Everyone knows what cognitive thinking is, but what about metacognitive thinking? Dan Sullivan uses this term to describe the kind of thinking The Strategic Coach® Program develops in entrepreneurs. In this episode, Dan and fellow business coach Shannon Waller explore metacognitive thinking and how it helps the right kind of entrepreneurs achieve their biggest dreams with greater clarity and confidence.

Here’s some of what you’ll learn in this episode:

• The three levels of thinking most people rely on in daily life.
• The fourth level of thinking that unlocks your best entrepreneurial ideas.
• Dan’s first childhood experience of thinking about his thinking.
• The question that set Dan on a completely different life path from his peers.
• Why entrepreneurs gain an unfair advantage when they learn to think about their thinking.

Show Notes:

One level of thinking is thinking about things. People like things, and they often use shared things as common ground for conversation.

The second level of thinking is thinking about people, which is why social media has become such a powerful phenomenon.

For most people, thinking about things and thinking about people uses up almost all of their available mental time.

The third level of thinking is thinking about thoughts, which is the focus of higher education and high-level media.

In higher education, professors typically teach other people’s thinking rather than developing and teaching their own.

The fourth level of thinking, which very creative people—and especially entrepreneurs—can access, is thinking about your thinking.

Thinking about your thinking gives you the ability to deliberately change how you’re thinking about a situation or problem.

Strategic Coach® provides hundreds of thinking tools to help entrepreneurs think about their thinking in structured, practical ways.

Your emotions are not a direct response to what happens outside of you; they’re a response to how you’re thinking about what happens.

Resources:

My Plan For Living To 156 by Dan Sullivan

Unique Ability®

Entrepreneurs often need to be creative to have a profitable business. What do you do when you aren’t a creative person? In this episode, business coaches Dan Sullivan and Shannon Waller talk about the “why” and “how” of imitating other people in order to achieve business success.

Here's some of what you'll learn in this episode:

• Why we imitate other people’s performance.
• The reason Dan never attends workshops by other coaches.
• How real creativity involves grafting.
• How uses of technology can be a step back instead of a step forward.

Show Notes:

There are two timeless ways of learning and improving yourself: imitating other people's performance, and repetition.

Humans are the only species that can use their brains to access the uniqueness of other people's brains.

We all imitate other people, whether we like to admit it or not.

If you're creative, and you come across someone who's more creative, you imitate, but at a certain point, you make it your own.

What an imitating person does, and for how long they do it, tells you whether they're just an imitator or whether they're creative.

If you appreciate someone else’s skills, you can translate them into your own world.

Creative people can be polarizing.

You create a new capability using vision and obstacles.

The combination of two people’s uniqueness creates something brand new.

People who imitate but aren’t creative are stealing.

In a world of AI imitation, creative people are going to get wildly more creative to differentiate themselves from robots.

Resources:

Unique Ability®

Your Life As A Strategy Circle by Dan Sullivan

Every great entrepreneur wants (and deserves) to have a dependable team around them so they can be freed up to develop new ideas and focus on growing their business. But how do you get one? After all, the first question most entrepreneurs ask when they join The Strategic Coach® Program is, “Where do you find such great team members?” In this episode of Inside Strategic Coach, Dan Sullivan and Shannon Waller finally answer this question in-depth. From identifying and nurturing Unique Ability® within a team and creating a positive and collaborative work culture to investing in team members’ growth, Dan and Shannon share everything that makes Strategic Coach® a magnet for skilled and passionate talent—and how to become one too.

Here’s some of what you’ll learn in this episode:

• The number one tool necessary for building and maintaining a great team.
• How to determine if an activity is right for a person.
• Why Strategic Coach team members don’t really need to be managed, monitored, or motivated.
• How Strategic Coach creates an incredible sense of safety for its team members.
• The two things that team members are looking for.
• Why you should think of hiring someone as an investment, not a cost.

Show Notes:

At Strategic Coach, you’re always either winning or learning.

There are a lot of Coach tools that support having a great team.

Everybody's on their own unique growth path in terms of who they are and the kind of work they’re most likely to enjoy and excel at.

Strategic Coach team members can continually focus their time at work on doing what they’re excited about.

The moment someone is hired, Coach invests in learning about who that person is and how they can grow their skills.

At Strategic Coach, if something doesn’t work, the system gets blamed, not the individual.

The four core values of Strategic Coach (PAGE) are: positive and collaborative teamwork, being alert, curious, responsive, and resourceful, getting results, and providing an excellent first-class experience.

Strategic Coach has uniformly very helpful and very positive staff.

Some Coach clients have been with the company for 15, 20, 25 years, and so have some team members.

The educational system generally disparages successful business people.

Almost all Coach team members are directly in contact on a person to person level with the company’s clients.

A team member can’t be at their best if they don’t feel safe.

If you want great team members, you have to be a great entrepreneur. And that also includes being a great person.

Great team members who want a bigger future aren't interested in being with someone who doesn't have any future.

If you're going to be able to attract and retain the best people out there, you can’t have an entitled attitude.

Resources:

Unique AbilityⓇ

Article: Your Business Is a Theater Production: Your Back Stage Shouldn’t Show on the Front Stage

The Team Success Handbook by Shannon Waller

Everyone And Everything Grows by Dan Sullivan

Who Not How by Dan Sullivan with Dr. Benjamin Hardy