What happens when everything you built your identity on is taken away? In this conversation, legendary speaker Dan Clark shares how a life-altering injury, a single cassette tape, and the right mentors transformed his darkest moments into a calling that’s impacted millions—revealing why resilience, belief, and purpose always matter more than talent alone. This episode is a reminder that you don’t find your calling by chasing success, but by answering the moment that almost broke you.

About the Guest:

Dan Clark is an internationally renowned Hall of Fame speaker, bestselling author, and resilience expert who has delivered more than 6,000 presentations across 79 countries. A former elite athlete whose career was derailed by a life-altering injury, Dan transformed adversity into purpose and became one of the pioneers of motivational speaking in schools, colleges, corporations, and leadership conferences worldwide. He is a trusted mentor to leaders, a longtime protégé of Zig Ziglar, and the author of over 30 books focused on leadership, belief, and personal excellence. Dan’s message is rooted in integrity, resilience, and the power of discovering your WHY—impacting millions of lives across generations.

About the Host:

Jim Cathcart, CSP, CPAE is one of the top 5 most award-winning speakers in the world. His Top 1% TEDx video has over 2.8 million views, his 27 books are translated into multiple languages, including 3 International bestsellers. He is a Certified Virtual Presenter and past National President of the National Speakers Association. Jim’s PBS television programs, podcast appearances and radio shows have reached millions of Success Seekers and he is often retained to advise achievers and their companies.

Even his colleagues, some of the top speakers in the world, have hired Jim to speak at their own events. Jim is an Executive MBA Professor at California Lutheran University School of Management and serves as their first Entrepreneur in Residence. He has been inducted into the Sales & Marketing Hall of Fame in London for his pioneering work with his concept of “Relationship Selling.” He is also in the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame and has received The Cavett Award and The Golden Gavel Award.

Jim has written 27 books, hundreds of articles and he is always writing at least one new book. His most recent book is HI-REV for Small Business, The Faster Way to Profits . Audiences buy his books by the hundreds and he happily adds autograph sessions to his speeches.

https://cathcart.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cathcartinstitute/

https://www.facebook.com/jim.cathcart

https://www.youtube.com/user/jimcathcart

Tedx: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ki9-oaPwHs

Hey folks, welcome to the professional experts podcast. This is a gathering of eagles. We don't we don't just invite all the birds here. This is for the folks that have made it to the top, that are up there making a difference in the world, and willing to share their example so that you can learn from the path they took in the professional experts, the certified professional experts group, we now have 39 people, and one of those is you're about to hear from in just a moment, that's Dan Clark, who has upgraded the whole group by being a part of it. But the thing that distinguishes each one of them is they are building a career based on being the best version of themselves as a value to the world. In other words, they're not selling a product. They're selling their service. They're building a brand identity, kind of like in Hollywood. You know, if you were a talent agency, you would take on a new actor or actress, and you would be building their reputation and making them a desirable entity for all the movies that were being planned in the future. Well, that's the way we approach looking at being a certified professional expert. How do you establish your your value message, so that people know you're worth paying for? How do you set your distinctive brand identity so in a group of people just like you, you stand out. How do you identify the customers you ought to be going after, whether it's industrial customers or one on one coaching or consulting clients, or whether it's retail establishments or sports teams or whoever it happens to be. And how do you choose the business model for this stage of your business development? Because just like Dan, I've gone through various iterations over the years, from solopreneur to small staff to partnership to part of a corporation to a training company, to a license or of other products to a author and publisher you know. So how do you choose your business model, and how do you select the best operating

systems and standards to keep your business solid as it grows. So welcome with me, one of the coolest people I've ever run across. And I mean that sincerely, Dan Clark, Dan, you live in Salt Lake City. Is that where you are today? No, I'm in my home in Arizona. Oh, in Arizona. Where about I in Gilbert on the east side of Phoenix. Got it. I know. I know Gilbert. Well, gosh, we met in what, 82

Yes sir, when you were the chairman of the National Speakers Association convention in Chicago, Illinois.

And if I could just reminisce for a moment, yeah, in those days, we needed a sponsor in the National Speakers Association, and I'd been speaking for a while, and Zig Ziglar heard me and took me under his wing. We can talk about that story if we want to talk about the six degrees of separation that really brings us back together through that long story short, or Zig heard me speak and sponsored me in the National Speakers Association and told me to meet him in Chicago in 1982 and after the fact, as Zig and I became really close, and he mentored me personally at so so much for 25 plus years, he confessed that that was the litmus test, that if he was going to invest time in me, I needed to show him that I was serious. And his test at the moment was, would I invest in myself with money I did not have as a newlywed, fly to Chicago for five days, pay the registration fee, even though he was my sponsor, and learn what I could. And it was there as his little protege, you know, speaking to the youth, everybody seemed to endure themselves to me, including you. Oh, Dan, you can't make any money doing, you know, speaking to youth, but somebody's got to do it. We love you. God bless you. You know, how wonderful is that? Little did they know that, you know, I would accelerate that process. But Zig introduced me to you. He introduced me to Ty Boyd, who I'd seen, obviously, as the MC of the big PMA rallies, and that's when I first connected with zig and G Roberson, and that convention literally catapulted my career and validated one thing that Dr Jim Rohn, everybody's mentor, you know, as songwriters, as. As recording artists, as singers, we know that it's the hook that sells the saw my buddy Jim Nichols wrote live like you're dying. Yeah, you know the dance. I could have missed the pain, but then I'd have missed the dance. And the one Jim Rohn line that you and I could have easily written, that I am an expert in, that you're an expert in, is that we become the average of the

five people we associate with the most. And I've always added to that another couple of by Max Lucado, who said, which means we must be willing to pay any price and travel any distance to associate with extraordinary human beings, even online.

