In this episode of the Morning Upgrade podcast I talk with Dean Brown about internal and external judgement, making a difference, delegation and more.
In this episode of the Morning Upgrade podcast I talk with Dean Brown about internal and external judgement, making a difference, delegation and more.
Ryan
Hey guys, it's Ryan real quick. So my mission with the Morning Upgrade blog and podcast is to raise the awareness of morning routines and personal development. And I now have two products that are also helped me with this mission. The first product helps you start a 20 minute morning routine. And the second product is a book that outlines how to use personal development, upgrade your life and business. You can get full details on both products over at morning upgrade.com. Thanks for letting me share. And now on to the show.
Announcer
Welcome to the Morning upgrade podcast with Ryan Cote where we feature casual conversations with entrepreneurs about personal development and growth.
Ryan
Hey, everyone, this is Ryan cote with the morning upgrade podcast. And today I'm speaking with Dean Brown. Dean, how are you doing?
Dean
Well, Ryan, good to be with you.
Ryan
Yeah, likewise, I'm excited to speak with you. Why don't we start by you telling everyone who you are, what you do, and what your interests are?
Dean
My name is Dean Brown. I'm a Holistic Life Coach. I help professional men and dads by providing a high-performance, holistic life coaching program. It's a personal reality type approach with the business orientation, as well as some law of attraction is there to keep everybody tuned in online. And I help everybody either start or build a business, just say seven figures plus and I also like to introduce a multi-stream approach to things.
Ryan
Yeah, I saw on your site that I didn't realize the law of attraction has a coaching certification program. It's pretty cool. I've read the book. I didn't realize they had that program.
Dean
They do. Yeah, that's quite awesome, actually. Because a lot of people don't even understand the law of attraction, let alone how to master it. And that really does run your life. So I'm very, very thankful I have that part.
Ryan
Yeah, absolutely. What are your interests? What are you enjoy doing?
Dean
I'm a big fan of four-by-four off-roading. I took a 2015 Colorado and I put a big lift kit on it. And a bunch of you know, a nice big winch on it. And I like to go off-road where nothing else can go and then just be amazed at what my truck can do and where we can go. Oftentimes, we'll get into a situation where my wife will say, I gotta get out, I can't take it. And it's amazing what you can do with a good machine and a good mindset to keep going. I really enjoy that. No, of course, I like gardening and renovating. I like to build my own or at least fix my own house up and make sure that everything's the way I want it. So yeah, that's all for now. That's progress on pictures. It was pretty intense. When you get into a water crossing and the water is leaking, reach out your window and there are your hands are getting wet. It's you're thinking okay, you better not stop, you're gonna be in trouble if you have to stop.
Ryan
Ever gotten stuck?
Dean
I have got stuck with, thankfully, not that deep of water before. It's always been in a situation where you can get out and you know, get a winch line on there and pull yourself out the type of thing. So thankfully, never in deep water.
Ryan
Very neat. So let's talk about you know, your morning routine. Morning Upgrade is a personal development podcast, I like to talk about morning routines, personal development habits, like my business which we can get into. But why don't you tell everyone what your morning routine looks like?
Dean
Well, actually, my morning routine starts the night before what I do the night before, as I review the day how I did the wins, I focus on the wins, I've never been a self-judgment kind of guy because that just holds you back. And you know, just become aware of the things that I'm going to be needing to focus on the following day, I have a five-point system. So after I wake up at five o'clock, I like to do some gratitudes affirmations, do some meditation, some stretching with yoga. And then there's a pair of friend ladies that have mine that has a podcast that starts at 630. And I follow them they do a mindset type of thing where they follow through with books, like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, or Joe Dispenza is breaking the habit of being yourself. And they go through a chapter a day. And I just there, they're also my life event broadcasters for when I do coaching events. So they can go live on YouTube and LinkedIn and stuff like that for me when I'm doing that sort of thing. But anyway, after I do that, I get into that five-point system where one of those is about my family and the other four of our income-producing activities, building my business helping other people build theirs. And I go through all that sort of thing. And then, of course, I'm helping clients, you know, helping people build their business or start a business. I also do some affiliate marketing. So I use I have the beautiful opportunity to use prepaid vacations as an incentive. I'm able to share those unlimited prepaid vacations with people to help them build their businesses. So once I get all that done, the day is mine and I'm able to work on myself and my self-development. If you're not working on yourself, you're not developing and I can't help people are there to do the things they need to do to build themselves if I'm not doing the same thing myself. So that keeps me busy.
Ryan
It's a pretty detailed morning routine. A lot of questions were coming from my mind. But first I want to point that is the one book you mentioned Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I'm actually reading that right now. Ironically, I'm reading the 25th year anniversary version. It's a great book, man. It's like it's a little bit dense, I guess every page is very detailed but there are so many nuggets of wisdom that you can pull from it, I highly, highly recommend that book.
