“I believe that we choose our life.”
Dan Mendilow is an entrepreneurial neuropsychologist. He uses his background in psychology to help his clients rewire their brains and find success. He guides people through a journey that will send them on a completely different trajectory in life.
Join us as we delve into his personal journey towards success. Gain insight on how to harness your individual potential so you can transform your business by being accepting of your remarkable individuality and unique gifts. Learn that creating a successful and stress-free business requires more than just successful business strategies. You also need to rewire your thoughts and change your perception and beliefs.
“… everything that we do in order to heal our own wounds, to rewire our patterns, to evolve and grow will be mirrored in a way in our businesses, in our families, in our friends.”
Find more about Dan here:
Website: http://www.danmendilow.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DMendilow
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danmendilow/?hl=en
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-mendilow-46235124/
John: Thank you for listening to The Business Sphere. Don’t forget to share this episode and subscribe. My guest today is the entrepreneurial neuropsychologist, Dan Mendilow. Dan uses his background in psychology to help his clients rewire their brain and find success. Thanks for joining me today, Dan.
Dan: Thanks for having me, John.
John: So I’m excited to learn a little bit more about your journey, how you became who you are today, but maybe share with the listeners you know, what do people know you by today?
Dan: Well, these days as I’m going through a rebrand I’m known more as a personal magnetism Alchemist. My job is to help you call in the least amount of effort, least amount of stress, or the least amount of pushing or controlling the love or wealth that you’re really looking for and it requires an immense amount of healing and rewiring, I use tools from everything from psychology to cognitive science to neuroscience to more spiritual and energetic kinds of tools. That’s why people can’t really even call me a life coach anymore, I call myself a guide, I’ve called myself that for a number of years just because I take people through a journey that will send them on a completely different trajectory in life then that’s actually what I’m known for. The big juicy before and after kinds of transformations that change everything.
John: Wow, that’s a very deep. So how did you get into this path and maybe share with us some of your, you know, struggles or stories behind it?
Dan: You got it. This is a kind of a long story so I’ll give you the Cliffs Notes in with a backing to really say all this is I believe that we choose our lives. I do believe that we come into this life after a meeting her with a Grand Council to decide what are we going to try to learn in this life? What are we going to try to accomplish try to master in this life? And how do we set up challenges? So that by overcoming them, we can discover who we really are and discover our gifts and our strengths and grow into these actualized beings and with that in mind, I think I set myself up for a hell of a life. I started off as an emergency C section kid almost dying very first moments on this earth was traumatic, after that I was literally suicidally depressed my entire life until the age of 31, which is so rare that people will say it’s impossible. Bullied, messed with, picked on, I grew nearly a foot and a month that was catastrophic for my whole entire skeleton but also, throughout all these things feeling so weak and fragile, and feeling isolated.
I was born in Jerusalem, Israel, I grew up in New Jersey so, I know what it feels like to feel like a true outcast and to feel lesser than everyone else and to feel so different and on top of all of that, I’m an incredibly sensitive empath, but born into a society and into a family that was unaccustomed to it and didn’t really know what that was, or that was even a thing. So, I grew up not only depressed but thinking that I was literally insane, thinking that I was out of my mind because I just didn’t know what to do with all the emotions and thoughts and feelings and everything that was going through me on top of everything else and three years old, one of my sharpest memories from them was walking into my mom’s kitchen and telling her that I was so sick of being that I had just wanted to fit in and I just wanted to be like everybody else I’d never speak Hebrew again, my mother tongue. She has a three year old version of saying I will never be myself again and that vow fractured me and sent me on a course of just feeling worse and worse and worse and trying to fit in and trying to just have friends and have a normal life and just feel okay, there are no pictures of me smiling didn’t, know how to smile. In fact, in my senior year of high school I figured that might be something that I should learn how to do so I actually sat there like a psychopath and looked at pictures of people smiling so I could learn how to do it like a alien.
That’s who I was, got into drugs and alcohol in college and of course you know that’s the best thing you could do, right? Take a desperately depressed person and just give them drugs and that introduced me to my first bout with suicide, planning it out and promising myself I felt the same way in the morning that I would do it and instead of feeling that I felt angry and stubborn, and resistant, and rageful that this was my life, that this is the decision that I had to come to because it was the only thing that was gonna feel good. I refused and I set myself on a path to learn my way through it to figure out why was it that I was that I felt damned, that I felt condemned and broken every day of my life, whereas everybody else has so easy, everybody else could just go out and make friends, get dates have the bodies that made them feel comfortable, feel good within themselves, laugh, smile have normal lives. In here I was just struggling through every conversation every single day, every single thing felt like I was carrying thousands of pounds on me and regular psychology didn’t help. I ran circles around my psychologist and get they gave them either he gave my money back more than one time.
