In this coordinated episode, David Waldas, Founder of The Aligned Living, shares strategies for alignment and flow in life and business. If you struggle with disillusionment or lack of passion in leadership, you won't want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why passion drives sustainable success in stage 1 ventures

- How to find your unique spark beneath fears

- What aligned actions create fulfilling entrepreneurial freedom

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 1 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

David Waldas is the creator of the Aligned Living System. With a background in education, coaching, and entrepreneurship, he helps individuals achieve alignment and flow in both their personal and professional lives. David is also the author of Insight, Influence, and Flow: A Guide for Business Professionals, where he shares practical tools for achieving sustainable and lasting success. As an international speaker and coach, David’s work has positively impacted lives worldwide, helping individuals reach their highest potential.

Want to learn more about David Waldas' work at The Aligned Living? Check out his website at https://www.davidwaldas.com/

Mentioned in this episode:

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Founder's Quiz

uh Your last name is Waldis.

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Waldus, W-A-L-D-A-S, yeah, Waldus.

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Just like it sounds, yeah.

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Sure.

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And then they're not.

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Yeah.

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yeah, I always wanna check.

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All right, here we go.

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Hello, hello and welcome.

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Welcome once again to the Start, Scale and Succeed podcast.

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The only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey as a founder

and.

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For those of you who've followed me or listened to the podcast for a while, you probably

know that it was a podcast episode that totally changed the course and trajectory of my

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life over 10 years ago now.

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And my goal with each and every episode is to offer that kind of life-changing wisdom for

founders in each stage of their journey.

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And today, I'm especially excited about that opportunity for all of you in stage one, all

you pre-founders listening today, because...

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My guest with us here is David Waldis, who's the creator of the Aligned Living System.

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With a background in education, coaching, and entrepreneurship, he helps individuals

achieve alignment and flow in both their personal and professional lives.

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David is also the author of Insight, Influence, and Flow, a guide for business

professionals where he shares practical tools for achieving sustainable and lasting

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success.

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As an international speaker and coach, David's work has positively impacted lives

worldwide, helping individuals reach their highest potential.

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He's here with us today.

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David, welcome to the show.

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I actually just recently, yes, I just recently read a study that was done by Pew Research

Center, I think it was, and of self-employed individuals, uh they were considerably, I

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will say it that way, more likely than not self-employed individuals.

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to be fulfilled in their job, to say that they love it.

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It was something like 60%, which was amazing to me.

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uh And despite all the pro-employee changes that have happened in the market over the last

uh four five years, some of the silver lining, if you will, in the wake of COVID, uh is

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that more than half of professionals that they surveyed were still less than thrilled with

their job.

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So first question for you here out of the gate, why do so many professionals feel stuck

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and while starting their own business or side hustle, solve it for them.

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Yeah, that's great, Scott.

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I think it's that feeling of I don't have as much agency over my work day, over my work

life, over what I'm working on, what I'm not working on.

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And that feeling that feels like somebody else is dictating my life or my work life or

what's open to me and what's not open to me.

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We love freedom.

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And then we go to create it ourselves.

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And I love where you're going with this, the idea of am I creating freedom for myself?

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or am I just making myself my own boss?

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And maybe that's even worse than my last boss.

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I often joke, you know, like how self-employed, well, it's great, but my boss just won't

let up, you know?

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And so, you know, are we creating something that is about passion?

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And you know, it's funny, I started joking with my clients, usually after they've signed

up with me, saying, they're like, man, I just keep getting more in touch with my passion.

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I'm like, yeah, I didn't tell you this when you signed up, but...

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uh

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One of things that happens, anybody I work with becomes unemployable within the first two

months because you can't do things ineffectively anymore.

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You can't do things the way other people want you.

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You get passionate about what you want to bring and you have to bring it.

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And so when that's our driving force, rather than, know, God, I want the freedom.

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And I think this is just a dead on truth about everything in life.

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Whenever we're trying to create by getting away from something, we're just hanging

ourselves out to dry.

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It's got to be, I want this.

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And this is what I want to create.

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I'm not doing that shit anymore.

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I'm going to do something else ah that never works.

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Yeah, that's so, so true.

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And what's interesting is you see the journey that founders go through, that reality kind

of sandwiches it on both sides.

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You see a lot of folks early on that are trying to leave some type of bad boss or bad

something out uh behind them and uh you jump in, maybe they should, maybe they shouldn't

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start a business.

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Well, you fast forward five, 10, 15, 20 years and folks are thinking about getting out of

their business and they leave to get away from the whole thing.

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It's really wild.

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And yeah, I couldn't agree more.