Yeah, yeah. Thank Evans for online.

And it was that convention with the goodness of your heart and about six or seven of the other CPAs who consciously or subconsciously took me under your wing and basically said, This is what you got to do. Here's how you create a brochure. You were always known as the marketing genius. This is nothing new to the world. The sales genius Zig. Give him credit for mentoring me in the art and science of storytelling. So each of these individuals you know and Robert Henry the power of the punctuating pause, and the Jack Benny look and all these little, teeny things that are humor helped me become who I want, wanted to be. So right on the shoots, I thank you so much. And anybody listening, you're the one that turned decades into days for me and so many other speakers. So to be, to be classified as an expert under the Jim Cathcart Institute. I don't take that lightly, brother, I I'm I'm part of it for several reasons. At the time, I was the youngest guy to get the CSP to earn designation certified. I waited national. Yep, I waited until 1987 so Jim Tunney could sign my my CSP. I was so into who I connected with in my career, so that I could pinpoint this accelerated part, this illuminated path to an individual hero worship. And by golly, I'm on your podcast, and you're one of my major influences as being a Hall of Fame Speaker I need Don't worry. You know that, Jim, I honor you, I love

and I appreciate it deeply, and for the folks viewing and listening, I want you to understand this guy is a giant. This guy has done everything speakers dream of doing. Dan Clark has done. They say, I want to write a book multiple author. I want to speak on the prestigious stages around the world. He's hit them all. Check, check, check, been there, done that. I want to fly in the backseat of a supersonic jet. Okay? Do that? You know, I want to play music on stage in Nashville and and I want to be on stage in Hollywood. I want to Dan Clark has done it all, so he sounds enormously humble, and that's a beautiful blessing. But get it that that's a big guy being nice as not a little guy saying, you know, someday I'll be up there. He's already there. So Dan, what I want to know is, what got you started in this direction, what, what made you choose the path of motivation and speaking and, you know, human development in the first place. What word it's? What path did you leave to go on to that one?

That's a great question, and let me give a little preamble to my answer. Okay, right now the world is flooded with Speaker coaching programs. Oh, yeah, and most of them, it's, it's as it's as sarcastic as realizing that everyone who owns a phone suddenly thinks they're a life coach. Yeah, you know, just because you're an influencer on that on social media and have a million and a half followers, most of whom are 11 year olds from Brazil that you purchased, the world is so upside down. What you taught me, what Zig taught me, what I think we need to understand is that you just can't wake up one day and say, I'm going to be a professional speaker, because I got a standing ovation one time and the adrenaline, adrenaline rush fed the part of me that is called ego. That's not always good, and I want to do it again and again and again. Oh, and by the way, because we've made millions of dollars doing it, that's what I want to do. That's not how this works, my friends and you can't possibly. Be a certified expert. You can't possibly rise to the occasion to be a Hall of Fame speaker or or even earn the highest designation, CSP, certified speaking professional, unless you first are convicted in why someone would listen to you. What experience have you had? It could be one. I know so many speakers. We know so many speakers whose entire 60 minute keynote is about one experience, and then they dissect it into all the life lessons that they've heard. Yeah, but you know, and that's all it takes to be an a subject matter expert. Luckily, I've had multiples and so have you. But I just wanted to bring that out as a preamble, because being a professional speaker isn't a fireworks experience, it's a stacking one upon another. The perfect football analogy is not every football play is designed to score a touchdown, right? One play sets up the next play, which sets up the next play until that running back breaks through the line for a 30 yard scamper to get to score

the game winning touchdown. Momentum is only as good as your next play. What do I do now? What have I learned from this fumble, from this, this block, this, this failed attempt to customize my message to communicate or connect with the audience, blah, blah, blah. So I hope that's clear that I didn't set out to be a professional speaker. I didn't even know it existed. I didn't either. What happened to me is I go back and Gail one day. Yeah, my earliest recollection Jim, I bow to throat cancer when I was eight years old, and I don't have a lot of childhood memories, but psychologists will teach us that regardless of the experience, when you attach an emotion, it becomes a significant emotional event. Yeah, and a significant emotional event is an experience where we measure and quantify what we believed and how we behaved before it occurred, and how we now think differently and act and behave differently because it occurred. The two operative words are before and because, before and because. And I remember laying in that hospital bed in so much pain, I couldn't even lift my head off off the bed. I remember the doctors coming in, a whole staff. I remember hearing the conversations with my parents that who are people of faith, as you and I are, and the doctor basically saying that the cancerous abscess is right on the right on the edge of eating its way through into my vocal cords. And if we didn't have a modern miracle, if we did not have some sort of medical miracle to stop the accelerated growth, it would have eaten into my vocal cords, and I would have never been able to speak, and I would have never been able to sing, and I was out of the hospital a week later. It was just one of those great faith building moments, but that's my first recollection of understanding the law. I'll call it the law of resilience. And now fast forward into into high school, and I was an all American athlete. I played football, basketball, baseball, standing, your desk champion. I was

a Golden Gloves boxing champion, wow. I was the alpine ski racing champion, and I was a motocross racing champion. So I always pursued excellence.

