Welcome to Hal leaders lead where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. Today we're going to talk about a book that I co-authored with my friend Jason Goldsmith, a renowned sports performance coach for world class athletes. The book is available now wherever you buy books and is titled Take Charge of You, how self coaching can transform your life and career. What makes this book different is you can obviously read this book from front to back and I know you'll enjoy the stories that Jason and I tell. But the big differentiator is that we have great exercises and tools that you can use in this book to help you coach yourself to reach your full potential in your life and career. This is a book you can not only read it's a book you can use again and again to take yourself to new heights. Now you know I usually do these podcasts myself and ask all the questions but I thought it would be a lot of fun to let you hear from both Jason and I and have someone else interview us. So I asked my friend Donna Barton brothers to sit in and guide our conversation . Donna is a former jockey and world renowned broadcaster for NBC. It's the one you see at the Kentucky Derby interviewing the winner on horseback riding backwards. That's pretty incredible. So we're off to the races. Let's not wait any longer. Here's a very fun conversation with two of my good friends and soon to be yours Donna Barton brothers and Jason Goldsmith. It's my pleasure to talk today with David Novak and Jason Goldsmith the co authors of Take Charge of You. So why this book? Why now? And you've written three books about yourself. This is one that you co authored with Jason. So first of all how did that come about that you all would co author a book? Well I think the first thing is is that you know you really want to try to make the world a better place. That's really our personal missions and you know one of the things we've both learned and there's a lot of research on this. The people are very frustrated and business and life that they don't have access to really good coaching. People are very frustrated at work that their boss isn't giving them what they need. And so Jason and I we've been working together you know for a few years now and we felt that we could really help people by giving them the coaching or the process that they could use to coach themselves. You know life is just too important to leave your life up to somebody else. You know you need to take charge of it and that's why we decided to come together. Jason we know about the process of coaching. We know about getting a coach and in fact you've been a great coach but tell me what does self coaching mean. So self coaching is really just about being aware of yourself and what your goals and ambitions are and then having a process that allows you to achieve those goals. So David and I really felt like it was something that the world needed and not enough people understand that self coaching is really so important because there aren't enough good coaches out there for everybody to hire a coach like David or myself. So if you could learn to self coach then I think people will be able to achieve a lot more out of their lives. One of the reasons why I found it really interesting is because David mentioned I was a jockey and I think jockeys are one of the few professional athletes that don 't have a coach. Most professional athletes do and so my mantra sort of became how you do anything is how you do everything right and so that's how I would sort of coach myself but that 's more of a pep talk. I'm guessing that this self coaching method goes a lot further than pep talks that you give yourself. Yeah I mean I would say that when I first heard you say that about jockeys don 't have coaches number one I was really surprised because you know obviously I thought it's such you know a demanding sport and you're out there and you're really having to manage this animal that's underneath you you'd think that there would be jockeys from the past that would realize hey I have some insight here I could share it with other jockeys. So to me the fact that jockeys have had to self coach themselves all along is pretty amazing but to answer your question I think where people you know don't realize is you know every day people are self coaching. I think where we help people in this book is you know teach them best practices to maybe then understand what their purpose is and how to get more out of their life. So I think you know when you came up with that saying that was a pep talk well being a jockey and understanding that you have to have positive self talk a lot of the times to get your mindset right you know that's one of the tools that we use in the book so it's having this understanding that there are a lot of things that all of us you know do but we don't realize how important there are when you have a negative thought the most important thing you can do when you have that negative thought is to then you know reframe that and then have some positive self talk that gets you back into this neutral state when you're in that neutral state then everything is possible. So I think you know you were using that tool you just didn't know how powerful that tool was. I think that why did Jason and I really come together here is that you know he brings a very unique vantage point which is being a sports performance coach and then I 've coached a lot of business people and so together we thought we could do something that would be very unique. You know there's tons of books on coaching and so we really asked ourselves what can we do that will really be different and make a big difference in other people's lives and we both realized that even when you have a really good coach Donna you know it comes back to you you've got to put it into action and we also both realized that the way how I coach people in business and the way how he coached people in sports was very very similar so we thought the real big thing that we could do is create a totally different concept a new concept which is called self coaching and give people the process that they can use if they don't have the means of having a coach give them a process that they could follow a five step process that they could follow that would help them achieve their full potential as the self coach and that's why we really made the subtitle how self -coaching can transform your life and career. Dave can you talk about ways that you've used the self coaching in your own life? Well I think you know what's really interesting Donna I do all these podcasts with all these great CEOs and great sports leaders and it's interesting they all self-coach and that's another reason why we wrote the book they naturally kind of go through what coaches would do if they could teach them what to do you know and yeah there's been a number of times when you know I've coached myself just recently I was looking at a new business opportunity and I went through the process well I have three what we call joy builders one is my family two is golf I love the golf but three is I really have a personal passion for leadership development so somebody came to me with the business opportunity and I say no to anything that doesn't fall in the area of leadership development but this was one where we could help six million low-income families