So, I got into weirder stuff back then neuro linguistic programming was not so big neither was positive psychology didn’t even have a name back then and I started getting deep into Vedic sciences into spirituality into every single thing that I could. I started making progress, realizing that I had a knack for this kind of thing that I could understand like it’s weird, my memory is terrible for pretty much everything except for spirituality, psychology, transformation, human behavior, I remember it perfectly. Tell me that once it’s in there forever and I noticed like I just, I get this stuff and it helps and I could start helping other people while I was on my own healing journey and then I got introduced to a Hindu spiritual called for a year and a half that in and of itself is hours and hours, and hours, and hours of stories. If you’re listening to this now and you’re really curious about it, the story is profoundly fucked up but also beautiful and I had my Kundalini awakening and then connected with who I thought I lost when I was three years old and that connection, snapped me out of my depression, brought me into a world where I felt whole for the first time in my life. Where I could start feeling happiness and joy and I built my business and within six months, I had a six figure business, within a year and a half, I had a multi six figure business, within two years Yelp started naming me the number one life coach in LA and has named me that every single year since and I’ve realized that all these struggles, all these challenges, and there’s so many more that I just didn’t feel like we’re really important here to go through but they all set me up. To be this guide for people I’ve worked with over 1000 people around the world celebrities, I’ve gotten to have the honor of working with people who I love like I love their work, I look up to them as artists and as thinkers, and I’ve had the distinct joy of being able to be a part of their journey as well.
I’ve literally saved people’s lives with energy healing, pulling them out of unresponsive comas, and helping rid senior citizens with multiple comorbidities of COVID. I’ve helped people pull themselves out of depression and change their lives and attract in soulmate partners to get married or build businesses. I guess the thing that really gets me going is realizing you know I lived most of my life, I’m only 38 now I lived most of my life in a place where I thought that not only could my dreams not come true, but nothing could come true that no good things would happen to me I really believed that and now I have this life where miracles happen daily. I can expect them, I’m so amazed, I’m so grateful but I expect them to be there, I’m not surprised and I get to help other people do the same and it’s the most beautiful thing I can think of.
John: That’s amazing. I mean, I have so many things I wanted to ask you throughout but I wanted to like finish but throughout those that 31 years and I know there’s been struggles and I know you know being bullied, not knowing how to fit in, there’s right now technology is amazing if you know how to harness it to connect with people that are like you but when you’re in a small community, I grew up in the projects, I’m from Vietnam like my parents came from Vietnam, we didn’t have much growing up and it was challenging, it was tough but my parents really put us in the right path making sure that we stuck together as a family, as a unit and we only connected with education as our sole way to get through it all, which good or bad that’s what we did as children and I didn’t fit in like everyone else. I did have nice clothes, I shopped at you know, salvation army, food, banks, all that stuff but it didn’t, my parents didn’t allow it to affect us growing up. I think when you have judging going on, peer pressure, and you don’t know what’s going on growing up, especially in those early years when you’re 10, 12, 15, 20 and you spend so much time influenced by your peers and you start rebelling away from your parents because they, you know everything they say you think they don’t know anything right? Because all throughout your life you think you know more and better than your parents. How did you get through that? Because I know peer pressure is probably the biggest, the most hurtful, most harmful thing that children have to go through. How do you prevent it from happening at an early stage and early you know? As a parent myself you know these are things I’m always trying to understand, learn and educate myself so that I’ll be there and I’m the best parent for my son.
Dan: I think one of the most important parts of it is to realize that any gift that is misunderstood is identical to a flaw and that’s the challenge is when we have parents who are simply uneducated and it’s not their fault. We live in a society that we think like all kids are the same, they all develop the same, they all learn the same, like we’re just beginning to realize that people are different then a lot of people will listen to this and say, no we’ve been talking about this forever. Yeah, yeah just like we talked about the golden rule but no one follows it right? Doesn’t matter what you know, it matters what you act on, it matters what you embody and especially Western society, we have only recently begun to truly accept it in the ways that we think and behave that people are different in spectacular ways right? This is happening quite a bit in the world of sexuality and identification where we’ve begun to kinda get into that but there are so many people who believe that they’re messed up, they’re not, they’re empathic. We have so many people who believe that they have this thing that is wrong with the way that they’re thinking they they’re given ADHD but really you know, they’re prescribed these drugs but really they just had trauma as kids.
They think you know their OCD, OCPD, I think is the other version of it and it’s really just a trauma response. We just don’t know these things and so what parents try to do is they try to bring their kids into their own worlds, they try to instead of really trying to learn about who this child is and fully invest in discovering this child’s gifts instead of just thinking it’s different, there must be something wrong. That’s one of the things that I really do hate about our modern understanding of psychology and I think psychiatry is extremely hazardous in most cases because it’s just like, oh that’s different we need to treat it rather than understand it through a wider lens right? Like, I wasn’t just depressed the reasons why I was depressed, many reasons but you know without really understanding that they just give that kid some drugs I would have never had the opportunity. Thank God I never took drugs that promised myself if I ever got to that point that that would be the day that I do end it but it forced me to look in and understand, I wasn’t actually crazy.