Whatever you used your body for in sports worked,

And thanks for done you dissecting the body from the mind. Because, yes, most people who I, who knew me growing up, they thought seventh grade would be my senior year, so thanks for bringing that up. Yeah, I was an athlete, but the three years I was at, the three years I was a junior in high school, almost killed the whole faculty. So let's just put that to rest, three, not three years as a junior. Joke, joke, joke, anyway, so I'm an athlete, yeah, and highly recruited coming out of high school, and I signed a scholarship to play football and baseball at the University of Utah, and I was a projected number one draft pick by the Oakland Raiders going into the NS NFL. I had an invitation trial by the Kansas City Royals as a baseball pitcher coming out of high school, so I was a right handed stud in my mind, and my dream of being a professional athlete and being a superstar in the NFL looked like it was coming through. I shouldn't be so, so self, you know, aggrandizing, but, yeah, yeah, I was a pretty good athlete and and then one day in practice, as I get to my signature story, Coach blew the whistle, and another player and I ran full speed into each other to violent head on collision. Smash. Excuse me, smashing my right shoulder. It into the cutting edge of my fiberglass pads, and we slammed to the ground, and when Lyle got off of me, I'd compressed the seven cervical vertebrae in my neck. I had severed the axillary nerve in my right deltoid muscle, and I'd suffered a grade level two concussion, which is the most serious concussion of all. Wow, I drooped. I had loss of speech. I couldn't talk anymore. My right side was paralyzed, and my arm dangled helplessly on my side, leaving me paralyzed for 14 months. I went to 16 doctors, 15 of whom said I would never get any better and not recover. And my life spiraled downward until I hit what I thought was rock bottom. And if I can conclude this story in a consolidated way, which is

kind of my, my go to message now that I fought my way back to a 95% recovery, the three most frequently asked questions are these. Clark, what do you mean you thought you hit rock bottom? And I share with my audiences that no matter how, no matter how tough times get, no matter how hard, how hard life is, nobody ever hits rock bottom. We hit rock Foundation. We hit rock belief. We hit the baseline core values and governing principles on which we were raised. Question number two, why did I keep going to so many different doctors? I kept going from doctor to doctor, until I found one who believed I would get better. And question number three, what took me so long to pivot? What took me so long to recover? Why did I stay paralyzed for 14 months? Answer, I was asking the wrong questions. I was asking the doctors how to get better when I should have been asking myself why, and once we answer why, figured out the How to becomes clear and simple. And I don't want people to think this was a rah rah you can, if you think you can, no one who understands a true motivational speaker understands that we're not a motivational rah rah guy. It's based in neuroscience, yeah, and when we only focus on the how and the what, we only engage the head, but when we add to that a passionate why and a compelling want, which means our Why is bigger than our why not biologically proven, our our blood pumps more rapidly, our brains fire and our muscles magnify, which maximizes our energy and accelerates our performance. So I'm down my life. I've spiraled downward. Vice President University of Utah, my coaches, they all thought I was suicidal because I climbed to the cave recluse. I'd lost my identity. I thought I was a football player, when in reality, that's just what I did, not who I am as a man. So that makes my injury clearly one of the best things that's ever happened to me, not because, oh, I was paralyzed, but because of who I became, because of it, and in that process, while I was so

down, the Vice President of the University of Utah gave me a cassette tape by a motivational speaker by the name of Zig Ziglar, wow.

And I'd never be you at the top. See, right? Yeah.

And I'd never heard of zig before. I thought, well, his mom ran out of names, no kidding. So out of curiosity, I plugged it in. I listened to it, and it literally saved my life. Jim, it didn't just change my life. It saved my life. I was suicidal. I was so confused about what to do with my life, because I had always been myopic. I was an athlete. That's who I was, that's what I did. And the cool thing about Zig was I don't remember one thing he said on that tape, except him telling that story about Spindletop, the well in West Texas. And in my mind, I was not ready for a physician's diagnosis, for a psychologist's prognosis, for some sort of a scientific explanation. I was ready and emotionally available to hear a story and apprehend the deeper messages of that story, relating it to my body as the land the ground, my spirit, my potential, my ability to rise above it as the oil and someone like Zig Ziglar, and I'm getting emotional, and Jim Cathcart as being the Derek that was that I could rely on to help me pump the oil, the potential, my spirit, my resilience, out of this broken body, to find a new game and commit to living again. That's the significance of what we do. Brother and I've never missed a speech, 6000 stages, 79 countries, millions of people, and I've never ever missed a speech. And that's not because I'm so. Noble. I've had planes canceled. I've rented cars and driven seven hours from from Denver, Colorado, through the Badlands of Nebraska to show up in Rapid City, South Dakota as the final speaker of a three day conference for the community, and being the only speaker who showed up because of inclement weather, yeah, being hugged by the event planners at the door. And the only reason why I've never missed a speech is because I know for a fact, Jim in every one of my speeches, large, larger or small, there's at least one man or one woman who is hurting as badly as I was. And we all have stories, but they're not our stories.