get the help they need to decide whether their kid should go into vocational school and college so it was right up my alley and I said you know I can have fun doing this so I coached myself into saying yes and you had that sort of guiding paradigm and you looked at it and said yes it fits into my paradigm it fits into what my purpose is what my joy is you know what is going to give me a lot of satisfaction and you know for me one of the big things that I think unite both Jason and I as we're very other directed you know we we get our joy from helping other people and but that's how I make my decisions and it keeps me in the right lane and I don't end up doing things that I don't enjoy yeah hey Jason in the book one of the things that I really loved is the way you use the word yet instead of ever or never can you talk about that a little bit sure so you know to me everybody has these times where they're wanting to accomplish something and for them it's difficult to think that they can you know run that marathon whatever it is you know hit that hundred and fifty yards shot a little bit closer make that pot what you know so whatever it is when you haven't done something you're very uncomfortable so typically you create this story and this story tends to limit your potential so if you think about something that you really want to accomplish and you say to yourself I'm not sure I can do that but then you just add the word yet to the end it completely changes the energy and so it's a way to reframe situations and so you know I've used that for years and whenever I hear somebody make a negative statement I always just say yet at the end so what the way I look at it you might not think you're a really good self coach and I think I just said hey yet you're not a good self coach yet you know read this book and you learn how to be a great self coach and do what you want to do in life so one of the other take away from the book is a stat in there that you said Americans are starting new businesses now at a higher than ever rate so it seems to me like this is really the best timing for this book and David you've coached so many people who are in businesses but people who are starting new businesses I think can benefit from this more than most. I love talking to all these people who have these startups and the founders of these you know embryonic companies the thing that really is the biggest hurdle they often have to get over is just making that leap that I'm going to actually do this and I think what our book does is it helps people make those personal leaps get the transform ational insights on their own performance and what they want to do in life that allow you to jump off that diving platform and make a few ripples that's what I think is really exciting. And beyond that Jason one of the other takeaways from the book is that in there it says that according to a Gallup poll 85% of people are dissatisfied with the position they're in because of their manager and so if the manager is not coaching them then if they follow these principles in theory they could stay in that same job and become more satisfied because of the coaching they're getting. Yeah 100% right Donna it's so many people go to work every day and aren't passionate about what they do and they're not receiving the coaching they need so that they can achieve the things that they want to out of life and that's what we hope this book does for people is it's the nudge to get them to realize that they have that ability inside of what they need is just a few tools. And it's not just being able to go to the job and be your own coach it's by learning to coach yourself you can coach others and when you build that capability you 're going to grow yourself and you're going to have the ability to lead other people. So it's a big win win you know it's if you can coach yourself then you can coach other people and that that'll help catapult your career as well. People are so frustrated so frustrated with their bosses in fact you know I've often thought that you know we should just start this movement to declare war on bad bosses and bad bosses just aren't really good at coaching and that's why people are so frustrated and that's why if we can create more great coaches we'll create more leaders and that's going to make a big difference in the world. Yeah and I would venture to say if these bad bosses could learn to coach themselves they might be able to learn to coach other people as well. Well I'm hoping that somebody has gotten some feedback as a bad boss. They'll pick up take charge of you and say hey look this is something that I need and I guarantee if you don't know how to coach you learn how to coach yourself first you'll be able to coach other people and this is what I think makes us such a revolutionary concept there's all these books on coaching and you know but hey you know you gotta start with yourself it's like expectations the highest expectations anyone should have is the expectation that they have personally for themselves and when you have that that leads to other things that that take you forward. So let's back up how did the two of you guys meet? David has a really good friend named Jimmy Dunn and Jimmy is an amazing businessman but he also loves golf just as much as David does you know some would say David loves golf more than anybody but Jimmy said I have this buddy and I think he could use your help and if you could come down here and maybe you know introduce yourself and have a session and we'll just see how things go. Okay so let's stop for a second because I've heard David's a pretty good golfer so obviously the guy wasn't gone I've got this buddy who's a bad golfer so what was it about your golf being and your buddy that made him go Jason I think you got to come help my friend. Well I think that's a very good question I have to be very honest open and vulnerable here is that you know I was very good at playing rounds of golf but when I played in tournaments I didn't play as well I'd have the big shot I have to make or have to have the putt I needed to make but I would get too tight think about the outcome and not hit the shot when I needed to do it so I think what Jimmy wanted me to do is to learn how to free myself up you always used to say to be you know it's just the golf shot okay well I put too much importance on that so I needed to have a performance coach someone to really help me through what I needed to do to be able to perform in those kinds of situations and I've made a lot of progress like you know I'm not as good as I want to be but I know I wouldn't be where I'm at today without Jason's coaching. What point did you guys decide hey we've got something here between the two of us what was your aha moment let's write a book together. Well when you spend a lot of time with people you either decide you like them or you don't okay and you know Jason is like one of my best friends and I was thinking geez we have such commonality in terms of the desire to help other people we both love coaching he's a professional coach I took pride in being a great coach when I was a CEO of Young Brands and teaching taking people with you and doing one on one with all of my general managers and really helping them and I just said hey Jason you know we should write a book then the next process was how do