There are these things called empathic people and we do take in other thoughts and emotions from others, that’s not craziness, that’s a reality and so when parents understand the different realities that could exist and the gifts in them and how to communicate with people like that, how to think like they do you know like you raised an autistic child, there are so many gifts and being autistic it’s insane but yet there are parents because they just don’t understand it or raises their kids thinking that they’re broken and because they, they believe that or they believe that, oh the you know I need to treat this kid in a different way that is fundamentally disempowering. Through pity, through whatever kind of frame they put themselves through all that stuff gets retained by the child, all that stuff gets absorbed by the kid and they think, oh my God yeah there is something wrong with me, there is something bad, I do need special treatment, I do need this, I do need that, I do need these drugs, I do need to make up for this instead of learning how to use it, harness it, love it, work with it, see the gifts in it because when we fully appreciate ourselves, bullying can’t happen. It doesn’t exist right?
Kids who get bullied usually get bullied because they have targets on their backs and they’re the ones who put them there themselves but where did they get that idea? Right? There we’re not, most of us are not born thinking that we are worthless, most of us. We got that idea from somewhere, where did we get it from? Right? So, I really believe that parents need weirder education, let’s put it that way, we can no longer continue to raise kids without training or raise kids, we’ll just figure it out the you will. Your kids get to end up on my couch one day right? Learn, study, learn about yourself, learn about the human heart, learn emotions, learn about spirituality, learn about how different people think in different ways and process information very differently from each other. So that when you meet someone who seems like an alien to you, you understand them, you can speak with them and when that person is living in your home then you can be a really good guide for them. I think that’s how we heal it.
John: Yeah and this is great insight because psychology and I, I’m been a big advocate of you know just working with business owners and the mindset the business owner has to get through to really provide a service or product to customers is getting into the minds of their ideal customers, their customers right? The users and the you know last couple years I’ve been really taking a step back in reflecting on perspectives of all my team members, my staff, my clients, my family, my relatives, my everyone, and spending more time on slowing down because I was wired to just go go go and that I’ve been less stress, I’ve been sleeping way better, I’ve been mindful, I’ve been doing a lot of relaxation and meditation and you know everything to really slow down to have a better perspective on values, cultures, upbringing, you know how people absorb content. How do they take it in? And how do they express it? And why do people do certain things? And I’m teaching this to my son of course, this is the main trigger for me being educated, informed enough to make informed decisions that best suits my family, the closest people in my life so that we are better equipped to not judge anyone. Let people be who they are, accept them, and just live what you are there for right? To be a part of society right? And as your last two years COVID has hit a lot of people on an emotional level, on a whatever it is like health, finances, there’s a lot of stressors going on in life and I found that I’ve been happier than ever, things are going better than ever, family are closer together because I’ve slowed down and stopped judging and I started letting go, I started letting things be the way it is.
It’s been so refreshing and I don’t know if this is normal but a lot of people are probably letting stressors affect them and that’s how you get into this rabbit hole of you know destroying your life and other people’s and starting judging and you know all these ripple effects that happen but if you slow down and then really analyze and figure out, why are you stressed? What’s the root of it all? Are there triggers? Are there people that are preventing you from doing things or you know, things right? It’s been great like last couple years I don’t know just absorbing tons of content, learning from a lot of different you know, good people, humans, even people that are above or below me, it doesn’t matter it’s just people in general. The more you communicate, the more you talk to others and you get to know them and you match the activities, hobbies, lifestyles, whatever cultures and you learn and you’re, I’m constantly curious and I want to be vulnerable, I wanna let people in on how I grow and learn right? And people may resonate or not, they may think I’m a whack job and that’s totally fine too, I will accept them for what it is and that’s how it is. Like, I don’t know if that’s good or bad, Dan but that’s what I’ve come to realize in the last couple years. I’ve been happier, I’ve been successful and I’m trying to help as many people get to this state but it’s hard because a lot of people are not there yet.
Dan: Sure. I mean okay, so what you said, yeah it’s not normal, it should be but it’s not normal because in a society that celebrates feeling bad and they do especially now
John: Media
Dan: right now, we live in a society that worships being a victim, worships it and it really look at the memes, you look at social media, you look at how people talk, look at the fact that you can be unhappy for no reason then people will accept it but if you feel happy for no reason people will 51 50 right? Like no no no, what do you mean happy for no reason? You’re just happy? Or you must be insane right? And the society that is fundamentally unhappy, being happy is crazy and it’s rebellious and putting down the judgment and making these changes is an act of pure rebellion and it’s important until it is normalized, it is important that we are rebel and we avoid whatever society says usually you know it’s like, oh society says it’s usually wrong and so we, it’s our responsibility to be that voice of rebellion.
