The Entrepreneur's Secret Weapon Is An Elite Thinking Program

Shannon Waller: Hi, Shannon Waller here, and welcome to Inside Strategic Coach with Dan Sullivan. Dan, I work with you a lot. I've spent a lot of years working with you. I talk with you a lot. We're in a lot of sessions together. And you said something the other day that I have never heard you say before. I thought, ooh. This was surprising and new to me. And I'd love to do a deeper dive into it because I was super curious. You said, "I didn't set out to create a program for entrepreneurs. I set out to create a thinking program, and entrepreneurs are the ones who most took to it." So I would love to know more about creating a thinking program. Where did that come from? And also, obviously, it's fascinating that entrepreneurs are the ones who the most took to it. So I find that fascinating. It's something I didn't know, even after 33 years of hanging out with you.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, it goes back quite a long time. It goes back to 1964. I attended a great, great program called Outward Bound in Scotland. So it was November and December of 1964. I was 20. And I'd always had this thing that the educational system didn't deal with the reality of people's lives. And I always felt that each person can take the actual experiences of their daily life, and they can develop it into knowledge. So I kept a journal while I was at Outward Bound. And I profited enormously from the program. But I kept a journal, and I would write in the journal every day what I had learned that day of the experiences. And for those who don't know it, Outward Bound is, I'm not sure how they describe it, but it's an outdoors leadership program where you're the leader of yourself.
 
So they put you through, you know, for me, it was quite demanding physically, and we climbed mountains in Scotland, Cairngorms and the Strathfarrar mountains, not Rocky Mountains, but good hikes. And we sailed on the North Sea, and this is November. So, you know, it's cold and it's wet and choppy. You just have to really push yourself. And I did. So I came back, and I really liked the experience because they don't tell you what you're supposed to learn. They just give you the challenge and then you have to meet the challenge. And whatever you learn, that's what you learned. And I benefited enormously from that. And I would say of all the learning experiences that other people created, I found Outward Bound the most influential on my thinking today.
 
So my feeling is that the challenges that you have during each day in normal life are sufficient to create a lifetime learning program. And I kept playing with that, and I started creating forms. You know, Strategic Coach has a lot of different forms that you write on. And I think I've been doing that for 60 years, one way or another. And of course, it's easier getting things created and produced these days than it was in the old days. So what I really felt is that there's ways of thinking about your daily experience that can be a constant source of new knowledge that makes you more skillful, makes you more confident. That was the start of it. I launched this as a company in 1974—50 years this year—and I tried working with different kinds of people. I had politicians that I worked with. Interesting. I had bureaucrats, government bureaucrats who did it. I learned something from that. Corporate people. I had people who worked for non-profits, foundations, that type of thing.
 
And I found after about three years of exploring, the only people who really took to it were entrepreneurs. It took a little weeding out over a number of years, but by probably five years into my coaching career, it was 100% entrepreneurs. And I think the reason is because entrepreneurs have to constantly be learning on a day-by-day basis, and other people can get in positions where they may have had to learn some things to get the job, but they might not have to learn too much more after they got the job. It's just showing up and more or less repeating what they've already learned. I think you're less able to do that today than you were 50 years ago. But it's seen as a chore that you have to learn new things. And I think that entrepreneurs see it as their advantage that they can continually be learning new things. So that's the reason why I ended up, and we ended up, with an entrepreneurial program. But it's a thinking program, and entrepreneurs can make greater progress from thinking than people in most other lines of work.
 
Shannon Waller: Why is that, do you think?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, they're solving problems. The bigger the problem, the faster the solution, the bigger the check.
 
Shannon Waller: Right. You also said something which I find really interesting. You said entrepreneurs get punished most heavily for not changing their minds. So, they're not solving problems or they're staying locked in old ways of thinking, marketplace will let them know.
 
Dan Sullivan: Usually the end of each month is a test.
 
Shannon Waller: What is it? "They have an unusually intimate relationship with the 15th and the 30th of the month"?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, the 30th anyway, usually. 30th, 31st, 29th.
 