we make it unique. Jason had you thought about writing a book before that point. No Donna not at all I'm dyslexic so you know for me language has always been very difficult. I have to interject because one of the things I did love about the book is how you also came to see your dyslexia growing up always as a liability or as a disability and at some point you were able to reframe that and see that it also helped you develop along the way special abilities that you otherwise wouldn't have. Yeah so you know to me it's you know it's like you're always hiding something because you're not sure how the rest of the world is going to view you if they know you have this you know supposed disability and to me you know it's like what we say in this book one person can change your life and I was playing around a golf and it happened to be a guy that was in our force and that I'd never met before and he started you know asking me about my life and dyslexia came up and he said you know my daughter is dys lexic and I was like really and he said yeah and he said you know they view that as just her brain being different but in a lot of ways she's way more creative than a lot of other people and you know so now they're looking at it as you know maybe that's a good thing like like having a brain that isn't the same as everybody else's and just that conversation you know completely changed my view on how I had been carrying around this fear for the majority of my life and so you know to me it's like what David said about this book if you know somehow we can have these five steps just be a spark that ignites something and somebody that maybe they didn't think they were capable of before and it changes their life you know to me that's the power of being a good coach you know and so it's so we you know you guys were saying earlier about these you know bad bosses maybe they just haven't had the opportunity to coach somebody and feel what it feels like to transform somebody's life because I think once they got that it's so addicting that I think everybody would do it because it's just so gratifying it's interesting because there's a lot of research on this the happiest people in the world are other directed and that's another reason why I wanted to team up with Jason so you're saying narcissists aren't happy narcissists are not happy that you know collecting things you know getting the title you know moving up at all costs these people are are the most frustrated people in the world they might have everything but they have nothing okay but the people that are the happiest or the people that are other directed and and that's another reason why I wanted to team up with Jason you know Jason's a very hard working person the only thing he cares about is helping other people and he's one of the happiest guys I know I wonder why you know I mean I'm always told him and I coach him on his business I say Jason you don't charge enough money for what you do he doesn't care about money what motivates him is the thing that that gives him the joy of coaching others so David speaking of coaching others you did write the book taking people with you but beyond that I heard a rumor that there's something like twenty seven people who worked under you at some point that are now CEOs or went on to be CEOs so this is a little bit of a twofold question first of all I'm sure you 're very proud of that but secondly you were talking Jason earlier about sort of feeling like he had something to hide so I'm guessing that imposter syndrome also holds people back so you obviously coached people through this does the self coaching also help people get past that sort of imposter syndrome and move up yeah you know you can have a coach and a coach can tell you so many things okay and it's like that's great but the real question is are you going to do it see the coach can never do it for you okay so you know Jason can teach Jason day and Justin Rose how to become number one golfers in the world when they didn't but that's in practice but when those two guys got out there on the golf course they're faced with a situation Jason isn't there to tell them what to think Jason isn't there to tell them to get the neutral zone Jason isn't there to say not yet you know they have to self coach to get there but they have the tools to do it because they 've worked with the Jason and I can tell you myself when I do what Jason tells me to do I do extremely well but the problem is Donna I don't do it enough okay you can distract it and I think that's what happens to everybody but at least I've been blessed enough to have a process that I can use that if I use it well I'm going to perform well Jason he brought up the neutral zone let's talk about that zone of neutrality yeah so it's just really just another way of saying being present you know so when people are talking about being in the zone what they're really talking about is being present and having a clear intention and trusting their ability and that's really what being in the zone is so so when we want people to get into the neutral state we want them to get there because everything's possible from that place so you're not too positive and you're not too negative you're in this neutral space where everything can unfold in front of you and that's when you 're most creative and that's when you're your best athlete is when you're in a neutral place the outcome takes care of itself David I guess it's hard for a passionate guy like you to stay in a neutral zone I think it's a great point you know because you get a little bit too high and sometimes you get a little bit too low but funny story about this when Jason and I the very first day that we work together I'm out there I've got my golf clubs with me and I really want to work on my short game because that's my biggest area of opportunity and I like the way you called it your biggest area of opportunity he listened so anyway you know Jason says let's go inside I go what do you mean let's go inside so he takes me inside the clubhouse and we find this one room and he puts on this focus band which allows you to really understand if you're in a neutral state or not it's new technology that he's created and he has me walk up and down the room and you know just trying to be focused on being neutral and if you're neutral you go in the green state when you're thinking different thoughts the red comes like well I got red popping up all over the place you know but I you know but it really made me think about the importance of just quieting your your mind so eventually we did go out on the golf course and it's fitting rain I mean it's just absolutely pouring rain and I got this guy he's very expensive so I got to use him I'm gonna have to pay him so I'm not there raining and you know so I I start hitting shots and you know I'm so focused on being good I was terrible and you know it's really interesting in business I can free myself up I've had so much experience I can do it naturally you know that it comes to me and you know but it's all because I spent so much time at it okay I couldn't in the sporting in the golf environment really free myself up to perform it at my best and when you get that kind of tension you can't get there and so I think the whole neutral state and a number of other things that Jason talks about in the book helps you