The thing is that knowledge alone very rarely changes anything, we need transformation, that’s why a lot of people can read self help books forever and they can sit there and they think about it over analyze why am I stressed? Why do I feel this way? And they wrap themselves up in mental circles because we must understand that we have a conscious and an unconscious mind, the conscious is all about that logic right? That story, why am I stressed? What’s going on? What did they say? But the thing is that no one has ever told me “Dan, I’m so happy.” I sat there and over analyze that situation for three hours, I finally came to the bottom of it never heard it, never done. It was a huge over an analyzer myself and read everything, I’ve read over 1000 books you know what I mean just on psychology and transformation and everything, and the thing that I found here is that there’s another thing that we tend to tacitly agree with which we say knowledge is power, which it isn’t. Nobody cares about, you know, you don’t even care about what you know. And again, we can go back to everybody knows a golden rule, how many people actually live by it? Right? So what we want, what we really need is transformation, the unconscious shifting your unconscious designed to hide from you. You know, if you could just read a self help book know all your wounds and heal them. We just need one book. Everybody would be happy and the world would be great. The problem is doesn’t work like that. Right? So what we really need is unconscious healing. That’s where your emotions are, that’s where your wounds and triggers are. The rewiring in that area allows you to shift how you show up, change your behavior, change your perceptions, change your beliefs, because your beliefs as I’m sure your audience knows, right?
You guys know that beliefs are self fulfilling prophecies, whether they’re empowering or not. He’s just like, like, like Ford quote, whether you believe you can or you believe you can’t, you’re right and that is the basis of the placebo and nocebo effect is psychologically and scientifically studied and held as fact. So we know that we need to have unconscious changing and going back to as well you know with kids, kids will take on a parent’s unresolved emotional wounds, whether the parent teaches it, says it or even knows about them themselves. One of the best things that we could do is not just educate ourselves, but also heal ourselves. It’s the same thing in a business, the business will take on just like a kid, the business will take on the leadership’s unresolved emotional issues. That’s why one of the most important things if you are a business owner and you’re listening to this, I don’t care if it’s just you as a solopreneur if you got people reporting to you, you’ve got to do some healing, a lot of healing well, all of us I believe, we should just heal forever because there’s never really an end to and every time you do it your life only gets even better but when we do that and we have people looking at us for guidance, we change them by changing ourselves and everything that we do in order to heal our own wounds, to rewire our patterns to evolve and grow will be mirrored in a way in our businesses and our families and our friends, the best thing that we can do for the world around us, no matter what pursuit, whether you’re you know, a home husband, housewife, whatever is to do that healing.
However, it is you get yourself a shaman, a life coach, a spiritual guide, a community with people who can help you with it. But the whole idea of doing it ourselves is old school. You know I’m not a car mechanic I don’t try to fix my car myself. I do study this, I do this. I’ve studied this for 20 years. And most of the time when I want to go after my deepest darkest patterns are the ones that I don’t even know about, I hire someone as well. To get expert, really high level help to do it as quickly as possible, as deeply as possible, as best as possible to heal things I can’t see or touch and it always reflects in the people in my business in the world around me.
John: Amazing Dan, So I know people refer you as the alignment specialist, someone that actually aligns their, the person’s goals with what they want out of it and you’ve focused on working with a lot of individuals. You know, you’ve been living in LA, you’ve probably met a lot of famous actors and people that are probably celebrities. What have you noticed that are similar or different in individuals like people? Humans have a lot of fear, a lot of regret, a lot of pain. But for them to let go, acknowledge that and then be okay with, you know trying to cure it or trying to reverse it right? And make things better. How? Like do you mind sharing with the audience about there’s no name that you can associate with but it’s more about the journeys, like what were some of them some of these transformations that you would like to share? Because I’m just very interested to know because a lot of people need help. They need to figure out their pain in order to let it go. The challenges they don’t even know what that is, where, how deep it is, what’s going on? And what exactly is it that you have harvest through your training and your expertise that makes you so unique in the world that we’re living in today?