If the story can save a marriage, can keep someone from taking their life, who can kickstart an entrepreneurial idea, who can be the catalyst for them to get back up and go again, knowing, not knowing how much longer they might have. Why quit today, when you can live another 65 years? And I know back in the day when our careers were right at the beginning, we didn't have email, there was no internet. So I have my mom worked for me for a long time. She has filed cabinets full of handwritten letters. Thank you so much. You saved my life. Thank you so much. What you said saved my son's life. Thank you so much. That's the answer to your question, that we need to feel like it's a calling, and once we know it's a calling and that we have a message worth sharing, it's our moral obligation to find someone like the Jim Cathcart, like a Zig Ziglar, who will take the time to help us turn our decades into days and help us become that visible connector, that visible ambassador of good, clean, pure, powerful and positive, to give people hope and a and a substantial plan of action. Remember one of the one of the bad, one of the bad raps that motivational speakers get is it's all just fluff, and hopefully I put that to rest. But you know, French philosopher Pascal, he said, Too many people live their lives hoping to be happy, but because they only hope they never really are. And I add to that, it's like we're waiting for someone to ask us to the senior prom, and we've never even taken the time to learn how to dance, right? So once I was knighted by Zig Ziglar, and this is, let me just finish the story. So now Zig comes into town with Ty Boyd, Robert Schuller, Dr Norman, Vincent, Peale, the PMA rallies. I knew Doug snarr Very well, and I positioned myself backstage, because I was at the University of Utah. Star zig's done, and he's walking out. And I leaned down, Zig, I'm Dan Clark. You saved my life. You really have me. I take you to dinner. He said, I'm leaving

town. I'm coming back in three weeks to do a follow up sales seminar, call Laurie majors in my office and ask her what we can work out. I hounded her. I called her every single day. I sat right, you know, close to her during zig's funeral. Obviously, she's still working there to this day. No, she's still with finally calls me back. She finally calls me back and says, zig will allow you to pick him up at the airport. And I'm like, whoopee, that's a 15 minute drive if I get lost in the airport to the hotel,

and it's just the two of you here. You go into his attention, yep.

And by the time we get to the hotel, he goes, Dan, Is there someplace I could see this motivational assembly. So let me back up. Sorry. So I'm hurt. I hope I'm not boring your people, but it's my story. You're not I'm hurt, and I'm in the football coach's office. A call comes in, will you send a coach or an athlete to come and speak to our team in this little rural town? I'm in the office. Coach says, Danny, go play. Go speak. I said, No, go speak. It's not me. I'm not a speaker. Go speak. He knew something that I didn't know about me, that I needed this. I went to speak. I show up. The coach has multiple sclerosis. I stopped feeling sorry for myself. 16 doctors had already told me I would never recovery. Recover. I've listened to the Zig Ziglar tape. I'm starting to figure it out. I'm starting to change my mindset. And I ended up speaking before their football team seven out of the eight games, and they won the state championship. High School Principal heard me speak. He invited me in to speak to his student body. He dug it. He calls up four of his his fellow principals. So I spoke at five high schools that year. I invited four of my buddies to join me because I thought I had about seven and a half minutes of good material. Yeah. Next year I spoke at 13 schools. I realized this, that this was something I had invented, the high school motivational assembly. So I go to the Utah I go to the Utah school. Board, anybody can get on the program. Seven members. I gave my still my shtick. They voted unanimously to endorse my high school assembly program. Lola B or I'm the president of the school board, calls the Speaker of the House of Representatives Utah legislature. I in front of the entire legislature at the Capitol, spoke for 45 minutes, gave my high school assembly. They voted unanimously to fund me to speak to every high school in the state of Utah for 100 grand. They renewed that contract in 1981 add to it and enlarge it, to speak to every high

school in junior high. So I had spoken to 170 schools. Wow, by the time I met zit, wow, and he had his Born to Win seminar, but he also had his C with the top character development curriculum for schools, and he was stuck trying to figure out how to get it into schools, and I was his answer. There you go. Now we're in the hotel, and he says, Is there someplace I could see this high school assembly? I said, Yeah, I've rented the small ballroom Off the foyer, and then I had a little slideshow and everything. I set it up as you said, mono, and mono, yeah, I gave him my whole speech. He stands up tears. I'm crying. The next week, he flies me to Dallas to speak to his company. The next week, he sponsors me into the National Speakers Association. This is in 1982 I meet him in Chicago. And then the next week, he invites my beautiful new bride to Dallas to his five day born, to win seminar, my first ever seminar. And it was there he introduced me to someone who introduced me to Nancy Reagan, who invited me into the Reagan White House to take her just say no program to all 50 states. So between 1983 and 1989 I spoke in three high schools every single day, 15 a week for 140 school days a year. And then those the nature of the beast. They would graduate from high school, go to college. And with the convocation program, I started speaking to 100 college university campuses a year. Wow. So I was the one of the two guys that literally invented the high school motivational assembly, yeah, the other one being our dear friend, Mark sheerenbrock, yeah. He was sponsored by Jostens. I was sponsored by the White House. And we did so many of the same leadership conferences together in the world, and that's where he and I hit it off. He was a late comer to NSA, yeah, but I attribute everything in my career to meeting Zig Ziglar, who introduced me, yeah, I Boyd never really, I never really interacted with them, but who introduced me to you, who introduced me to Jean

Robertson, who introduced me to Robert Henry, yeah, I love you. Jim Cathcart, and that's God, that is such a long answer to yours, your biblical question, but those who are listening, we need to be called, and once we feel like we're called, What do the Scriptures say? Many are called, but few are chosen. When you know you've been tapped out, you better rise to the occasion, because that's the only way we can die knowing we're the best version of ourselves, which is what you're about, Jim. That's everything you say in my mind, everything I've listened to. You know, let's before I forget. I'm a dumb football player. My cholesterol counts higher than my SAT scores. Let's talk about the difference you made in my life with a story, a metaphor of the acorn effect. Oh my gosh, one story that Zig taught me, that Zig shared with me, unbeknownst to him, that changed my life, my gosh brother, I had one inside of me. I was more than an athlete, absolutely and because of your message and your metaphor in the mighty oak tree, for some reason I believed in myself again.