navigate through through those and so you eventually learned how to get into the neutral state I can I can't get in the neutral state you know and it's it's kind of funny you know I wish I could do it more often but since I started working with Jason I did win a club championship for the first time you know I shot my age I'm 68 I shot my 68 at a very that's a big very good golf course and you know I've I've won you know a very prestigious tournament with a partner where I shot a 74 on my own ball and another very difficult course so you know but the problem is with me you know next day I'm I shoot 82 I think that's the problem with most people who are not pro golf ers yeah well I maybe so but you know we're all in the question of getting better so does self coaching mean that you have to go it alone you just are on your own well I think ultimately the answer's yes but what David said earlier is absolutely correct we're all doing it anyway what we're saying is is through our life experience we're going to give you these tools to get you there quicker and that's our goal is you know if you wanted to spend 20 or 30 years you know to come up with this process yourself you probably would if you're really focused on it so let's talk about the process how did you you guys essentially create a road map that will lead you from point eight or where you want to be how did you come up with that process you don't want to get to that but I want to go back to your question because I think it's a it's excellent questions because the self coaching mean you don't need coaches absolutely that's crazy to think that you don't need coaches but what self coaching does is helps you figure out who you need to learn from let me give you a good example when I was first became CEO I was the marketing and operations person I never really had a lot of experience working with the investment community so I used a few contacts to do everything I could to get a meeting with Warren Buffett and so I went to Omaha and I talked to him about you know how to deal with investors what he would do if he was me and I took notes and I was sitting there at the feet of the master and and I picked up some great know how on how to deal with investors and I went to see Warren Buffett every year I was CEO and I was CEO from 1997 to 2016 but I did that with Warren Buffett I did that with other people I would always go I'd know what my gaps were I'd know where I needed to you know to get better and I would go to people to learn from them then sometimes I wanted to put the pedal to the metal on something that I was really good at and I go to somebody there that could maybe teach me something that I didn't know yeah and you know that that's what I think self coaching does is self coaching helps you build awareness of yourself so that you can know what coaches to go to and you don't have to necessarily not everybody can go to see Warren Buffett or you know the people that I've been able to see but you can go read books about those people and what they had to say about the subject you there's lots of different ways you can get that know how so it sounds like really what you're trying to do is develop confidence with humility to understand where your shortfalls are and then go fill those gaps yeah I think you know that's a very good point I think and and it's interesting the best leaders I know you know let's take a guy like a Jamie Diamond who runs JP Morgan Chase this guy is extremely confident yet he's humble enough to know that he doesn't know everything and and and I think that makes him very endearing very inspiring and why people want to follow him so now let's talk about that process how did you guys land on this is the map that we think is going to work for most everybody out there well I think what we did was we sat down and we really thought about you know who were all these really successful people and what did they have in common and you know David and I would share stories and then it was once we started to to look at all these different stories and all these different successful people what were the commonalities and these were stories from athletes on your part and CEOs and leaders of multiple organizations people who start up companies people like yourself you know people that we learn from and and also we really dug deep into how we do what we do you know a lot of times really successful people they they do things that other people don't do but they they say they they say well it just comes naturally to me that's you well maybe it comes naturally to you but not when you really diagnose what it is that you've done okay and you know what we did is we sat down and we really talked about how I coach how he coaches we looked at the commonalities and we came up with this five step process that's in the book that'll take you through whatever issue that you're dealing with and help you get to hopefully the promise land and and but it was that we had a dig deep you know even Jason a professional coach he has all these tools he didn't really have a five step process okay he was doing those things but together we created this five step process that anybody in any walk a life any vocation can use to up their game and at this point what gives you the confidence to know that this process works well I think for me it's because you know at the end of the day what David said is is true I didn't realize that I was doing this while I was doing it and you know to think back at how I started out and to think where I ended up you know everything is is is just gravy to me like this is just icing on the cake to have this book on the shelf so I know the process works because I've lived the process and I want to share that with other people and that's the really the goal of the book when you when you read the book you're going to hear all kinds of stories from from Jason's vantage point where he's worked with people and help them achieve things that they were really struggling with okay and not just the very top elite athletes but you know people who were climbing the ladder in the in the in the world's of sports you know some ways 15 years old it's being overly criticized by by their mother you know it just lots of things that I think will really be in the book that you'll really enjoy because you know people love stories you know you don't want to just hear do ABCDEF you want stories that inspire you to do ABCDEF and Jason has a lot of them and maybe I have one or two okay and you know we try to really make the book come alive through the stories that we have well I have to admit I got a copy of the book a couple of days ago so I had two days to read it and so I loved everything about it except that I had to rush through it so I look forward to go back and reading it slowly but back to the writing process and comparing the different ways that the business people in the athletes have have achieved their goals did you guys ever have any arguments or any like points of contention or did it all come together really easily once you you sat down and talked about it yeah I think it really came together quite easily I mean to me if you're really good at something you get so good at it that you actually play at it and and at the end of the day that's what I coach because so many people forget how to play because they get so