Dan: Sure, so there are a couple of questions in that so I’m gonna do my best to answer all of them. The first thing with like celebrities know this, we’re all people. No matter how successful you are, no matter how successful people are, there’s still people. I’m sure the Dalai Lama has his own personal issues he’s working through right now. We all have the same or very similar kind of emotional makeup. People at the top of the business World also have fears and imposter syndrome. And the fear of failure, the fear of rejection, they have their own personal issues, they might have social anxiety they might have you know, it’s the same, it’s just at a different level. But a different level of what? Right, I’ve met so many people who are multi, multi multi, multi millionaires, 10 figure earners who have everything they could ever want on paper but feel socially bankrupt and isolated and alone and unhappy and unlovable. Something that anyone can feel at any time in life, no matter what they do or where they’ve come from. It’s one of the things that I think we could all really get into, so once you do this work for long enough you realize that we’re all the same. We just look different, we do different things. But at the core, we share so much if we just knew that, I think the world would be very different. We knew that top level top of mind people go yeah, I know yeah, again, right. But it needs once we feel it in our hearts we really see like, oh my god like, yeah, you know you’re poor, you’re rich. But we can still the same fears, and they can still impact us deeply. We all want to be seen and understood and loved, we all want to feel like we’re worthy and valuable. We all want to feel like we deserve to have the life that we have and even better and when I work with people in alignment, it’s aligning their energies to their goals, really helping them step into this area where unconsciously deep down just like by breathing they know, right? They know that they’re worthy of these things, they love themselves, they appreciate themselves, they can forgive themselves, they can look back at their challenges and tragedies and realize that as much as it sucked, there are gifts in there and they feel equipped in order to handle massive stress. Working with a celebrity was no different than working with anybody else. Except for maybe I had an appreciation of the work because I knew it, right? I’ve gotten a chance to work with some of the people who have made some of my favorite shows and some of my favorite movies and that was cool because I knew of their work. But when we got down, we’re just people. It was just a conversation between two people. It didn’t change anything, right? Their awards, their fame, it didn’t change anything.
John: I love the fact the you’re just being real with it because humans have to understand you know we come from earth like there’s one one place and we’re all equal no matter where you live if you’re rich, if you’re poor, you’re in different parts of the world you live in a forest, a tribe versus a you know a country that has different values and culture. I mean we are still humans that have the same feelings, that have emotions, that have rooted beliefs right? And energy and if you can kind of understand like people’s upbringing there’s gonna be some challenges that people have to deal with right? Everyone has problems and they just voice it differently, they handle it differently, they control it differently. But ultimately they want to be accepted, they want to be heard, they wanna be like everyone else, they wanna be a part of something and that’s what I’ve learned from communities over the last couple years I’ve been really harvesting myself and ingraining myself in activities, hobbies, interest of what I believe are my interests right?
I’m big into business, I’m into sports, I’m big, I just signed up for marathons, I bought books and I’d sign up and join Spartan tough mudders whatever and that’s what I’m talking about, things that resonate with me? I’m gonna find other people that have the same interest and I’m gonna go connect with them because we have something like in common and that’s what I’ve learned, a lot of people are hesitant, fearful, scared of judgements right? Like things that psychologically they just shouldn’t, but they’re afraid. How do people overcome that? Because not everyone’s wired like myself I feel, like how do people step outside to be more vulnerable, be you know just open.
Dan: Yeah, I mean that’s where the healing comes in, you know that’s why people like me really exist to help people heal those emotional wounds because really blatantly, look, all the things that I used to hate myself most for? Are my favorite things about me now, that’s why I said you know getting any gift misunderstood is identical to a flaw, the things that you hate yourself for, your deepest darkest insecurities, when you heal the wounds around them, those things will become your superpowers. But the thing is we don’t find our strength when things are easy, we don’t discover who we are as a gift, we have to work for it because like when we pray for wealth usually money isn’t just gonna show up in our pockets, life is gonna give us an experience that will teach us how to generate that wealth, if we ask for strength we’re not just gonna get muscles we’re just, we’re gonna be put in a situation where we are forced to become even stronger. So when we struggle with these things, we struggle fitting in or feeling seen, heard whatever these basic human desires as we’re talking about, that’s what it is. It’s a call for you to do the internal work and get to a place of deep appreciation for all of these things, to learn how to use them, learn why you are gifted with them, like being an empath not only is it amazing professionally because I can read my clients minds and I know what they feel before they feel it, but it’s such a gift, I love being able to interact with the world this way, the fact that I was Israeli born in or you know raised in New Jersey and I’m an immigrant, I used to hate that, I love that about myself now, it makes me different and it attaches me to such deep rich history that the thing is that like, one of my clients asked me the other day she wanted in a way to know the things that heals all things if there’s such a thing, what is the thing?
