise, his clients’ fantasies and wildest dreams come true. Getting married by the pope in the Vatican, being serenaded by Andrea Bocelli, and connecting with powerful business moguls like Elon Musk and Sir Elton John are just a few of the many projects he has worked on. Steve is also the author of the New York Times bestselling book Bluefishing: The Art Of Making Things Happen in which he shares his practical tips, techniques, and strategies to help YOU break down any obstacle and turn YOUR dreams into reality. He shares a lot of those techniques during our conversation.  But WHO is Steve Sims? If you know him personally, he’s “a strange looking fella that makes things happen.” Forbes called him the real-life Wizard of Oz! He’s the guy that will give you more interesting cocktail stories. He can take your bucket list and make it a reality so that you wake up at 2 a.m. going, “Wow, I can't believe I did that!”  Steve built his entire business by word of mouth. He didn't even have a phone number or an email address on his website. It was literally a case of, “Hey, remember I told you the story of when I played the piano with Elton John? This guy's the one that made that happen.” And it grew from there.  Before his book came out, what used to excite Steve was people challenging him to make seemingly CRAZY things happen. Like closing down a museum in Florence, going down to see the Titanic or playing tennis with Richard Branson. Those things were exciting, expensive, and a challenge for him at the time.  When the book came out, he suddenly found himself working with intelligent entrepreneurs who were held back by their own mindsets telling them there were things they couldn’t possibly do.  Now he’s doing a lot of workshops and speaking all over the planet, shaking up entrepreneurs, getting them uncomfortable, and changing their mindsets. “The superpower of an entrepreneur is their ignorance”—the fact that they can’t possibly perceive that they're going to fail. And with THAT mindset, nine times out of 10 ... they don't.  One of the things that Steve really likes to do with his clients is to get people uncomfortable by putting them in environments they’ve never been in. He’s held masterminds at The Bunny Ranch Brothel, Maximum Security Prisons, and the Tesla Production Plant.  Once you’ve met people who want to change their lives, in an environment that's heavily suppressed like a maximum security prison, you have no more excuses for why your business won’t work. We tend to excuse ourselves to death. Steve is one of the most fascinating, passionate, and principled individuals I have ever met. I cannot WAIT for you to experience this episode.

Welcome to Amplifying And Multiplying Your Time PART 2! This episode is all about focusing on YOUR unique capabilities to amplify your life and business and using real-life time hacks to make the MOST of the time you have.   This episode of the podcast focuses on something I call Folding Time. Think of it visually, as if you were to take a piece of paper and fold it like an accordion or in a stack. You can pass through time by getting through a lot more stuff by stacking or folding time. Here are some “time folding hacks”:   #1 - Personal coaching. This means having someone on the outside look at your life and say, “Here are some horrible behaviors” or “Here are some ways you can get rid of the ‘noise’ in your day-to-day life.”  #2 - Ego death. This essentially means, “What are your worst unconscious behaviors?” Sometimes they're stacked traumas or trauma resolution that comes from getting supportive help, possibly through a spiritual or personal guide. Meditation is the “slow path” toward ego death.   Right now, it’s very popular for executives and professionals to practice “plant medicine” (psilocybin or “magic mushrooms,” ayahuasca, LSD, and many other tools) that rapidly allows you to “see” parts or elements of yourself and rid yourself of them quickly.  Another time compressor is creating less or not over-creating. What I've learned after coaching and advising hundreds of business leaders and executives who feel stuck is that rather than selling more and increasing their value, they go back to creating more “stuff.”   Soon they're surrounded by 40 products that aren’t being sold or marketed. What they should be doing is picking the top three and putting ALL of their effort into those. This isn’t fun or attractive to “quick start creatives,” but it’s necessary.   With 100 percent certainty, I know this to be true and I am completely guilty of doing this in the past. My typical behavior historically is, instead of solving the problems that exist in the current product, to just create a new product with a different message and get that out there. What I wound up with was an overwhelmed and confused audience of buyers. NOT good.  During this episode, Dan and I each talk about and identify our top three unique capabilities—the three things we’re really great at and focus on in order to increase our value and grow our businesses. You’re not going to want to miss those. Enjoy the show!   