connected to the outcome that they forget it's really about the joy of playing so I don't think it matters if you're a doctor or a lawyer or a professional call for a basketball baseball player it really doesn't matter you have this skill set you have this passion that drives you that motivates you to be able to play at whatever it is and and I think that's the real common ality is you know people that really succeed in life figure out how to play every day and find joy and that's what motivates them to get up every day and do it you know we had I would say a collective agreement on the major concepts of the book where we had our points of debate was how you say it you know because you know finding that that that magic set of words okay that really gets to what you're really talking about is not easy but you know again it helped us simplify you know and all leaders need to learn how to simplify you know what they want their people to do and we were able to simplify the way how we work with other people in a way that I think everybody can relate to and come back to their specific location well back to what you said earlier one of the things I thought you all did really well to tell the story was let other people tell the story like through example of well I coached this one guy or I talked to this other guy and those stories I feel like really fed into this is why this works yeah yeah well hopefully you know and you know because you the last thing you want to do when you write a book is bore people you know exactly so the real question is how do you put a unique twist on on on the familiar well there's a lot of stuff out there that talks about coaching our unique twist is is self coaching and the unique banny's point from doing it I don't think there's too many coaching books or business books where you have somebody that comes at it from the sports side and the business side and I think that that's another point of uniqueness in in in the book and another reason why we enjoy doing it because you know there's nothing like becoming what I call whole brain okay you know you have a different skill you have different skills we have all have different ways that we go about doing things but when we all come together you know the brain gets more full the brain gets more total you become whole brain and that's what we think we give is a whole brain perspective on the world of coaching right well I can tell you I've read everything from Zig Ziggler to Deepak Chopra to Tony Robbins and this is unique and I liked everything about it so I felt like you guys did a really good job thank you all had been friends for a long time before this but then you went for those writing process together did you learn anything about each other that you didn 't know before learn that you had any special talents well what I learned you know because I 've heard all the stories and you know read David's books and so I you know and a new David as being you know one of the top CEOs in the world but what I hadn't learned was what it was like to participate with David leading a group of people with a common goal so that you know I know David as you know a great friend of mine you know one of my best friends in the whole world now but in the beginning you know he was somebody that needed help at golf and so to go from that to this you know that that was what was so different for me is is how creative and what an amazing leader he is it's different to hear about it and then to experience so for me that's what I learned was I knew David you know was it was a genius when it came to being creative but when you're in a book writing process and you need things to get done you need somebody that's going to lead the team but you also need somebody that's going to have this creative way about them to come up with new ideas you know come up with the name of the book you know those kind of things so you know to me that was that's what I learned most when in during this process one of the things about Jason is very process directed he says never don't worry about outcome always be focused on the process process process process you know and but one of the things I learned about Jason and it surprised me because I thought he was extremely anal you know very literal you know but he ended up being extremely creative I didn't know this about him you know because we you know I came up with the title take charge of you and the subhead but we were really struggling with you know how do we get a really exciting cover you know the cover is really important if you want to sell a lot of books and believe me you know we want to sell a lot of books because we want to make a difference with a lot of people well we kept thinking about the cover looking at covers and we had all these people working on the cover in our designers and all the stuff and he actually when you look at the cover which is basically a reflective mirror it says take charge of you it was his idea he said why not put a mirror on the cover and then we found out that we could make it reflective and you know it's a really great cover in my opinion better than anything I've ever done and he came up with it then we paid these designers to come up with icons to get at our coaching tips and you know all this and and again we get zero creativity I don't know why these are professionals and this guy comes up and he comes up with the two icons that we 're going to use inside of the book because this is a book of exercises and you know it's you know you can read this book straight through and you're going to enjoy it okay but the people that are going to get the most out of it they're going to stop and do many of the exercises that we have in the book because it'll help you get done what needs to get done but anyway Jason came up with the icons and I was surprised how creative he was he's very creative he now he walks around like a little rooster going you know I came up with the cover or not a little bit I know you said did you surprise yourself or did was this just something that you normally do no I've been obviously have never done anything like this before but you know to me it was we had spent so much time and you know when you spend so much time thinking about one thing and you know I'm going to say you get in the neutral state it's incredible you know what ideas you know you can come up with and and so again it was just an exercise and we had this really clear intention we were spending a tremendous amount of time on you know figuring out these things that were like David said so critical very important and and I would literally meditate on these concepts and you know just one day I'm like looking at myself in the mirror probably getting ready to do something he does that quite often yeah I probably need to do a little bit more but but and literally saw take charge of you on the mirror and I thought God wouldn't that be great if you walked into a bookstore and you picked up this book and it reflected back your face in the book and it said take charge of you to me that would be something that I would pick up and I'd at least open it up to read what the book was about and and I think it's great and you know the I think the other thing that we learned about each other is just how much fun it is to do something that you're really proud of that you know will help