That once we take care of this thing it will heal everything and people will say self-love but I think self-love is one of those concepts that’s a little hard for people to reach or even understand, it’s a little bit too far away for people to grasp. I think it’s self appreciation and acceptance, acceptance is realizing that even though there are things that you might not like about yourself or that you want to improve that it doesn’t diminish your worthiness in this world and it doesn’t diminish you value, it doesn’t take away from who you are, and then appreciation is a skill, through healing the wounds and learning that skill you can come to a place of deep appreciation, of who you are and where you are, of your struggles, of what you’re going through, now even though they don’t feel very good. Because there whether you’re trying to use spiritual manifestation, psychological adaptation where you’re trying to go from a side of psychology and science or spirituality and magic, the feeling of deep appreciation that you can cultivate for yourself and acceptance will call in the things that you want, you develop an energy that is irresistibly magnetic to people who are on the same wavelength, to people who feel the same, might have had the same background, might be looking for what you have to offer, might love your energy, so we become magnetic to clients that’s why you know my business owner clients very often double, triple or quadruple their incomes in a matter of weeks, we become magnetic to lovers, I’ve helped people literally manifest the perfect woman that they wrote down on paper and they’re getting’ oh nope they got married this last July, I have you now helped people become magnetic to opportunity to simply opportunity to up level and grow because we pull them in and when we appreciate ourselves for everything that we are, we step out of that worry and out of that fear and over analysis and out of this introspective solipsistic kind of way of life and we exist in the world, so we can be observant, we can notice the shortcuts that might have been there the signs, the signals, the supporters, the people who enjoy us.
We can notice how many people are there for us, when we can send our attention outward because we deeply appreciate who we are inward. I noticed the more work that I do in this area the more I love everything, the more I can appreciate a simple cup of coffee or the sunshine or the rain. Even when I have extremely bad nights of sleep I have massive sleep challenges, I can still appreciate things and I can still be present and I can still be here and who I am through this work, that’s why I think everybody deserves to do the healing, everybody is worthy of making their lives even better and better and better and better and that’s the thing, you don’t need to have like problems in order to be on your healing journey, all you need to do is want even more, want even better for yourself because the things that might be keeping you stuck in a good life and preventing you from getting an extraordinary one, those are also wounds, beliefs, patterns that just limit you and by finding them by working through them by healing them deeply not just by watching a YouTube video or reading a book by actually doing the work you can transform your life and I think we all deserve it.
John: That’s amazing Dan. I know you touched on life experiences and your uniqueness right? Like everyone is different, everyone comes from different upbringing, different culture, different you know parenting styles, different values, different friends, different social groups you know. But the challenges a lot of people don’t realize that’s how they you know grow, and learn, right? Like it’s not the only way and when you start realizing and slowly slowing down I found like last couple of years just slowing down and having better perspective on where people are in different stages of their lives, different places, how they came to be who they are which is completely unique from everyone else in the world and except that where they transform, they progress, they learn from you know where the gaps are, where they want to put more effort in their pillars right? Because some people are very heavy focused on business growth, revenue, profit, you know whatever it is, sales, but they’re missing this huge relationship piece or family dynamics or whatever you know desires which is like they want that social acceptance but they believe that the money pillar, the wealth, the fame, the influence is what really drives them to continue pushing that believing because in society and the culture that we live in, people who have X amount of net worth or wealth is perceived to live a better grander life, but in reality, are they really content and half happy and you know do they have solid relationship pieces that fundamentally I find most important thing is the people that you connect with in your inner circle, that you can call at 3,4,5 a.m and they will pick it up and drive to you no matter where you are and that group, whoever they are they are you know your Godsend, they are the people you want to stick with for the rest of your life right?
That’s the most important piece, because everything else is superficial, people are chasing here and there and figuring, trying to figure it out but it takes a lot of work to get to that place, a lot of people and I, again in my 40’s so you know it took me time to get to where I am, to be in a happy place and that usually, you know a lot of people go through a lot of challenges, they go, they have to live right? They got to make their own struggles, mistakes and they got to learn life experiences right? And they have to be ready to accept transformation too, because you cannot force it on people, they have to acknowledge there are challenges and there’s problems and root issues that needs to be uncovered, they need to get to it and they got to get dirty to figure it out to change. So have you found like you know a lot of people reaching out to you? It’s, not everyone is ready.
Dan: Yeah and sometimes like I kind of feel like a genie, you know what I mean? Like I can make anything happen in your life, I can help you heal from anything but you’ve gotta want it first, you know without it it’s just the mind will protect itself from the healing, so it’ll just block it entirely. The one thing that I do want to bring up though as you were talking about how relationships are the core of everything, they can be, the problem sometimes people get into is they feel like that will heal them, that will solve things so they get into the pursuit of a relationship or relationships similarly to the way that some people would get into the pursuit of money, like there’s a pretty easy rule, the more your rewards come from outside of you the more you get addicted to them, the more your rewards come from inside of you the more they set you free. Appreciation is a skill, it really is a skill it’s not just something that happens and so when we can, when you can get to a place where you can really enjoy and appreciate and be good student of life, be a good student of yourself and really appreciate every step not for what you’re accomplishing externally, not for the money that you made or the date that you went on but how you felt. Appreciating how you showed up or how you learned from that challenge or mistake or the date that went wrong or how you lost money or whatever, and we can cultivate the rewards internally using the externals to help us feel from ourselves worthy, valuable, like we’re growing, like we’re contributing, feeling significant.