Management Mess To Leadership Success!! My guest on this week’s show is Scott Jeffrey Miller. If you want to improve your management skills and capabilities, this is the episode you’ve been waiting for.  Entering his twenty-third year with Franklin Covey, Miller serves as the executive vice president of thought leadership. He is the host of the Franklin Covey-sponsored “On Leadership With Scott Miller,” a weekly leadership webcast, podcast, and newsletter that features interviews with renowned business titans, authors, and thought leaders and is distributed to more than five million business leaders worldwide. He is also the host of the weekly radio program “Great Life, Great Career With Scott Miller.” This radio program and podcast provide insight and strategies drawn from Franklin Covey’s leadership principles and from Miller’s career and personal life experience to assist listeners in becoming more effective as business leaders and to improve their personal performance. One guest interview in particular had such a profound effect on Miller that it inspired him to write his first TWO books, Management Mess To Leadership Success and Everyone Deserves A Great Manager, simultaneously. (Which he does NOT recommend doing, by the way!)  The guest who inspired Miller was Steven M.R. Covey, the oldest son of Dr. Steven Covey whose book The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People sold 30 million copies and who is one of the most influential men of the last 100 years. Miller asked him if he ever felt like he needed to write a book because of his dad and his response was “I didn't until I did.” Meaning he never had anything to say until one day he realized he DID, so he took a two-year sabbatical, wrote The Speed Of Trust and sold two million copies.   At this point, Miller had been at Franklin Covey for 22 years and never thought he had anything to say either ... until that interview. What he realized he had to say is that leadership is not easy, it’s not for everyone, and vulnerability is a leadership competency (which really goes against the traditional culture of the firm).   Miller wrote the first book, Management Mess To Leadership Success, which is the story of all his struggles as an officer in a leadership firm where he wasn’t even sure he should have been a leader. The book sold 20,000 copies in 100 days, and right now, he’s in the process of writing seven more books in the “Mess To Success Series.”  The book is raw and relatable with content like, “Here are 30 challenges you're going to face, not just as a formal leader, but in your personal life with your mother-in-law, your spouse, or your kids.“  The second book, Everyone Deserves A Great Manager, Miller co-authored with Franklin Covey's chief people officer and one of their leadership consultants. This one is a very practical and easy read, using Franklin Covey's 40 years in business and millions of profile assessments to share things like, “Six things that leaders need to do to build a great team.”  To hear this inspiring conversation about leadership, download or stream the full episode today. You’ll be happy you did! –Mike 

This episode is all about amplifying and multiplying your time to increase your consciousness and value. It’s something that is near and dear to both Dan and me. We're talking about getting the MOST time out of the life you have.  There is one thing in this world that is fixed and that is everybody has quantitatively the same amount of time. When people say they’ve found a way to “shorten time,” it’s simply not true. That would be like shortening gravity or water. We're all given the same material (time) to work with but the gradient equality is what people do with the quantity of time that they have.  I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and a few days ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with six core ideas about time shuffling around in my head. They were important enough to wake me up so I wrote them down:   * Time Slicing * Time Compression * Folding Time * Chaos Elimination * Courage Amplification * Embracing The New Rules Of The Universe   Let’s take the first one, “time slicing,” for example. The basic premise is increasing your consciousness through meditation—actually slowing down time and focusing on or creating peak experiences. I believe those who focus on and in the spiritual realm are living “outside” of time versus living in the physical realm. The more conscious you are, the slower time can appear to be.  When you pack more exciting experiences into the same amount of time, you, in fact, live more. Imagine time as stacks of pancakes versus laying the pancakes end to end. There's more density to the quality of life. The quality of your life depends on how you choose to perceive and give meaning to the things happening around you and for you.  The world is getting more and more complicated every day, and it's the actual experience of unpredictable complexity that robs us of time consciousness. We’re being asked to constantly respond to new things and don't have time to reflect and give it meaning. Instead, we react. Figuring out how to slow down and become more conscious through meditation will help combat this ever-increasing problem.  Your phone and social media can be a gateway to constant, unconscious interruptions (hell on earth) or an infinite volume of wisdom, knowledge, and information (heaven on earth). Every day, you get to choose. Chaos elimination is next. In other words, owning your time by not giving it away or devaluing yourself improves your decision making. This increases your own self worth and your value to the market, and increases your consciousness and awareness.   One major example of this is unconscious consumption. To me, the biggest robber of consciousness is social media and TV. There is SO much out there readily available for consumption that it is very easy to just flip, flip, flip through, and down the rabbit hole you go, appealing to the lowest-frequency, addictive part of the human brain.   I’m guilty of doing it. Nearly EVERYONE is. Until you make the conscious decision to eliminate those “time sucks,” you’ll stay stuck and continue to lose precious time.  Evidence of this is our lowest common denominator, clickbait world of media. Journalism ceased to exist the moment it began depending on clicks to survive. One hype-induced “us or them” existential threat after another. 9/11 led to a (fake) war. Remember the big “anthrax” scare in letters that was the end of the world? Turned out to be one guy. Then SARS. Pandemic! End of the world. Nope. Then one Trump drama after another. Now it’s the coronavirus. Keep the lemmings glued to their screens. It’s “us” versus “them.” All the world's a stage, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Wizard of Oz. It’s all just a grand illusion. Peace is behind the curtain if you choose to pull it back, look behind and contemplate ...