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think the advice in either of those situations is what are you going to, not what are you

going from?

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Yeah.

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often think about that too when I've talked to people that have had boats.

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I'm like, oh, I'm thinking about getting a boat.

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What do you think?

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And they go, you know, two best days of owning a boat is the day you buy it and the day

you sell it.

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And some people's businesses are like that.

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Like, oh, freedom.

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Oh my God, this won't end.

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Yeah, yeah, it's so true.

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So in my world, the world that I come from, I should say, I'm working almost exclusively

with founders and their leadership teams.

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And so one of the questions that I get asked a whole lot from people casually when I tell

them what I do is this question, um what do you think of my business idea, whatever it is,

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right?

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Everyone's got an idea.

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And I actually don't think that's the right,

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It's a good question.

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It's one that you have to answer if you're going to start a business.

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well that and I think a better question is should I start a business?

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Right?

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Like, is this actually the right mechanism or platform for me?

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And so when you're working with your clients does that question come up?

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This idea of whether they should start their own business and if so, how do you help them

navigate it?

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Yeah, that's great because I think when we hit a certain place inside of ourselves where

we just go, gosh, I'm really getting in touch with my purpose, that purpose either plugs

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into somebody else's machine or it doesn't.

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And if it doesn't plug into somebody else's and there's not a spot in us, is one of the

cogs in the wheel and in their system or a way that we can help enrich their system or

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lead in their system, then we got to start looking, well, how do we create that system?

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I love that quote from, ah I forget his first name, but Porsche who started Porsche, said,

there's a car I always wanted to drive and didn't exist, so I created it myself.

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And that piece, if it doesn't exist, we don't need to reinvent the wheel.

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If there's a spot for us in somebody else's machine, great.

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And if we can enhance it and expand it, because being an entrepreneur, it's not easy.

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It doesn't end.

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There's always something you have to be taken care of.

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You're responsible for everything.

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And if you don't see it that way, it's not going to work for you.

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And so I think that question is getting really clear about what your passion is and it

coming from your core and what you love doing.

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And if you can fit into somebody else's business, explore that first, really.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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fully agree.

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And what I love about that is em one of the things that I often say is that the defining

question at this stage that tends to separate founders from just folks who can plug into

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someone else's system as you described it, is that better way, right?

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It's that it really doesn't exist and you can't do it by any other mechanism.

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uh

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If you were to boil it down in kind of the most mechanical or even mercenary approach, it

would be, should I start a business?

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If you can do anything else, do that.

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eh If you can do anything else.

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um So, because it is, it's hard, it's challenging, it's not the easiest mechanism for

doing, but if your purpose demands it, you'll, I can't say gladly, because it doesn't

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always feel all that glad, but you'll make that sacrifice, right?

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And you have to be able to manage the stress of it too, because there's not a paycheck

anymore.

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And that pay is being created by you, the vision is being created by you.

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And I think there's a way higher upside for the amount of wealth we can create, but we

can't do it for that reason, because otherwise everything is about trying to get there as

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opposed to offering our service.

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And it's great, you know, like I'm getting ready to travel right now and, you know, spend

three weeks in Europe.

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And I just spent a week in New York and my schedule allows for that.

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And when I was in sales before or teaching or education, it wouldn't have allowed for

that.

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But if I did it for that, you know, like it just wouldn't work.

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And so these secondary gains, which are often what draw people into it, um can't be the

primary.

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Otherwise, it's, you know, if you're working for time off, you know.

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that.

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was talking to my son the other day who's very into wrestling.

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ah And this is like got dreams the whole nine yards.

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um real wrestling, not like WWF, but like real like collegiate style wrestling.

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so he's training year round for it.

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He's doing a great job.

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uh And I asked him like, why'd you choose it?

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know, cause I actually, wrestled for one year and I hated it.

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ah And he said, you know, to be honest with you, I chose it because a friend told me that

the hoodies were really soft.

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uh

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I chose it for comfort.

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I chose it because the hoodies were soft and cozy.

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Whatever gets us in though, right?

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Whatever opens up that spark.

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Awesome.

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five out of five.

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And yeah, it was a lot of fun.

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here's what I wanna get to with that.

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And that you kind of laid this out.

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Like there are primary objectives and there are secondary objectives.

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And how do you know which is which?

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Yeah, you know...

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I think it feels different inside of us.

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You know, the thing that just goes, I got to offer this versus like, that's gonna be a

sweet vacation.

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You know, and I think we've all had those things of like, those perks, like, it's gonna

feel good to be rich.

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It's gonna feel good to have money.

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And then there's just something that just comes from out of out from the inside of us.