Again, not from the externals because you can feel all of these things if you make a dollar or you make a million dollars but you can also not feel these things, no matter how much money you make or how many friends you have. I felt totally alone and I had like 30 friends, good friends, still felt totally alone, had nothing to do with them, had everything to do with me. How is that perceiving myself? In these situations, when we can get to a place where we can create, we can generate these amazing feelings for ourselves, no matter what’s happening externally? We are free, but the more we need relationships or the money or the house or the job or the status or whatever, the more we need of these things right? It’s called the hedonic treadmill we can get used to everything, that’s why when you have your first 10k month it feels great, after you’ve had your fifth now that becomes the baseline and if you don’t hit that 10k what used to be a dream goal, if you don’t hit it now it’s the worst month of your life, right?
Because you’ve gotten used to it, you familiarized it, it’s gone back to baseline so now you need more, you need more. If your relationships are try, if you’re trying to fill a void in your life with relationships you will never have enough, you will always need more, you will be a social climber, a people pleaser, right? Hey, we can turn anything external into an addiction and give it power over ourselves. But when we learn how to cultivate what we want we can heal that void, what are you using those relationships for significance? Great! Well, if you heal the wounds preventing you from feeling significant in your daily life and you can help yourself feel significant just by making a cup of coffee or just by waking up in the morning, not only are you free of the addiction but your relationships will improve in their quality because now you’re not needing them, you don’t need them, you want them. Now you don’t need them as medicine, you want them because they fill you with joy so you can connect with people on an even deeper level, that’s the spirit of freedom.
John: I think self-awareness is so critical being grateful appreciate giving you know just thanks to everyone, everything, every product, service, people you interact with and accept them for who they are and what they do and how they got to where they are and I’m finally realizing like judging people for face value like, why do people do that? Why do they feel so superior to others to then be able to judge and want to believe that they’re not normal, right? When you’re at a point where you realize that everyone is unique and they’re special and they have superpowers and they want to just be loved. They, like last couple of years been very transformational for me, Dan and just being able to accept my neighbors, I’m spending more time in the community because of covid. Getting to know every walks of lives because I’m not traveling like I used to, I’m able to accept people and wanna bring them in and have fun and learn like I’m ultra curious of my neighbor that you know yesterday I spent all day shoveling snow and I was walking around and some of these homeowners were ladies that are in their 60’s and trying to shovel on their own so I just went out and help and have a conversation with them and it was so helpful for me and I was like you know, yes they want to thank me and stuff. But I was like no! Thank you! You know for being a great neighbor, right? Like just accepting them.
So, I came to this realization that it’s like slow down, have time to really reflect and the more I’m doing that, I’m really appreciating people as humans and the perception that I once had. Like I don’t judge, I try to just believe who they are because it’s what you know, what they don’t know, like they just were brought up differently, they were the culture, the upbringing was completely different, the way they were taught were different. That you know, it’s hard but it’s it took time and that’s what I mean like transformation does take time and maybe I could have expedited it using your services but it’s great for myself to realize and have more joy in my life because I have abundance of people and myself being fully self aware of what triggers me happiness right? And the more I give just not wanting anything out of it the more just being happy and being myself right? Things happen like you mentioned, Dan like it’s weird, it’s like karma like people say like it just happens and it’s amazing.
Dan: Yeah. I mean that’s, that is magic you know that’s you know part of my work is teaching people how to manifest things but a lot of people go through the visualization, they go through all these other steps and they go through prayers and mantras and they write things out. They way that I do it is harder but it’s right through healing is again when we can drop that judgement by the way, the more when we catch ourselves unconsciously judging other people it’s because we’re unconsciously judging ourselves and it might not be the one for if I think that someone is stupid doesn’t necessarily mean that I think I’m stupid but there is a judgement there unconsciously spoken when we drop that stuff we come into acceptance and appreciation of ourselves very often we don’t need all visualization, we don’t need everything life will just give you gifts, life will just give you blessings and that’ll you know when we really cultivate that ability to be grateful as well, then it’s like it rains it pours but on positive side you know you get a gift and that just fills you full of joy and because you’re full of joy, you meet someone who wants to help you or give you another gift and that feels you even more joy and transfer that off to a friend. It creates this dominos positive domino effect and I think that’s how I have right now a business that I don’t need to market for at all.
Multi six figure business, I don’t need to do any marketing, I don’t know another coach who can say that, I don’t need to worry, I get to spend my time just cultivating those amazing feelings for myself and the people around me and life keeps on bringing me amazing things it happens for all of my clients as well. It’s effortless manifestation, it’s almost like this is how we’re supposed to live.