Shannon Waller: There you go. Yeah. It's interesting, Dan, because entrepreneurs do- Well, first of all, the ones we work with enjoy learning, love learning. If they're not, they get a little bored and that's dangerous. And so they really have taken to this thinking program and set of processes. And I like what you said earlier, that what's interesting about Strategic Coach thinking tools is you're never telling someone what they should learn from it, exactly the same as Outward Bound, right? You'll give them the experience of the thinking and then what they take out of it is what's most important. Can you talk more about that?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I find if you set the challenge up properly, everything that people get out of it will be valuable to them personally. You don't have to tell them what they're getting out of it. Part of our teaching method is, we ask people what they're learning, but we don't tell them what to learn before they've learned it. That's pretty clear cut with all of our 250 thinking tools.
 
Shannon Waller: And ways of thinking that leave you more skillful and more confident.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. More capable and more confident.
 
Shannon Waller: More capable. Thank you.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and it's an endless process. You know, I mean, the entrepreneurial game can go as long as you're up to the game. You know, I'm 80 years old. You know, I'm more ambitious, I think I'm more capable now at 80 than I was at 60 than I was at 40 than I was at 20. I have far more ambition today than I did when I first met you.
 
Shannon Waller: That's true. And way more capability too.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and I've got, not only have my capability, but all the capabilities of our team members and our clients' capabilities, I have access to that too.
 
Shannon Waller: And I really see that that's actually what's fed your bigger ambition, because your capabilities grew, but so did the people around you and the capabilities of the people around you. And that just means the impact can get so much bigger, which is very exciting.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and it keeps you from worrying about the future because whatever the future is, there's always more capability and confidence around you. And I think that's unique in the way that people make their living on the planet, where it always gets better in the future. As a group, I think the clients of Strategic Coach are uniquely confident, feel a unique sense of capability and confidence about the future, very positive about the future. At a time when things are very uncertain in the world, our clients tend to be very, very capable and confident that they can take on anything that comes up.
 
Shannon Waller: And that was just also shown in a survey that we did. They were more optimistic about the future, more positive.
 
Dan Sullivan: They thought they were going to live longer.
 
Shannon Waller: And live longer.
 
Dan Sullivan: And they make more money and they take more free time than a comparable group of entrepreneurs. It was quite striking, the difference between Strategic Coach entrepreneurs. You know, I had a two-hour Zoom session with about 35 this morning. You know, I had people there who have been in Coach for 33 years, someone 30 years, you know, and very excited about the future. They're in their 60s. Some of them are in their 70s, very excited about the future, have no notion that they would ever stop doing what they're doing.
 
Shannon Waller: Amazing.
 
Dan Sullivan: But it's all about the thinking. Don't leave home without it.
 
Shannon Waller: One of the things that I want to bring in is, you reflected on when you are creating a new thinking tool, which you do a lot, multiple times a week, you have a perspective. You want to make sure that it would be relevant thousands of years before we are now and also in the future. Could you talk about that because it was fun how you actually-
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, my two tests are the Roman marketplace—ancient Rome in the marketplace, in the year 1, so it could be 1 BC or 1 AD, but in the marketplace, so more than 2,000 years old—and the Star Wars cafe, the very famous cafe scene from the movie Star Wars, where there's a lot of odd-looking entrepreneurs, but they're all traders. They're there, you know, they're cosmic traders. Intergalactic traders. So I test the tool with this tool that I just created to be useful to entrepreneurs in the marketplace in Rome 2,000 years ago. Would it be useful to entrepreneurs in the Star Wars cafe centuries in the future? And I said, yeah, I think it would be useful. And that way I know I have a timeless tool.
 
Shannon Waller: We talk about this in terms of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. And wisdom is timeless knowledge, which to my mind is in the thinking processes that you're creating. It really is generating wisdom for people. They get to figure out their own wisdom. That's pretty timeless. They can take this into the future. They can use it- Their reflections of the past are really helpful. So it's almost a philosophical school that you've got here, Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: It is a philosophical school, yeah. And I'm a philosopher, you know. I have expensive tastes, and most schools of philosophy don't pay that much. You know, I'm not excessive, but I like going first class with everything, and I like having a lot of help around, you know, skilled people who do all sorts of things. The other thing is, it's not a school of philosophy like it's this school of philosophy or that school of philosophy. It's just the wisdom of everyday living. But entrepreneurs are the best because they're the only people whose very success depends upon being transformative. And what I mean by that, the original definition of entrepreneurism, first time it was ever written down was 1804, and it was a French, what we would call an economist today, they didn't call them economists then, his name was Say, Jean-Baptiste Say, and he said that an entrepreneur is someone who takes resources from a lower level of productivity to a higher level of productivity. Well, I'm an entrepreneur who takes a resource called an entrepreneur from a lower level of productivity to a higher level. So I'm a super duper entrepreneur. And what we show them is that just using their everyday experiences, they can become 10 times more knowledgeable and wise about how they're conducting their business, how they are conducting their life. I think I'm sort of at the center of the philosophical universe.
 