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goes, man, when I change somebody's life, when I sit down with them and a light bulb goes

off and they change directions and they see everything differently, like there's nothing

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else I want to be doing in that moment.

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And I don't care about how much money I'm making.

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I don't care about time off.

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because everything's complete in that moment.

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And if we're not finding that in our business, whatever it is, it's creating, like if

you're a salesperson and you're like, oh my gosh, I'm lining this person up with something

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that's gonna change their world or I'm finding success and I'm finding a way for people to

understand what it is that I'm offering them.

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And it just keeps landing that feeling of really where we're in flow, where everything

disappears and we kind of forget we exist.

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that's gotta be the core of it and everything else is gonna be those secondary pieces.

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yeah.

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As you're saying that, yeah, as you're saying that, it feels to me like our primary

objectives tend to be what we can give, right?

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What we will gladly give.

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And our secondary tends to be what we get.

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And I love this idea, and you talk about it a lot in the book.

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And so I did want to make sure we get to it in this conversation.

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That was a good point.

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But you talk a lot about this idea of flow.

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And...

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For folks who haven't necessarily looked at it, it seems like one of the most woo woo

things that we could come at, but it's not.

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There's a lot more to this.

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So yeah, yeah, yeah.

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So what's the science behind flow?

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What are we talking about when we're talking about flow and how do you help your clients

to achieve it?

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Yeah, so we're really what we're talking about is a state of consciousness and people

meditate and a lot of people have found some sort of peaceful place inside in meditation.

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And what I've found and again, this was like a spontaneous experience for me where I ended

up in this, you know, internal state of consciousness is that it's very easy to get there.

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The reason that we don't go there is because most of us are so entrained with everybody

else's energy fields and everybody else's surroundings, everybody else's thoughts,

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everybody else's emotions.

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that there's so much emotional noise running into us all the time.

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And when it's that loud emotionally, we're not gonna be able to quiet our inner world

because it's not our inner world.

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It's whatever we're surrounded by.

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And so what do we do?

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We go, I need a retreat.

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I need to go somewhere where nobody else is.

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And so I teach people how to basically rework with or rewire their own energetic system,

which is a part of us that we all have that, you you walk into a room,

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and it's super tense and you start to feel tense.

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Or you walk into a room and it's like a party vibe and everybody's happy and you start to

feel the party vibe, you start to feel happy.

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And so there's a part of us that picks that up.

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And science has really just dialed that in now that there's information that gets passed

through our electromagnetic field that all runs in this torus and this toroidal field,

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this kind of donut of energy that loops through us.

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We overlap and we have experiences with each other's energy.

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And it's really undeniable that we've had that.

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If you're sitting with somebody who's sad, you can feel it kind of

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pulling you in, know, why do you tear up sometimes when somebody else is having a hard

time?

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You know, we end up with that inside of our experience.

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And so, you know, it's great to be able to feel that and have that true empathy.

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But when it's 90 % of what we feel and only 10 % is us, we don't have the ability to go

into flow.

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We don't have the ability to really even get in touch with what we truly want because

we're so busy managing our surroundings.

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And so I teach people how to restructure it so they're feeling themselves 90 % and the

external world.

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and the emotions of everybody else 10%.

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And the moment we do that, now we can quiet our inner world.

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And once we can quiet our inner world, we have agency over it.

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And we can move away from all the distractions, all the micromanaging, all the meddling

with everything and start to move in a place where we just trust things a lot more because

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we're just feeling greater clarity, greater quiet within.

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And it's a really hard state to describe because what people love to do, and of course we

do it, is we just go...

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I think I know what he's talking about because it's the closest thing we've had on

meditation.

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think I've had that or maybe in sports I've had that and it's always surprising to people

when they go into this internal state of consciousness because you just seem to know

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what's next.

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You just seem to know very intuitively how to navigate and you're not pulled into the

what's wrong.

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And this is similar to what we were talking about, right?

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Because, you know, if you're leaving a job because your boss sucked or because you don't

have the freedom or whatever, that's all the what's wrong.

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And then we look for what's not that.

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We solve the problem really with the opposite problem.

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We go, this has no freedom.

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I'm going to create freedom.

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I'm going to do the clarity.

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We see it in life, like in dating.

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I'm dating somebody who's really obnoxious.

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Like, oh, I'm going to go date somebody who's really quiet.

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Oh, they're really boring.

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Now I'm going go back to somebody who's really obnoxious.

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We're just always solving problems with the opposite problem.

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And when we go into this alignment, into this place of flow, it's really next right

action.

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It's like, what's right for me?

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And it has nothing to do with what's making me uncomfortable right now.