other people we both have that incl inations he's coached all these athletes and you're right I'm extremely proud of the fact that you know I've got over 20 people that I worked with that become CEO's of really big time companies and that makes me really proud and and and the fact that we could work together and and really you know put down and codify the things that have helped these people be so successful really really meant a lot to both of us yeah I think it really shows that both of you are really passionate about helping other people and not not just so that you can make money to to coach other people but to truly help other people but Jason let's go to your background a little bit because you were in business and so how did you go from having two different businesses actually to becoming a performance coach so it really goes back to my you know my wife was the one that got me on this path and and she knew that I was not happy with where I was and and and you know quite frankly I was in a great career and I was running a boat company in San Diego you were successful but not happy I was I was more successful than I thought I'd ever be but I it wasn't feeding my soul so I knew that that I had a greater purpose and I didn't know at the time that I wasn't fulfilling my life purpose and I won't tell the whole story but I do love the fact that your wife called you out on your own sort of declaration and said hey you said and so right part of it is right part of coaching is having people to hold you accountable and she held me accountable and in that accountability changed my life and so I went from not feeding my soul and not knowing what my life's purpose is you know sitting here now knowing exactly what I was put on this earth to do . David let's talk about the accountability because you do talk about it in the book also but earlier I asked you to self coaching mean you go it alone and essentially in the book you talk about it's important to set goals and then tell people about those goals. Yeah I think you know the most important people understand what people want okay they talk about it all the time and then they make sure that it happens and you know I think that you know the real question is if that's the key to success how do you do that for yourself that's the that's the million dollar question that's why you need books like this to help you work through those things so that you can have that that kind of success. You know I have all kinds of self coaching stories and that I've had and stories where other people have self coached in the business world and I've seen it happen in sports as well but it ultimately comes down to your own personal accountability do I want this bad enough to where I'm going to make the changes I need to make to get to where I want to go. So Jason you've worked with some of the most accomplished athletes in the world where do you even start with a guy like Jason Day who says you know come help me where do you start as a coach. I always start with their story because if you can get somebody to relay their story to you then you really start to get inside into their personal beliefs and then you can figure out okay where are the areas that this particular person needs some help . So asking a lot of questions you know becoming you know what I would say more self aware or helping the athlete become more self aware so that we can identify what the issues are and then we have a starting point as to how we can help them get better and achieve their goals. And have they all been pretty easily coachable or some of them a bit more set in their ways? I would say every athlete that I've ever worked with is different and I think that's you know obvious you know everybody's unique so it's finding the person where they are and then having a process in place that's going to allow you to help them help themselves and so really you know Justin Rose is very different than Jason Day but at the end of the day they want the same thing and so if you can help both of them achieve their goals to completely different personality types but they want to achieve you know what they're here to do and so you know once you understand that then it's just a matter of creating a road map and then helping them achieve it. So in coaching yourself you've got to tell your own story to yourself which means you got to be open, you got to be vulnerable, you got to see the world the way out really is not the way you want it to be and you got to start out with that story and then you can go from there and you know I think what really makes a good coach is a good coach is someone who's trustworthy, someone that you know has your best interest at heart, nobody's going to care about you until you care about them. Once a person feels that in you they will open up be vulnerable and tell people exactly you know what they think and you know I have I'm an extrovert I think it's probably pretty easy for Jason to get me to spill my guts okay which I did okay but I've coached a lot of people who are introverts and shy and they're not going to give it to you at the very beginning. Yeah let's talk about that we talked about your sort of coaching tree where you 've had something like 27 people who worked under you come up and be their own CEOs were they all really good self-coachers or did they need coaching along the way? I think they needed coaching but the good thing about it was when they got in a particular situation they coached themselves to come up with the right approach to get to the right answer okay because ultimately you do have to take personal accountability for executing what you learn. Donna you could tell me a lot of great things and they all make sense and then I can just walk down the street and just keep doing things the way I 've always done it. That's one of the reasons why I hated these a lot of times we'd have these three-day meetings and everybody be all high and you know we learn this and we learn that they walk out the door and then they go back to normal doing the job the way how they've always done it okay because we didn't shock the system enough we didn't shake people up enough to where you really drive that change so you know yeah I don't think anybody's going to pick up our book if they don't want to change their life and make it better in some way or help somebody else make it better okay so you got to have that in your gut first when you have that then you might be able to make some change. Jason who are some of the best self-coached athletes you've worked with? Well I would say you know Jason Day, Justin Rose at the end of the day like David said they have to hit the shot you know so I've worked with you know hundreds of golfers and you know all of them you know most of them are professional golfers and and like we were just talking about we can talk about performance all day long but at the end of the day you know when they need to hit a shot and it's a shot that's going to you know put them in contention or give them an opportunity to win there's nobody on the planet but them and they have to you know make a decision set their intention and then they have to perform. Yeah David it's the same with being a CEO or a leader so who are some of the best self-coached leaders that you've worked with like who just sort of really gets it. Oh there's