Shannon Waller: It's true, Dan. Having studied philosophy, finding you was a gem. That was a really good thing because you're the most practical philosopher I've ever met.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yes. You said that about 30 years ago, and I wasn't quite sure, but 30 years later, you're still saying it, so I think it's true.
 
Shannon Waller: I'm glad you agree. And the result of that is people get so- I mean, we talk about freedom a lot, but they get so expanded in their freedom. We're talking about the Four Freedoms—time and money and relationships and, ultimately, purpose—but they do it in such a practical way, which I find it's this juxtaposition between, you know, this way of maybe this ideal way of living, but then you just get there through practical exercises and thinking tools. And then you keep compounding them and then ... Then you are living this life that you've envisioned the whole time.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, Shannon, how have you become wiser using your daily experience over the last 33 years?
 
Shannon Waller: Oh, there are so many ways, Dan. My Unique Ability has been huge, really leaning into that. It makes me less reactive and more creative with situations. I think that's the thing I very practically appreciate all the time. I think the thing that I enjoy the most is how much it's allowed me to have a positive impact on the people I coach and the people I work with. So that for me has just been joyful. So it's wiser about what to do, wiser about what not to do, when to get the "Whos" involved, which is almost all the time. I get to do this with you, which is a blast. So it's led to enormous amounts of freedom and capability and contribution. So it's wiser, but with impact, if that makes sense. Yeah, thank you.
 
Dan Sullivan: Do you have other people in your life that would tell you that? Well, I'll tell you that, you know, so I'm first in line there. All those things you said about yourself, I would say that all of them are true.
 
Shannon Waller: Thank you.
 
Dan Sullivan: But do you have other people who would say it?
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah. Especially clients. My family, if I'm being nice. But definitely, I think it's allowed me to be my best self. And uncluttered. And I think the other part of it is just really looking at life ... I want to say realistically—most people when they say realistically, that means negative. I don't mean it that way at all. Just accept it as it is, deal with it coming in, knowing that I can transform anything I need to. There's incredible confidence that comes with that capability, like my goodness. And the future is positive and optimistic.
 
Dan Sullivan: And bigger.
 
Shannon Waller: And much bigger. So it's just like this superpower, that's really the benefit. And my selling point to join Coach was my question, can I do the Program? If the answer had been no, I probably wouldn't be here because I didn't qualify back then. And so I got to do the Program. So I've been in the Program since July of 1991. So I'm a longstanding student.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah. And I do it every quarter. So.
 
Dan Sullivan: One of the themes I've been working on lately is that entrepreneurs, at whatever age, they might be 60 or 70, are most like their eight-year-old self than almost all other human beings. I think that they have a sense of themselves that they had very young. And I think that's what makes them easy clients of the Program is that whatever they've been building, they've been building it for 20 or 30 years, maybe 50 years before they have some thinking tools to actually validate and substantiate what they've always known about themselves. They always had the means to think about it, but they didn't have the means to talk about it.
 
Shannon Waller: Yes, they had the means to think about it, but didn't have the means to talk about it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And I think our tools give them a language that they can talk to other entrepreneurs about it.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah. Well, and you've always said this, Dan, like the tools, everyone's experience that they put into the tool is unique to them, but it allows us to talk about it in a way that just makes sense. I was going to say it's equal, which doesn't quite give the right flavor, but it just allows us to communicate about something like, oh, this is my Unique Ability. Oh, this is my Time System. Oh, this is my Experience Transformer on this. And we all understand exactly what we're talking about.
 