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Mm.

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the moment we play that game, we're bouncing back and forth between opposites, as opposed

to really feeling our truth.

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And so from that place, we just get clear, and we just start to flow with things.

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And it's always surprising to people.

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There's um point in your book that I thought was really interesting.

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I believe the language you used for it was the gift of rejection, which I thought was very

appropriate for this conversation because um one of the challenges that we have as

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entrepreneurs, and you don't really think this is going to happen, but everyone else has

the power over whether or not your business succeeds, right?

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Every customer.

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Yeah, yeah.

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or break your business tomorrow, it feels that way.

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uh And in that real heightened, uh those real heightened stakes, there's the sense of

like, you'll experience as much rejection in the first two years of starting a business as

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most people in like two lifetimes.

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So how do we turn that around into the gift that uh you think it can be?

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Yeah, and I think it's true in all areas of life.

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When we're really stabilized in who we are, we look at some people and they're just kind

of appealing to everybody.

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And we go, that's so great.

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Everybody likes them.

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But who are they inside that, that they can be somebody that's so benign that everybody

just likes them?

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And when we really get clear on who we are and we hold that in a powerful way, there's

going be people that love it and people that really are not interested or even are just

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like,

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I don't want to be around that.

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Like it goes against my own principles or it goes against my own sense of safety, right?

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And if people are trying to be safe and they're around somebody who's just like, we're

moving forward and we're creating stuff and they're like, I'm out, you know?

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And so that gift of rejection, oh it comes from being really clear about who you are, what

you're creating and being fully committed to it.

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Not wishy washy, not trying to appeal to people, but just coming from your own clarity.

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And when we do that, it's a bit polarized, right?

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But it's successful because it's clear.

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And when we try to appeal to everybody, maybe we get a lot less rejection, but we just

can't create because we're just a bit more amorphic.

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People can't really be our super fans because they're just like, yeah, they're great.

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Yes, I guess they're great.

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I don't know that.

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I always seem to be like being around them, but there's no conviction.

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And from that place of conviction, we lead.

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And when we're leading from that place, people

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our inner out.

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And that's great because it does not waste our time or theirs.

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Very good.

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David, there's this question that I like to ask all my guests.

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I'm interested to see what you have to say about it, but it's this.

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What would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn't a secret at all?

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What's that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?

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Yeah, I mean, it really is that we all have this ability to tap into a place inside of

ourselves, that we have this incredible gift to bring that's unique to us.

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And it may sound a bit cliche, but I'm talking about literally getting in touch with it.

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Not trying to find it, not going, my mom always said I was like this, or my teacher said I

was like this.

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But something that lights up inside of us, that burns so bright that we can't help but

bring it to the world.

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And when we seek that place, which is usually underneath our worst fears, which is usually

underneath the things that we're the most ashamed of.

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And we move through that, I always call it the fear veneer or shame veneer, because it

feels like it's solid, but it's not.

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And when we push past the shame and push past the fear, we go, my God, there's something

really special in here and that's me.

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And I'm going to bring that.

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And when that spark lights up inside of us, there's no stopping us.

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But when we're playing it safe and trying to figure out...

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Where do we fit in?

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What do they want?

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I'll offer what they want.

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ah Everything has a certain amount of watered down, no conviction.

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And so when we can find that spark inside of us, underneath our fears, underneath our

shame, that's where all their fulfillment is.

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And that's really the work I do is teach people that place and help them bring it.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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of the work that you do, uh there's obviously the book out, Inside Influence and Flow, a

Guide for Business Professionals.

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uh Where can we get a copy of the book and where can folks find more out about you and the

work that you do?

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Yeah, so I mean it is on Amazon, but you can go to my website at DavidWaldus.com and it

has access to, you know, can order the book from there, but you can also see I do small

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group programs like five to seven people.

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I do a handful of one-to-ones, pretty close to booked up on that, but you know, there's

often an opening coming up here and there.

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And then I train coaches in what I do too.

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And so, you know, a lot of people that are even just,

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want to learn how to coach this because it takes them to a whole nother level in their

practice.

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And so I would bet that three quarters of the people I've trained to be coaches really

just incorporate it into themselves and how they engage with each individual that they

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work with in their business.

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And others just do it professionally.

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But it's one of the things I'm most excited about, about taking the system that I teach

and handing it to others to create that exponential impact so that it's getting shared

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over and over again.

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Fantastic.

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Well, David, thank you so much for being on the show.

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Just a privilege and honor having you here today.

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And for those of you watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the

world to us.

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I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see

you next time.

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Take care.

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Thanks so much, Scott, and thanks for listening.