For 35 years now, The Strategic Coach® Program has been helping entrepreneurs to achieve business success and business growth while living happy lives. But Dan Sullivan didn’t set out to create a program for entrepreneurs. He set out to create a thinking program, and entrepreneurs are the ones who took to it the most. In this episode, Dan talks with fellow business coach Shannon Waller about the genesis of Strategic Coach® and why it works so well for entrepreneurs.

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

• The learning experience created by others that’s had the most influence on Dan’s thinking today.
• The ways of thinking on which Dan based The Strategic Coach Program.
• How constantly growing in capability and confidence protects you from worrying about the future.
• What lets Dan know he’s created a timeless thinking tool.
• Where all Strategic Coach thinking tools come from.

Show Notes:

The entrepreneurial game will continue for as long as you’re up to it.

Each person can take the actual experiences of their daily life and develop them into knowledge.

The challenges you face each day are sufficient to create a lifetime learning program.

It's easier to get things created and produced these days than it was in the old days.

Entrepreneurs have to be learning on a daily basis, while many non-entrepreneurs don’t have to do much learning after they get the job.

Some non-entrepreneurs view having to learn new things as a chore, while entrepreneurs see it as an advantage.

The bigger the problem and the faster the solution, the bigger the check for the entrepreneur.

Strategic Coach clients are never told what they should learn from using a Coach thinking tool.

It’s dangerous for an entrepreneur to get bored.

Entrepreneurs get punished most heavily for not changing their minds.

Entrepreneurs can make greater progress from thinking than people in most other lines of work.

As a group, Strategic Coach clients are uniquely confident and feel a unique sense of capability and confidence about the future.

Strategic Coach clients make more money and take more free time than a comparable group of entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs are the only people whose success depends upon being transformative.

Strategic Coach clients have a shared language thanks to the Program’s thinking tools.

The cause of most entrepreneurial problems is loneliness.

Resources:

The 4 Freedoms That Motivate Successful Entrepreneurs [Article]

Unique Ability®

Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy

The Entrepreneurial Time System®—The Entrepreneur’s Guide To Time Management

The Experience Transformer®—Transforming Experiences Into Multipliers [Article]

The Impact Filter™

Do you give yourself time to think? Many people don’t. And for entrepreneurs, the stakes are higher because they’re in the marketplace independently. In this episode, business coaches Dan Sullivan and Shannon Waller talk about why thinking time is so important for business success and how entrepreneurs can get the highest quality thinking time through The Strategic Coach® Program.

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

· Why deep thinking is scary.

· The question that The Strategic Coach Program was based on from the start.

· Why it’s easier to get entrepreneurs thinking about their thinking than most people.

· Why thinking about your thinking is something that has to be consciously learned.

Show Notes:

Most people only do the kind of thinking done in Strategic Coach® in extreme emergency.

Most people engage in three levels of thinking: thinking about things, thinking about other people, and thinking about other people’s thoughts. But there is a fourth level: thinking about your thinking.

Higher education is almost entirely based on people who spent their whole lives thinking about somebody else's thoughts.

In any sale, the first thing that people buy is a relationship.

There’s only one expert on what progress is going to make a client happy, and that's the client.

Some people don’t think about their thinking because they’re afraid of their thinking.

For most people, it’s an unnatural act to think about their thinking.

The Strategic Coach Program is about the clients, not the coaches.

Instead of thinking about their thinking, most people just engage with whatever the world throws at them during the day, and then watch TV in the evening.

Thinking about your thinking means taking agency over what actually goes on in your mind.

The more you think about your thinking, the more normal it becomes.

The problem is never the problem; the problem is not knowing how to think about the problem.

Tightly scheduled entrepreneurs cannot transform themselves.

Resources:

Thinking About Your Thinking by Dan Sullivan

The Dan Sullivan Question by Dan Sullivan

Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Your Life As A Strategy Circle by Dan Sullivan

The Impact Filter™

Article: The 4 Freedoms That Motivate Successful Entrepreneurs