no question that Jamie Diamond and JP Morgan Chase is amazing. Brian Roberts at Comcast is sensational you know Jason brought up Jimmy Dunn does a great job of self-coaching himself and you know Tom Brady 's fantastic self-coach you know Steve Kerr unbelievable self-coach you know it's hard for me to look at a really fantastic leader without realizing and knowing that and just seeing an action that they're very good at self-coaching themselves to self-correct or the leverage of skill that they have to take it to the next level they they just get it and that's something we want to help people learn how to do. David you call it raising the bar but what keeps you motivated every year to every year on January 1st sit down and say this is how I'm going to be a better person this year what keeps you motivated to do this you've already been so successful. Well I don't know about that but I do know that I don't think anybody in the world wakes up every day wanting to be a part of something mediocre and so I kind of look at myself as a work in progress and I want to make what David Novak is be the best it can possible be I want to make the biggest impact I can on earth while I'm here and so I don't want to go through life just you know doing things that I enjoy I wanted to go through life doing things that help others that I enjoy. So it comes back to helping people. I think there's no question that's my passion. So Jason can you talk about a time when self-coaching really helped you yourself. I mean I think it was we could you know go back to how I got on this path of becoming a coach you know I had to understand that you know what I was doing wasn't feeding my soul it wasn't you know had a purpose it was to run this boat company but you know at the end of the day I wasn't having the impact that I thought I could have you know while I was here so you know to me it was you know how do you go from doing this you know you're really good at and you know and you're enjoying to you know something else that really motiv ates you to be you know passionate and you know and like I said earlier you know once you start to see that you have a positive effect on other people's lives it's really difficult not to want to do that every single day. Yeah so David how do you use the self-co aching to help others and not only to focus on themselves but to get them to also help others. I think that it's the aha moment that that comes from learning how to self-coach is once you pick up these skills you don't really have to put a lot of emphasis on the need to help others you know because I think you know most people realize that you're going to achieve the most success in life you know when you can help others but you got to help yourself first anytime just so you can get prepared to do that you can you can want to be a great executive but if you haven't put in the time and grade to learn your trade it's going to be hard for you to be a coach in that specific area so there's a combination of time and grade and then you know the experience that you learn the things that you pick up you combine that and with the experience you get and the desire you get to take what you've learned and spread it that makes you become a great coach. Jason what's your favorite tip from the book? Reframing is you know maybe the most powerful tool and getting yourself into neutral mindset is you know to me it's very powerful but most people need that refram ing tool on a daily basis so if you could develop you know that tool to where you don't look at things in the scope of failure failure doesn't exist right it's all just about experience and if you can look at life is just one big experience after another if you can set a clear intention and you start on a path then you're going to be able to achieve you know whatever it is that you're passionate about. Along those lines what's the most important question that you have to ask yourself? I think the most important question that you have to ask yourself is who am I you know you need to be self-aware you need to have you know that question answered so when somebody asks you who are you there can 't be any hesitations like what David was saying you have to be that confident about you know why you 're here. What is your favorite tip from the book David? Well I really love the idea of joy builders and joy blockers and I think if you can understand what gives you joy and what gets in the way of your joy you're on your way to be in home free. Since I read the book I will say you also offer ways for people to discover those so if it doesn't immediately come to mind you do give tips for how can you find those. This is a book of self-discovery this you know I learned a long time ago that telling isn't selling the best ideas anybody can come up with are their own okay therefore stories work and good logic and good process and good exercises they all work you know you can't do something like this and and do it with fl uff it's got to be substance. David I know you're passionate about learning so tell me what does it mean to be an avid learner and why does this book fit the bill? Well avid learners I mean you know people often ask me you talk to all these great leaders what's the single biggest trait that they all have and it is that they're avid learners they want to make themselves better they want to make their business better and you know you're constantly on the lookout for learning and that's what I think the big big trait is is that you know the one thing about greatness is that there's always some humility in greatness because humility says that you don't know it all there have been books written about people who are the smartest people in the room okay they end up being the dumbest but the people who know that they don't know it all those are the people that become avid learners and they ultimately end up learning a lot more than everybody else and then they put that to use for their business and the people that they lead and themselves because you have to grow yourself you have to grow your business you have to grow others and avid learning allows you do all those things all right we're gonna have some fun now we're gonna do that lightning round that you like to do at the end of your podcast I've never done this yeah all right now you have to answer the questions so these are gonna be for both of you they're gonna be really quick questions really quick answers favorite golf movie Jason oh 10 cup 10 cup hello okay David all time favorite resource Secretariat oh I mean I was gonna say Secretariat oh you can have the same movie same horse I guess we're gonna okay so Jason if you could be a superhero any one of them which one would it be and why I guarantee you David will not pick this dr. Strange and the reason is he manipulates time oh that's good that's what you do with meditation David Captain America no question I'm gonna say the plan and I want to have that I want to wear that union I want to be I want to be Captain America so David one of the questions that you ask all the guests that you have on do you have a secret talent do I have a secret talent oh I love doing the voice with my grandkids really oh yeah I'm not a good singer but we we get the chairs out we do the turnaround and all that kind of stuff it is that's awesome yeah it is amazing no it's amazing