Man, thank you. You blow me away. No wonder you've been such a powerful force for good. And by the way, just for a footnote for the you know this, but the viewers might not. I was hired by the Nancy Reagan White House office when she was first lady to do speak speaker training for the other speakers for the just say no campaign. It would have been great if you and I had built that day too. That is amazing. Now, listeners, I want you to just reflect on what you've just heard. I mean, many people will be tempted to say, oh my gosh, Dan's a miracle. I could never do that. What an amazing and wonderful story. That was fun, the movie. Has played, and now I'll go home to my ordinary life. No, no, no, no, no, no. Dan just laid out a smorgasbord of gift goodies for you. I want you to listen to the echo of what he just said and realize this is a guy who was he was gifted. Yeah, he was gifted athletically and born into a loving family. And you know, he had a lot of great things going for him, but in an instant, he lost all of that ability, and with it, his belief that life was worth continuing. He was on the you know, that close to suicide when he changed directions, and that change of direction held unbelievable benefits for humanity, as well as for Dan himself. I want you notice another thing earlier? He said 16 doctors because he kept changing doctors until he found one that believed there was hope. That's not just a story for Dan. I i had a doctor years ago I had thrown my back out at age 40. On my birthday, I bent over to pick something up, herniated two discs, and had to get in a wheelchair in order to get home, traveling from airport to airport and finally back home across the country. And I went to my doctor, and he said, Well, looks like we're going to have to operate. And I said, you're fired. He said, What? And I said, There's got to be another way, because I don't want to rot in my back as my first option. So I kept shopping doctors

until I found a chiropractor who said, I can, I can fix that, but it's going to take about 10 treatments, maybe more, and I got up every morning and went back every afternoon, and it took a half hour just to get from the bed to the car and the car to the office on each of those trips. And over about a 10 or 12 day period, he finally got my back to where it got the movement it needed and healed itself, and I didn't have to have surgery, and there I am, almost 40 years later, still going fine. So take the thinking that Dan is presenting to you and apply that in your own personal life. Now, Dan, let's take a different direction. Let's, let's look at your business evolution. Your the path. Okay? So you had the hit show, and it was getting booked everywhere, right? And you were, you, yeah, you took the initiative to go and call on the people that could open those doors, and you were willing to take the risk of being turned down, but you hit a lot of home runs in the process. Now, when you got into the business and back then, it was easier to get 120 150 engagements a year than it would be today. But I mean, even 2030, engagements a year can still be a thriving career, depending on how you approach it. What has been the evolution of your business model over the time?

It's such a great question again. So let's just put things in perspective. Let's just go back to the 80s. So my business model immediately became it's not how many people are in your audience, it's who's in your audience. You want to make sure it's not how many times you speak, it's to whom you speak. And are there multiple decision makers in your audience? And so what my business model was at the very beginning was to get on the stages of the leadership conferences. And at the time, there were 16 nationalist student leadership organizations, Key Club, Junior Achievement, Hugh O'Brien Leadership Council, and then all of the vocational FBLA Future Business Leaders of America, distributed education Clubs of America, DEC, which was the college version. And Vicki, future homemakers, Future Farmers of America. You know, Scott McKay and Mark Mayfield, they were national officers in the FMEA, blah, blah, blah. And each one of those have regional conferences. And as a reverse engineer, each one of us have state conferences, yep. So instead of just spending my time going to high schools, which is a one off, what would happen is, at the end of that week, I needed to get myself in front of decision makers so that I would speak at 15 schools in. District, why not hang around Friday afternoon and do a teacher in service for free? There you go. And get myself in front of all of their faculty, which included counselors, American School Counselors Association, convention, Secondary School Principals Association, Association of of assistant principals, the list goes, have

the teachers that had been designated as sponsors for FFA and the O'Brien youth leadership, and they got everything else. Yeah, and

everybody's in search of a speaker, and if I did my homework and customized my speech and connected with these kids in the faculty and deliver that powerful message, not everybody needed to love me, not everybody needed to connect with me, but if I had at least one, they could recommend me to someone who ran the state association, and that's exactly what happened to me. Let me interject this, because you and I are both guitar players. You and I are both singer songwriters. Got some gold records in country music. What I was just in Nashville right before the store made a couple weeks ago, writing songs I still do that. Used to have a publishing deal with Sony BMG, back in the day, by the way,

we need we write a song together about, oh, I want to. We'll talk about that offline.

So what? What keeps us songwriters and singers motivated to never sell our soul, to stay true to our message, to stay true to who we are, is the goal to have a platinum selling record or a platinum selling song, which means you sell 1 million copies. And what keeps us true to ourselves and motivated is the reality, excuse me, that there are 300 million people in America, which means you can literally tick off 299 million and still go platinum. So our value proposition doesn't have to be for everybody you know, find those like the doctors I was searching for who believe what you believe. You know, the purpose of a leader is to grow more leaders who believe what you believe, not generate more followers.

Absolutely, you know. But later was effective by looking at what happened after he or she left.