Dean
And the beauty of that book is that it's timeless. And it was written, My goodness, almost 100 years ago, back in the 30s. That was written and it's amazing how timeless true wisdom really is, those habits are the same habits that anybody that wants to be successful just needs to embrace that once they understand them, and just keep practicing those habits.
Ryan
Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you mentioned was the fact that, you have five things that you kind of focus on during the day, that resonates with me because I used to keep part of my morning routine, I have a to-do list, I create a to-do list. And it used to be semi-long. And it started stressing me out when I look at it. And now I've kept I keep it to four things, three things, you know, I'm going to do for work, or family, and then one and then one person, I'm going to recognize that day, word of encouragement, or whatever the case says, recognize them for something. And so that much shorter list, when you're forced to create a shortlist like that it forces you to only put down the things that are really, really important for that day. And it just I think it's made things a lot more simple. So I resonate with that part of your routine.
Dean
And the beauty of it is to you can also focus a little more intently with a lot more success. When you're not worried about oh, my goodness, I've got 20 things I got to do today. It can be overwhelming you did you said that yourself when you get too much of a list going on. You can almost be guaranteed you're not going to get something done right. Or at least if you do you haven't done everything well.
Ryan
Yeah, yeah. When I started feeling stressed looking at it, I was like, alright, I gotta change something here. This is not sustainable.
Dean
If you haven't even started yet, and you're stressed, you've got you're doing something wrong.
Ryan
Dean, I know you. I know a big focus of your coaching business is on mindset when it comes to mindset. And really, my question is more along the lines of happiness, but the two of them are related. What is your approach to happiness? Like? How do you focus? How do you work on your happiness? And how do you help your clients with their happiness?
Dean
The whole point of it is judgment. And I'm talking about judgment from the external as well as the internal, if you're always telling yourself something negative, then you're never going to find a way to tell yourself something positive. And the whole point of being happy being positive is not focusing on the negative Now be aware of it, learn from it. But don't let it be the thing that drives your mindset. Now we're born with two things, we're born with awareness and choice. And in that, we need to be aware of what we're thinking and how we feel about it. And if we're having thoughts that are making us anxious, angry, or sad, then we're already on the right track. But the beautiful thing is that you can become aware of that, you can let yourself know that, hey, wait for a second, this is a negative thought. And that's where the awareness comes in. And once you realize that, hey, wait for a second, I'm holding myself back here, I'm being my biggest obstacle, then you can step into that other thing you're born with, which is choice. And you can actually say, Hey, this is my opportunity to make a difference for myself. And for the people that I deal with your if you're in corporate, you're going to be dealing with you know, your superior unless you're the president, you're going to be dealing with team members, if you're on a project, you're going to be dealing with people that work under you, if you're in supervision. Or if you're just you know, a guide on the team, you still have to be aware that not only does this have to work for you, but it has to work for the people around you. So just don't let other people hold you back by what they go through. Because trust me, it's not about you, when other people are giving you a hard time. So happiness is a choice, my friend, you just have to be aware that you're not in that moment. And the whole thing is people tend to think about the past or the future. And they get stressed about those things. They either live in something that happened to them in the past, or they're stressing about something that hasn't happened yet. And they don't allow themselves to be thankful and grateful for what they already have now.
Ryan
Yeah, a lot of nuggets of wisdom and what you just said, I think it's freeing that you said that you don't have to completely avoid your negative thoughts because that is natural to have them. It's more about recognizing them and then moving past them. Absolutely. Yeah, that's excellent. Let's go to the entrepreneur side, before we started recording, you were talking about some challenges that you had in business and businesses 10-15 years ago. And not that I want to have a negative conversation here. But it's more about overcoming the challenges. Everyone has challenges you went through some of them sound like was pretty intense. And I'd like to talk about how you got over them how you overcame the challenges.
Dean
The reality of it is that until you actually choose that you want to make a difference for yourself, you're not going to and I didn't at first because I didn't understand that I was doing it wrong. I was just going with, you know the needs of my family. It was just after 2008. And the economy had collapsed. And I was in a manufacturing job at the time and went into business for myself after that. And it wasn't that I didn't know what I was doing. It's just that I wasn't being aware of all of the Fast Facts. actors involved. So that I spend a lot of my time actually trying to get people to pay me that I spent more time doing that than I did actually doing the work that earned that money. So it's an opportunity for all of us to take stock. Are we in the right place? are we approaching everything from the right angle? Are we working with the right people in our lives? Are we planning in such a way that we're, you know like we mentioned earlier? Do you have too many things on your plate? And you know, you're not going to get to them? So you've already started from a negative place? Are you seeing some wins every day? Are you celebrating those wins? Right? And are you in a place where you know, you're Are you leaving yourself short, just by the simple fact that you haven't planned all that? Well. So for me, it's one of those things where we just have, to take a moment. And that's why I meditate, to be true to myself to understand that I'm doing not only this, you know, thing that whatever it is everybody's doing for myself, but also for the people that I'm really, you know, everybody is a stakeholder in your life, whether it's the guy at the coffee shop, the gas station, the restaurant where you work, all these people have a stakeholder and how you treat them. So that's a big part of it. Because if you're stressed out, if you have, if you're the guy that always grumbles, grumble, then you know, you're not going to go forward very far very fast, because nobody's gonna want to help you. And the big thing I just said, the big thing there is don't be afraid to ask for help.