it's amazing to watch it is really Jason you have a secret talent I mean I love to cook and I don't think a lot of people know that about me so I'm a pretty good like I have this ability that when I want to cook something I can have the taste of it in my mouth before I even start wow that's really going to that he makes a he makes a mean scrambled eggs I have to he taught me a few tips that I now I now make mean scrambled eggs all right now now we have to get the tip on the scrambled eggs so the tip is you add a little cold water okay and you whisk it in and it makes really fluffy scrambled eggs nice I like it all right you get a fruitcake as a holiday gift do you eat it or regift it I always eat it and it's for the same reason because I want to get better at so I'm very interested on what other people do so I always eat them with fruitcake yeah I want to know is there am I going to find one that I really enjoy and then why do I enjoy it I regifted something once for one of my relatives and my mother found out about it she gave me so much hell about I'll never reg ift anything again but I also will tell you I'm never going to eat any fruitcake either I'm with you on that both all right guilty pleasure it can be food or entertainment I guess you're going to be food but I don't know oh I would say I you know guilty pleasure I do enjoy a nice glass of wine on occasion um and for the same reason I want to I want to try as many things as possible so it's not a particular varietal I'm I'm open so I'm always looking for something I haven 't had before Dave you can't pick wine because you do that more than on occasion so yeah I gotta tell you guilty pleasure that's a tough one but I have to say is blue bell ice cream oh oh my g osh I I start that tub and it ends up being gone all right so David one of your favorite questions that you ask people on your show and I want to hear it from you are three traits that you see in the best leaders well I think number one they are humble enough to know that they can't go out alone number two they are big believers and people and they know that they have to have incredible talent to succeed and number three they take great joy in leading people to victory great traits all right Jason we're going to mix it up just a little bit for you because I want to know the three traits that you see in the most coachable and successful people doesn't have to be athletes most coachable and successful okay I would say I have most experience with athletes but but I would say in general they know who they are so people are self-aware um then they have their purpose is very well defined so they know where they want to go and then I would say the last thing is they're so passionate about achieving that thing and and to me that's you know what separates a person that's going to make it in sports from a person that that doesn't make it in sports it's the attention to detail and in the discipline and and and the self accountability to do that every single day and and you know to me I'm that's constantly amazing me and I'm so lucky to be able to to witness it you know and and being in and in the same in the same room while they're doing it it's just you know it's just inspirational to be able to watch it well I feel lucky to have been able to sit here and talk with both of you if it Jason David it's been my pleasure and David thank you for letting me host your show oh that was great you know we'd like to thank you Donna for doing this and you know a great self-coaching example that I saw or heard was when you were talking about when you won your first race and you you were coaching a horse okay and you knew when that that horse's ears per ked up that that was the time you need to give him a little extra incentive and that that helps you win your first race if I recall and there wasn't anybody there to tell you to to give that little you know slot you know whatever it is you do to horse to get him to go well as we talked about the jockeys do not have coaches but we do have a team member and our team members are hoarse and if you're as a jockey I think you are a coach and if you're a good coach then you're listening to what your team member needs and wants and you try to provide that oh there you go there you go and if you're in that flow state at the moment then you know that it's absolutely the right thing to do because you just trust your intention like it might not ever have been a thought that you ever had before but if you're in that flow state and you and you realize oh this is what I need to do speaking of that I'll tell you a quick story so I turned for home one day on a horse that was in front and I went to turn over my riding crop and as soon as I turned over my riding crop she pender ears back and so I put it away because I knew she didn't want that and so she ended up winning but only by a head and so when I came back the trainer said how did you know not to hit her I meant to tell you that I don't think she likes the riding crop and I said well she told me and so but the joke back in the jocks room was the valid said yeah Chris Balibitch was the guy who ran second down and turned over a riding crop and saw it was just Chris and put it away and I think Donna you coached yourself if I recall you wanted to be a jockey and you started hanging around in the stables and just being there and learning and people saw that in you and that ultimately led to you getting the opportunity if I recall I know your mother was a famous jockey yeah I think one of the one of the best pieces of advice I got with somebody said do you want to know how to win races and I said yeah and they said ride for people who win races and that's when I realized that I had to associate with people who were already successful if I wanted to be successful yeah that's a great that's like in golf they say if you want to be a good putter don't have dinner with a bad putter make sure you hang around good putters okay yeah all right guys it's been a lot of fun Jason really nice to talk with you thank you so much for joining us thanks for the book and your contribution to it and David it wouldn't be a book without the both of you working together Donna it's been wonderful to me you thank you so much we couldn't add anybody better ask us questions about what we're trying to do and we thank you for setting the stage for what we hope is a very successful endeavor yeah good luck yeah thank you and it was my pleasure thanks now I hope you enjoyed that conversation and I hope you're primed and ready to be the best self-coach you can be if you don't already have a copy of the new book go to Amazon or wherever you buy books and pick up a copy of take charge of you these lessons have made a significant impact on my life and my career and I want you to experience the same benefits pick up the book and go into self-coach and journey with me so do you want to know how leaders lead what we learned today is that the great leaders use self-coaching to transform their life and career thanks again for tuning in to another episode of how leaders lead where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world I make it a point to give you something simple in each episode that you can apply to your business so that you can become the best leader you can be I'll see you next week you you [ Silence ]