Exactly, yeah. And you know Simon Sinek, my colleague, my buddy, he says the goal is not to do business with everybody who wants what you have. The goal is to do business only with those who believe what you believe. So they choose you, not just somebody who does what you do. So back to the model as an athlete, do Yeah, the teams that lose begin the game with the goal of winning. Teams that win begin the game with the goal of execution. What are you going to do right now? What are you going to do with what you have, with what you know how to make this play everything it has the potential to be, no matter what you're asking me to have as follows future. So I just started going after the larger venues who had multiple decision makers and knocked on wood. I had a chance to I was invited to speak to the Western Region distributive education Clubs of America conference because it was being held in Salt Lake City, Utah. So somebody invites me and I get a call from a guy in Oklahoma, Dr Jim kinnaker had been a PhD marketing professor at in Stillwater at Oklahoma State University, and he was the one producing all of these regional shows for DECA. He calls me up and he goes, who are you? We've never heard of you. What do you mean? You're going to be the keynote speaker. It goes through us. We've never heard of you. And I said, Well, you know Zig Ziglar, you know he's who? I said, Yeah, Zig Ziglar sponsored me. Then asked bro. He says, oh, okay, we'll look into that. He didn't believe me. So he calls, yeah, oh yeah, we know who Dan is, yeah, yeah. He'd be a good choice. So Jim kindergarten calls me back and he says, I'll tell you what, Dan. He said, we'll cover your expenses. We're going to fly you into Atlanta, and we're going to put you on a stage, and we're going to see how good you are, and if you do well, we will book you into all of the regional conferences, and if you bomb, we'll just shake hands and walk away and say, No harm, no foul. I said,

Okay, so I show up in Atlanta. Talk about the tales of the road. Yeah, I brought, I bought a brand new polo suit. I'm backstage getting all fired up ready to go. Chivalry is not dead. Here come these two lovely ladies. There's a heavy box on the floor. Let me pick that up for you. Put it on the table. I bend over, and I rip my pants from the bottom of my zipper all the way around the back to my belt loop. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage. Dan Clark, so I go on stage, can you and I can't even be bold. Ralph bolos, well, yeah, I'm standing in front of this little podium, and I got to fire these folks up for 50 to 60 minutes. Well, I'm pissing my butt at the beach, hoping that no one sees my flowered underwear

With a breathe breeze of support from behind.

Anyway, I roasted the occasion,

by the way, I got a line for you. You could hold that your tail, wind, oh.

Tail, wag your dog, baby. You're so funny. Anyway, so that was another one of those six degrees of separation, and he launched me into the vocational student leadership organizations. And sure enough, they start swapping, because all of their offices were in Reston, Virginia, on Association Avenue, association Road, whoa. And they just started talking,

by the way, for the for the viewers, yeah, associations and and professional societies or where all the business people, or all the players gather for each of the major entities out there, like, you know, there's the Farmers Association, there's a Bankers Association, there's an everything Association, and there's the American Society of association, executive, A, S, A, S, A, E, Dan and I have both spoken for ASAE, and once you speak at their conference, all the other associations see you, and they hire speakers for their conferences too. Now let me change directions. Dan, everything you've been describing sounds like just a feast for a workaholic, because that's a heck of a lot of work that's showing up every day. That's full on commitment, total immersion, baptism in the field of speaking, not everybody wants to go at it that hard, but even if a person takes the wisdom of what you did, they don't have to embrace the volume of what you produced from it. They can take the wisdom of be in front of and in contact with the leaders so that they, as decision makers, can multiply your efforts along the food chain. Now, when did it? Has your career normalized, or you still on this breakneck pace? You know, where there's, there's not a spare minute to have a life, it seems, man.

You know, that's so funny. You know, I still love the road because I love to golf, but I can't. I can't, as often as I would like, walk off four hours to go play golf while I'm at home with my buddies, but on the road, I can, you know, I've written 37 books, and most of those books were written on airplanes or in hotel rooms when I would come home, unpublished home phone number, and that would allow me to be a full time husband, a full time dad. You know, between 19 my first son, my first child, our first child, was born in 1985 so I still had all of that ramp up time where my wife was working in her dad's dental office. That's where I met her. Apparently, is very attractive. And so she had the support of family, yeah, she had the support of family, independent, you know, just beautiful, strong. And, you know, we were together every single weekend, because I'd fly home right after a teacher in service on Friday, and then I'd hit the road again on Sunday night. So I could be a man of faith. I could do those things. And then the beauty in this gym was because I would walk into a school district, for example, we would move so now our son's just a little kid. We this is great. I haven't thought about this. This is such a critical part of my history, Jim, this is so fun. So we moved into the Inn at the park. It was the poshest hotel in Orange County, across the street from Disneyland. Yeah, my wife and I and our new little baby boy, Danny Jr, couldn't spell Jim. I'm humble. Couldn't think of another name here. Money we move into in at the park, yep, for the entire month of February. So I spoke to 60 high schools in Orange County, three a day, 20 days of the of the 20 school days of the month of February. Worry undone every day by three o'clock with the rental car. Yeah, we're in the pool. We go to Disneyland on the weekend and rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. Then we go to Hawaii and we move into a condo at Hilton, Hawaiian Village, there in Oahu rental

The one with the rainbow on the side. You got it?

And so I would what catapulted that real acceleration of my high school speaking. Not only was I sponsored by the White House, but I spoke at the National Student Council Association convention a year when it was in Rhode Island. And so now, every single one of the 50 executive directors of the State student council associations heard me speak. So now Damn they call my office, and that's why we I had six offices around the country. You know one of Shawnee Mission, Kansas. That's when I met, well, that's when I met Brad plum. Remember the good old days, Charlie

brother and the silly plums? I had one of the ran a bureau.