Dan Sullivan: All the tools that we have came out of me talking to entrepreneurs about their challenges and how they took advantage of opportunities, how they improved themselves. They're kind of like processes. If you do this, you answer this question, then you answer this question, you put the two answers together, and you create a third thing. It gives you insights. But all I'm doing is interacting with their experience and what they're telling me, and when I see a common theme, it's ready to get a tool and feed it back to them as a form of language that they can then communicate widely to other people who are also having the same type of experience. All communities are held together by language, and I think, you know, we're 35 years into the Program and we have now quite a deep language.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah, we do.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, so that we're having a big conference and we'll have people in the room who are their first year in Strategic Coach and we'll have some people there they've been in Strategic Coach for more than 30 years, and they'll be able to talk to each other. It's a neat thing. When Coach people get together, there is a very fast communication.
 
Shannon Waller: And I think part of the reason why that's critical is being an entrepreneur can be lonely. It can be isolating. You can be very alone with your experience because if you're the five percent of the five percent, there aren't that many of you. And a lot of people cannot relate to your challenges, your opportunities, your experiences, as I said. And so to find people with whom not only are also entrepreneurs, but then you can talk about it, that creates a deep level of community. I mean, we just got to spend time with them all of last week, both at Coach and somewhere else at a conference. And it was just so joyful. We have so much in common, but we're not isolated. We're not alone. We're together.
 
Dan Sullivan: At this point, because I've been thinking in these terms for 50 years, since I started coaching, actually making money out of my philosophy, I would say that the cause of most entrepreneurial problems is loneliness.
 
Shannon Waller: Mm. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: I think they get into trouble because they're lonely and they associate with people they shouldn't be associating with in their personal life, their business life, because they're lonely.
 
Shannon Waller: I think that's a really great point. Awesome.
 
Dan Sullivan: So I think just by being in this community, you've saved yourself a lot of trouble.
 
Shannon Waller: Well, we see that people, you know, if they've had one family, they don't go on to a second one. If they've had two, they don't go on to a third. Their businesses really grow and are successful. They're out of pain because they've got the right support team around them. They get bigger checks because they know who to focus their talents on. The word that's been coming up a lot is "unlock." Someone just said to me, "Oh, that's a real unlock on my thinking." And I was like, what a cool way to say it. But you see these entrepreneurs unlocked and unleashed. Oh, it is so fun and exciting just to be along for the ride, in a good way.
 
Dan Sullivan: It's like the great, great country and western singer Glen Campbell. I think he was married a lot of times, maybe half a dozen times. And he says, yeah, I've got a very predictable life about every five years. I take what's left of my net worth and cut it again in half.
 
Shannon Waller: That pauses when people join Coach. Which is great. Awesome. Well, Dan, thanks for being such a phenomenal practical philosopher and for sharing this origin. I had never heard you phrase the start of Coach that way, but you're totally right. I mean, you did test on other check writers, and entrepreneurs are the ones who absolutely took to it. So I love that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Just a little more of a refinement on that. I was very drawn to entrepreneurism. You know, I knew when I became an entrepreneur... You don't become an entrepreneur unless you're interested in entrepreneurism. But I did try it on other kinds of people. It just didn't go anywhere. It just didn't go anywhere. They would have to consult with someone whether they could do it. They had to see who would pay it. Entrepreneurs make up their mind on the spot. They can decide. They can write the check or send the payment right then. And they're doing it for freedom. And I think that freedom, the motivation for greater freedom, is at the basis of all good philosophy. Philosophy means the love of wisdom. It's a Greek word, but the translation is lover of wisdom. A philosopher is someone who loves wisdom. I love wisdom. I like things that last forever.
 
Shannon Waller: I love that, Dan. And you're great at making that happen for, well, thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs. So I didn't actually expect this to be so much about the Coach Program, to be perfectly honest. But I feel like I need to say, if you want to learn more, check out strategiccoach.com. And also, if you want to download one of our thinking tools that we've made available to everyone, it's The Impact Filter. Brilliant way of really getting clear on the purpose, importance, and ideal outcome of a project. That's the intellectual sale. The emotional sale is, what's the best result if it goes well, and the worst result if you don't do it? So that should be emotional. You should feel that. And then what are the success criteria to ensure the best and to prevent the worst? So if you want to download that, we'll put the link. Just go to strategiccoach.com, you can download The Impact Filter, and you can try this on for size. But the best part of it, doing the tool alone will be successful, but it's really the community, as we talked about, that makes the biggest difference. So Dan, thank you so much for illuminating your "why" of Coach. That's important. Thank you.