John: But it takes time right? And it takes a lot of work and it’s a lot of effort and not everyone gets it not because it’s self-realization right? A lot of people aren’t willing to step outside their comfort zone, a lot of people are unwilling for a change. They’re so used to what they perceive as what they were taught right? Like normal or good to have the beliefs, these values or whatever. So you know things, people absorb information differently and they take time you know, you may be very quick in terms of like knowledge, insights and really getting down gritty into making change happen. But some people just need to self-realize and that is also okay right? Because just like this pandemic right? A lot, you can tell a lot of people are emotionally depressed and there’s a lot of behavioral challenges that are now awakened because you know they’re uncertain of what really is going on. Media says one thing, friends say one thing, you read and start absorbing different content, it’s weird because people absorb content differently. There’s so much information out there now, access at your fingertips and you don’t even know who to believe anymore. So how do you go through life not knowing certainty? Because a lot of people don’t even know what they don’t know and how do they absorb information? Like books are great, authors have been doing it for 30-40 years, but it’s one person’s perspective with their audience. So I’m, like you said, “read a thousands of books” . I do it for different topics that are of my interest and then I pick pieces that resonate with my life and utilize it and actually take action in it. So doing things, reading it like you mentioned is completely different than actually making things happen. Because as a business owner you got to make and move forward, you got to do things right? And that’s how I have been working my, you know working this business, doing what I do, because I actually enjoy the process, I enjoy that transformation like you mentioned. You know this podcast didn’t just happen, it’s three years in the making. But I enjoy each conversation I have, taking bits and pieces and utilizing for you know myself and my audience of course. But it’s fun right? Like why I, why do I do things? Because I’m happy wanting to cherish these relationships and moments with others and hopefully making an impact in the world through this medium right? But ultimately what it is is happiness, true happiness. When you get to a point where everything you do from the time you wake up to the time you go to the bed, you’re embracing life, you’re living and you’re cherishing moments and you you’re appreciating, you’re grateful and you understand and you don’t judge and you just accept and you let go of any of the judgements? Then you come to a really good place in life.
Dan: Yeah I agree and by the way embracing things doesn’t mean that everything needs to feel good. You know you can be generally happy and have a bad day, you can be happy and have things go wrong, you can be happy and struggle right? It’s not a moment by moment thing, it is a general state of being and yeah its, that’s really the core. We break happiness down though, happiness is one of those things like depression or confidence that is actually the result of something, it’s a network of things and not everybody, okay we gotta honor where everybody is, you know what I mean? It’s not about peer pressuring people into healing, that’s just as messed up as any kind of other peer pressure, right? We gotta honor where people are and accept where they are whether we like it or not, we don’t need to continue engaging with them if it’s something that is bothering us or in some way disrupting our worlds. Everybody’s on their path and in different places along that path and for me I think that all a person needs is just want something even better, no matter how good, no matter how hard things are. All you need is just want something even better and when you want that enough to face your demons, to do the healing work, to go out on a limb and call someone for support, get a coach, get a guide, join a group, whatever. The moment you really truly willing to do that? Things begin to shift. It’s a hurdle for a lot of people, because people come up with all sorts of logical excuses right? How many, how many friends do we know who stay in abusive relationships? They have all the excuses in the world and they’ll say “yeah I know I should leave” but they don’t. I know I should quit this job but I’m making good money and I like the people here. These are excuses that I gave to stay in a job that I hated for eight years, we all have reasons to stay. So sometimes what people need is to hit rock bottom. Some people need to just fall down the open elevator shaft, have everything go as badly as possible as quick as possible, let’s not draw it out right? Rip the band-aid off as fast as you can and get to that place where you are kind of desperate. Because then, you’ll do things that you were resisting before and you’ll think things that you were resisting before. That’s why rock bottom is one of the most powerful places we can be, it can propel you into happiness. That’s one of the wildest things, by having things go as badly as possible. You can make things go as well as possible. But being in the middle sometimes that’s the worst.
John: Totally agree, it’s great! This conversation Dan has been very eye-opening, I really had a lot of fun. Can you share with the audience members how they can reach out to you? If they had any questions, how do they you know check you out in terms of any of the properties that you own and utilize your services if they have interest?
Dan: Yeah you got it. So my website is danmendilow.com if you’re interested in you know checking out some of the other sides of things you can look at me on Instagram @danmedilow, it’s pretty straight forward or Facebook Dan EC Medilow. I will begin writing actual posts again for the first time in five months pretty soon I’ve taken this massive hiatus but there will be a lot more content out there but if you go to my website, there is my own podcast with 125 episodes and videos and all sorts of kinda really fun and in-depth content on there if you’d like to learn more about me. There as well you can apply for a rapid expansion readiness call, it’s a free consultation with me to see if we wanna work together and then we can just take things from there.
John: Amazing. I’m gonna definitely have that on the show notes so it’s gonna be linkable but I really wanna thank you for your time, generosity to share with all the listers this great conversation. I’m ultra grateful and I appreciate the time that we’ve shared today. Thanks a lot, Dan.
Dan: Thank you for having me on, John. It was an awesome conversation.