I had one in in in Alabama, and I had one in Alaska, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, one in Toronto, Canada, because I speak at all 10 provinces of Canada. So why not have one in Oakville? And the guy that ran my office out of Oakville. Was a professor at the university, but he was in charge of all the student council Association leaders anyway. So here's what happens. So we moved to Hawaii, and I speak to every high school in the state of Hawaii. I go to Alaska every year for 13 days at a time, and started speaking to every single high school in Alaska, same with Arizona, same with Oregon. I did that multiple times. So over the course of those seven years, 83 to 89 if that's six years, that's why I spoke in so many schools, and that's how I balanced my life, my family, my love of my life and accelerated my career. I took them with me on the road, and then what happens is we have our next child, Nicola, three years younger than my son, and all of a sudden we had to put him in school, which screwed up my whole business plan. I don't know why he said, what came up anyway? And then as time went on, I would start to take one of my kids with me all the time. And there's something about ordering a room service and watching a movie with dad. Bring your kid to work. I couldn't do that really with the high schools, but I did that with the colleges, the college convocations, because there would be somebody who could sit with them on the front row. And then the nature of the beast. High School student leaders became student leaders in in government at colleges access to huge, huge budgets they would bring me in. That's when my speaker's fees started to accelerate. Then in 1991 because enough of those college student leaders had graduated in marketing and in new business sense, and were now engaged in that most noble profession of all, selling, as we know, they found themselves in positions of authority and decision making where they

could bring me into their companies, and that's When I made the leap into the corporate arena. So back in the day NSA, 1982 refresh my memory, but it seemed to be that the going that prestigious level of speakers honorary was at about $2,500

Boy, that would have been the big time. I'm sure at that time, I was getting like 500 bucks a shot, or maybe 1000 I don't know, but it was not a lot, but it was it seemed like a lot at the time, and as often as you and I were speaking, we were raking in some serious dollars, especially compared to the life we had lived before. Oh yeah, you know, my dad was a telephone repairman, and Michael coming out of high school, my dream was to someday earn $1,000 a month, 12 a year. Wow.

Yeah, you look so good for being 113 years old. Yeah, I hope I'm adding value to your listeners, to, you know,

Absolute pure gold. So today, I mean, you're over 50, so, oh yeah, here you are. Here you are at the at the pinnacle of quite a quite a mountain of achievements. I mean, all the things that other people get excited about doing someday you've done, like books, 37 for heaven's sakes, you know you've done so I didn't

say, you notice? I didn't say 37 good books. I just said 37

by so I hear, yeah, I've written, I've written 28 and there's about six of them on this. Still selling a lot of but what now? What are you doing now?

Yeah, I'm still writing songs. That's now I get my creative juices flowing, but I'm still speaking. Last year, by October, November were some of my busiest months in the last decade. You know, everything was shut down in covid, and I was on a huge roll. And within a matter of two to three weeks, every single speech in in 2019 20 were canceled, off my off my my calendar. But that's when we had to change our focus as professional communicators, that's right, and with all due respect to the analogy. We needed to learn how to make love to a camera. We need to learn how to reach through that little green.at the top of our screens and still connect head to head, heart to heart, Spirit to spirit, and drive that emotion. And so that increased, that gave us each a challenge to increase our skill set, to be able to communicate in a different way at a deeper level. And you know the way our obviously, everybody who's a speaker knows the way we keep our cash flow rolling is someone calls our office. Are you available? Put it on hold. They call up with the firm offer. We sign the contract, send it to them. They sign the contract, send it back with a 50% deposit. That's how we keep our cash flow, because so many of our speeches back in the good old days were booked a year to a year and a half in advance. Now they call us on a Saturday, but I didn't want to give that that that 50% deposit back. So that's when we started understanding that the goal was to become that speaker of value, which meant that if they allowed me to connect and fulfill this commitment with a virtual online speech for the price of the 50% deposit, I would be the first they would be the first right of refusal to have me come in as soon As the covid crisis wasn't over, and we were reconvening in live, belly to belly experiences that I would come back and speak for them, live for the other 50%

Now, instead of on that percent. Yeah, and that's

When my genius in my office, Laura Teresa in Santa Barbara, she's booked me for over 25 years. That's when she came up with the Clark stimulus package, which means now, once we were back in action and I could come and speak, I would keep that commitment to speak for the 50% which they they still owed. But what else could we do while I was there? Oh, I will do a follow up seminar, you know. And we added on and tacked on. Oh, can we, can we pre sell some books so everybody gets a copy of Dan's book. He'll do a VIP, you know, photos and signing

To me with your executive team, because you got answers, and I have a private session just for them, because they're sponsors of your event. Yeah. Could we solve that problem? So long thing for the for your top performers that are having difficulty, yeah, by the way, Santa Barbara, my son is the general manager of the Santa Barbara in right on the coast in Santa Barbara,

Oh my gosh, next up, either I'll slide in and say Your dad's Your dad told me to come in and confess my sins. I've stolen some towels and robes from your hotel, and I needed to

Introduce myself. I'd be easy to remember his name

Because you couldn't spell Dan, I get it? Yeah? Jim Jr, yeah. Well, so I'm still busy. I'm, you know, you know, as we start bragging how many times we've spoken in a year, it's just, you know, we always try to one up each other. You know, last year I spoke 5000 times, and everybody's like, yeah, sure, you did. I remember the good laugh in NSA one of the years, I think it was Robert Henry. We were talking about speakers fees, and we couldn't talk about them because of collusion and, you know, Manana

Laws, but any trust rulings and stuff,

But, but in those sacred, quiet, whispering moments, sitting next to Robert Henry, and he leans over and he goes, I don't know about you, man, but my speaker's fees 100 grand, he says, And nobody needs to know, I've never been asked to speak. My speaker fees 100 grand. That's just funny.