The concept and goal behind this podcast series is for our listeners to hear our brilliant guests and get a cartridge-style upgrade to their skills and capabilities. My request is that each guest speaks from the heart with honesty, authenticity, and integrity, and this week’s guest did not disappoint.  His name is Arjuna Ardagh. He is a Radical Brilliance coach, writer, and public speaker, and he was the original founder of Awakening Coaching. He has trained more than 2,000 people to become Awakening Coaches over the last 25 years. Arjuna has been a speaker at conferences all over the world and has appeared on TV, radio, and in print media in 12 countries. He has spoken at Google and at the United Nations. In his groundbreaking new book, Radical Brilliance, Arjuna (author of the #1 national bestseller The Translucent Revolution and eight other books) offers us a compelling and practical model for the hidden components that together make up a brilliant life.  Arjuna put this book together based on more than 15 years of interviews with more than 420 scientists, artists, musicians, inventors, and social architects.  Arjuna’s current big quest is two-fold. One massive context is what is actually happening to humanity on the planet right now. “Essentially we are faced with various kinds of crises that are completely and utterly unprecedented, both in their global nature and severity.”   We, as humans, can do various things to become more capable in various ways, but if we're not actively addressing the predicament of the global crisis, then whatever we're doing, “it's like making a little more money on the card table while the Titanic is going down. It’s going down anyway and your winnings will not mean very much once you're in the water.” Unless our capabilities are aligned with the well being of generations not yet born, they're irrelevant.   Second is how slowing down, relaxing, and doing less actually ushers miracles into your life. A big myth we often buy into as doers and entrepreneurs is that everything is the fruit of our actions and our intentions. We overlook the fact that a lot of the greatest miracles that come into our lives come when we’re STILL and when we connect with the source bigger than our own minds.  Arjuna and I dive deep into the mythology and research behind what people think makes for a meaningful life and what ACTUALLY makes for a meaningful life. I’ll tell you right now ... it’s probably not what you’re thinking.  Arjuna shared some really interesting background with me that not a lot of people know, including where he was born, where he studied, how he got interested in exploring the outer dimensions of consciousness, and how he got his current name. Enjoy!

Create Better Messaging And People Will Beg You To Take Their Money  When you are positioned, packaged, and branded with great messaging, you can charge premium prices and be seen as an industry leader. I want to be seen as the highest priced solution in my business category. Don’t you?  My co-host Dan Sullivan and I have produced many, many different kinds of knowledge products and intellectual tools to help entrepreneurs over the last several decades, and we’re constantly being asked, “What is your process and thinking behind it?”  A friend of mine recently said something to me that profoundly affected me. His name is Stewart Emery, he's 78 years old, and he's gone through many, many reinventions. He said, “I have been fortunate enough to follow my curiosities for my entire professional life and monetize a fair number of them.” Stewart happens to have been one of the creators and founders of EST, which eventually became the Landmark Forum.  I approach everything through the lens of curiosity and market interest. Historically, my brands and businesses have largely revolved around my own capabilities and interests. I have to be fired up, inspired, and motivated to actually do something.  I also pay very close attention to upcoming trends. Then I think about how I can amplify, multiply, and automate them. Something else that’s REALLY important to me is finding interesting people that I actually want to do business with.   From there, it’s a matter of market testing. For example, this year, my wife, Vivian, and I decided to do something we call “SuperBeing Dinners.” We invite really fascinating, interesting people to our home, bring in a caterer, create a great night, and start a conversation that you don’t get to have anywhere else. People LOVE them. It’s a way to see people’s responses and their perception of value.  It really comes down to how you create messaging, an experience, and a feeling for people so they wind up raising their hands and saying, “Yeah, I'd like a little bit of that, please!”   One of Dan’s passions in life is to just ask questions of people and have them tell him about their experiences (most of the time they've never actually described these experiences in their life so, in many ways, they're creating the experience on the spot).   Questions can be super powerful and that’s Dan’s approach to branding. It’s never about him. It's about what's going on in the mind of someone else. It's about asking better questions of better people.  Every week, Dan and I give away cool prizes to voters and commenters and that might as well be you!  Enjoy!  

Our guest this week KILLS FAT for a living. Her name is Natalie Jill and she is a fat loss expert turned high-performance coach. She helps women age in reverse and LEVEL UP in all areas of their lives.  Natalie is a 48-year-old woman and knows all too well the struggles that can come along with aging. About 10 years ago, she lost her house, her retirement, and her marriage, and gained a lot of weight. She hit ROCK BOTTOM.   She had all kinds of nagging “False Assumed Truths” that she believed about herself. She felt too old, too broke, too overweight, and too depressed to do anything, but she knew something had to shift. She changed her state by changing her mindset, turned it all around, got her life back, and became an inspiration to others.  Natalie was on 13 magazine covers after the age of 40 (despite society saying she was too old) and became a master at creating all possibilities from NOTHING.   Although fitness and fat loss programs are what she’s known for, her passion and priority are in the personal development space. She believes “it’s what’s in our heads, our beliefs and our actions that create our realities” because she’s seen it over and over again with her fat loss clients. She changes their state, and next to follow is their weight! It’s not JUST about following a specific diet or doing a workout: “It’s about stepping into TRULY LIVING.”  Natalie Jill is 48 years old and looks 20 years younger. She’s CONSTANTLY asked the question, “How do you do it and how can I do it too?”   She has discovered the solution is two simple words. Two simple words that will change your life forever, reprogram your brain, and get you the body and life you've always wanted:   DECIDE and SURRENDER.  Everything starts with a decision and surrendering to living in your current reality. Exactly where you are right NOW. Not in the past. Not where you should be. Not where you want to be. Start where you are, surrender, and step into your life.   Enjoy!  Mike