Ryan
With the stakeholder party, I read somewhere that one guy's advice was to treat everyone like a business can leave a review on you, I got a review on a business. Absolutely. The recommendation was to go through your whole life, and treat people like they're going to review you want to treat people, you want to treat people with kindness. And so that was his recommendation. I'm sure you have some habits, of course, and probably ones that helped you get through the challenges. What are your daily habits now that you rely on to grow your business and to grow your personal growth?
Dean
First of all, I mentioned earlier, reaching out for help, I don't try to do everything alone. If you're trying to do everything alone, you're already in a spot where you can't win, there are people out there that are willing to help them help you and you should be willing to ask for that help. And the best help of all is a coach for the last quite a while now, I've had more than one coach, I have several mentors depending on the business that I'm working in, I do have multi-stream business going on. So I have multiple mentors, I have multiple coaches. If you're not spending money on the help you're getting, and you're not getting the help you need. You know, if you're not willing to invest in yourself, then no one's going to be willing to invest in you. So the awareness of how much you build yourself is a direct reflection of how you might you can help other people build themselves.
Ryan
If you look at basketball, I mean, I'm a huge fan of coaches, a huge fan of masterminds. If you look at you know, sports, even the top athletes like Michael Jordan, you, somebody argues he's the best basketball player ever. He had multiple coaches. So even people at the top of their game, still need, you know, an outside perspective on how to improve things.
Dean
I mean, you could take that one step further and talk about that greatest golfer in the world. Tiger Woods, right. And he had a coach all the way through. I mean, it started out being his dad, but he had the awareness that you know, okay, for me to get better, I have to change the stance, I have to change my swing. And he always reviewed what he did. And he almost did it as a coach. So that's powerful. If you really, really want to reach the pinnacle of who and what you are, you need help to do it.
Ryan
Yeah, yeah. And I, you know, masterminds too, I bought a mastermind, I almost look at it look at us as a board of directors, I've got people that, you know, they get to know you over time. And they get to know your personality and your situation. And you can it's a group that you can bounce ideas off of that that really know you well, I think that that community aspect is very, very important.
Dean
Extremely important. If you don't have a place to go where there are people better than you that you're never going to get examples of things you can do differently or better.
Ryan
Definitely. So, Dean, I've got one more question for you. And then I'd like to wrap up with you telling everyone how they can learn more about you, your website, or whatever link you want to share. So my question, I want to go back to mindset because I know it's a big focus of yours. If you can give someone only one piece of advice around mindset, as your number one tip, what would it be?
Dean
I would suggest, don't judge yourself. Give yourself a break. Find the things you've done well don't focus on the things you haven't done well. When you do notice the things that you haven't done well, don't beat yourself up with them. Understand that that's where you have to build yourself up to improve yourself and then ask for that help. Always celebrate your wins and learn from your well some people call them failures, I call them lessons. And keep in mind that the universe is always putting something in front of us to teach us how to get to that next level. So it's not a problem. It's an opportunity for growth.
Ryan
And when you say don't judge yourself, what popped into my mind is my middle daughter, she seems to have a habit of no negative self-talk and she's only eight, trying to put the kibosh on that. Is there give any tips around eliminating self-talk.
Dean
Absolutely. So every time you're doing a self-talk situation, and this would be wonderful for your daughter to be coached through by your dad, is just take her aside and say, Okay, so you've done this poorly. But what were you trying to do? And I'm better than that. What did you do? Well, while you were working on it like I'm sure it's not a complete loss, there had to be something you did well, in the meantime. And she may say no, at first. But as you work on that, and as you give her some, you know, some fatherly love and encourage her, just let her know that, hey, wait for a second, I know you've done things well. And I know you're a good person. So let's look at the positive side and then say, you know, what is what the what was the lesson inside that there's no need to beat yourself up?
Ryan
Yeah, that's great advice. Thanks, Dan. I appreciate that. This was a great conversation. I really enjoyed speaking with you. If somebody wants to learn more about you and connect with you what's the best website they can go to?
Dean
They would be going to www.mypersonalreality.ca. I'm in Canada, so it's a .ca. And I have what's called a link tree. And that's link tree forward-slash coach, Dean Brown. And that would have you with the opportunity to click on anything that I do. Coaching assessment, building, a business assessment, going through all my different social media pages, all that sort of stuff.
Ryan
That's a great idea entry. Yeah. Well, we'll link up both of those on your show notes page. Perfect. All right. Well, thanks, Dean. I appreciate your time. Great conversation. And thanks, everyone for listening.
Dean
I enjoyed that too. Thank you, Ryan.
Ryan
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