Or Spencer Johnson, Who Moved My Cheese. Oh yeah, he'll walk through the one minute manner. He his office was next to mine in La Jolla, and so I saw him a lot. Man, Paula and his wife used to go to lunch together pretty often. He wrote a book called yes or no, the guide to better decisions, and I collaborated with him on that book, and he told me, I don't want to do any of the speeching. He said, You do the speaking. And so he. He referred things to me, and I said, Well, if you were to give a speech, what would you charge? He said, Well, I don't want to do it. So $100,000 he got it a few times. People brought him in because of the One Minute Manager, or the Who moved my chief, whatever, at that level of Lord. So it's possible, not likely, but it's possible some people get those kind of fees, man, so I'm excited, if you're a listener today, and you don't aspire to be a speaker, you can still learn a ton from what Dan has shared, because there's such wisdom in this, looking at sales strategy, looking at self discipline, looking at Industry Focus, choose a lane. Stay specific to that lane. Look for all the branches that lead you to make integrity more important than reward. Find a way to blend your personal life with your professional life and to add adventures that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Find a way to multiply each of the events that you get. How many other ways could I be of service while I'm here? You know, when you're forced to retool because of something like covid, like I lost an entire I lost about 300,000 hard dollars in the first half of the year 2020, because of covid, because I couldn't go back to China, where I had already pre booked a full year of lecture tours. So like Dan, I had to get a whole lot better at online communication real fast. And I hired mentors to train me, and I went through their training. And the first, the first big customer I got, was the Zig Ziglar Corporation hiring their training for their

trainers. Wow, is it so many connections we know with Nancy Reagan and Zig Ziglar and National Speakers Association and all that Well, Dan, you've been that you've been so generous today, and I appreciate you being on board with us.

May I throw out one more suggestion, yeah, don't ever turn down an opportunity to speak for free. We need fee integrity. We know that. But I've had a chance to sort of the edge of space and you two reconnaissance aircraft. I've been downrange eight times to Iraq, Afghanistan, the war zones, firing up the troops. I have flown all the fighter jets, all the bombers. I've had extraordinary experiences, because I've given over 350 free speeches to the military, and eventually, the commander of the general knows what our speaker's honorarium is, and so he comes to us and says, Dan, what can I do for you? I want to fly an F 18. I want to fly an F 16. They can't say, No, that's not the motivation. But I've had so many extraordinary experiences. You know, popping your cookies and an F 18 is actually a joyous experience. In fact, I ejected a box of Milk Duds I'd eat into the movie when it was nine, and it embellishes our opportunities to to illustrate life principles, just like you did, as you summarized our conversation in only the Jim Cathcart way, you dissected all of these great principles and lessons learned. You know, discipline, integrity, don't be afraid to say yes. And Zig taught me way, way back in the day. He wouldn't he would allocate 10 free speeches every year on his calendar. And as a man of integrity, he would hold true to that. And when someone would call up, he would say, you know, send us your information. All 10 speeches have already been allocated for this year, but we'll put you on the list next year. And he he challenged me to do the same. I could never say no to the military. It's the way I serve my country. Yeah. But when you could ask, when someone says, I don't have a budget, and you can ask the simple question, who's going to be in the audience? And you know, you can affect someone's life for good, change them forever, and expose your wisdom, expose your heart to a decision maker who can bring you into a full fee speech. Always

say yes, always, always, always say yes. And quick, because that was a true test.

Quick bit of advice. When you do, send a contract, if it's a free speech, send a contract showing that that's what the fee is, and mark it waived. And if it's waived because of certain conditions, like they agreed to let you fly in a f 18 or whatever, then write it in there, so that they take this seriously, just like you do if you're going to do all. This preparation and put your heart and soul and self into a situation. For them, they need to realize that that wasn't just a buddy showing up to help you move to a new home. You know, I'll help you load boxes. No, this is a professional providing services that are well worthy of being highly paid for and so that that keeps integrity on both sides of the table. And Dan, we've got to run. But I tell you, we've given them more than enough to think about this time, and I'm good have me back. We've got more stories to have you as certified professional expert. Can I give them a way to keep in touch with me? Or is that does not part either do, please do. Yeah, my website's Dan clark.com, D, A, n, C, l, a, r, k.com,

But I have a I have a whole community I call Dan nation. That's with an N, yeah, Dan nation, and it's my own app. It's going to be released in a couple of weeks. Is this being broadcast live today, or are you going to rebroadcast, rebroadcast?

Yeah, through, through old usual channels.

So what I'll do is I'll provide you with a QR code that you can just put up on the screen, and that will give them a chance to download my my app and keep in touch with me in any way that I can possibly serve them. Is that okay?

Yes, it Yes. It is absolutely. And some of this is going to be audio, so give me verbally the email address you want them to go to, or something like so.

So what you do is, what you do is you pull out your phone and you enter in Dan Clark three sixty.com, Dan Clark 360 dot com, and a screen will come up on your phone, and it gives you all the ways to keep in touch with me. You know, Instagram, Tiktok, LinkedIn, whatever, but push the button that says contact, and then when you push send text, it gives you an opportunity to add in your name and your best email address, and my team will email you the link to my new app, Dan nation, where you get access to my videos, one in your inbox every week for a year, just to make you laugh and cry, think and feel, but more importantly, the coaching and My Rolodex, my relationships, where I would have Jim on my show and get a chance to pick his brain, which will add 10 times the value that I've added to his show. So please join me again. Dan Clark, 360 push, contact, push, send text, enter in your name, your email, and you'll receive an immediate link from my team, an immediate email with the link of how you can keep in touch and join my my community called damnation.

That's irresistible. Well, thank you so much, and God bless you.

Thank you. Bless you. Thanks so much.

You bet you.