Deep Dive Dialogues with Dan Woerheide

How Intentionality Transforms Your Life and Business: Lessons from 2024

• Dan Woerheide • Episode 8

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Welcome back to another episode of Deep Dive Dialogues! This week, I’m reflecting on the power of intentionality in life, business, and personal growth. In this episode, I dive into lessons learned from my journey with the 75 Hard Challenge, insights from classic resources like The Strangest Secret and Think and Grow Rich, and the transformative coaching principles from The Prosperous Coach.

I share personal experiences, including how I handle setbacks (like missing a progress photo during 75 Hard), and how I’m choosing to stay intentional during the holiday season. We’ll also explore the importance of removing expectations from relationships and focusing on being present, inspired by Fred Rogers’ timeless wisdom.

If you’ve been struggling with mindset, staying consistent, or building meaningful connections in your coaching business, this episode is packed with actionable takeaways. Plus, I touch on Newton’s Third Law and how what we put out into the world shapes the outcomes we create.

Resources mentioned include The Prosperous Coach, The Strangest Secret, Think and Grow Rich, and more. Tune in to learn how to align your intentions with your goals and make the most of the season.

Until next week, let’s stay focused on intentionality and positivity!

Links and Resources:

The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale
Listen to it on YouTube ( OR Search for "The Strangest Secret Earl Nightingale").

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
Find it on Amazon  (Or Search on Amazon)

The Prosperous Coach by Steve Chandler and Rich Litvin
Find it on Amazon. (Or Search on Amazon)

Empowered Podcasting Group / Podcasting Morning Chat
Podcast version: https://www.podpage.com/pmc/
Or you can join us LIVE on Clubhouse M-F 7 am US/Eastern

Movie: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Watch on Amazon Prime
IMDB - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3224458/

Dan Woerheide:

Welcome back to another episode of Deep Dive Dialogues. I am your host, dan Warheady, and today's episode were able to enjoy time with family and loved ones and maybe just friends, and we did all of that. So it was definitely a week and we enjoyed. I enjoyed being able to connect with people I hadn't seen in a little while and just to spend time with some friends and some family. What a great week. But that leads me to part of today's conversation, which is right. I lacked the prior proper planning for preventing poor performance We'll just leave the other words out, but poor performance in this week's preparation. So I'm putting together a few things a little later in the process than I would normally like to sharing beforehand for recording these episodes, so that I can have time to think through the ideas and different pieces I'll call them that I want to share with you. So you know that brings me to one of my points for today. You know about intentionality and before I move into that, you know this podcast episode. There's going to be several different points that I wanted to bring up today. Again, I put this together a little later than planned, but that left me room to generate a few ideas of what I most wanted to share. So back to intentionality.

Dan Woerheide:

You know I've mentioned in a previous episode, maybe two, that I started the 75 Hard Challenge and it's been a really good. The month of November was a really good month. I learned quite a few things. I read way more books than required. Ten pages a day minimum of a nonfiction book physical book, not audio book was the minimum requirement for that challenge. I think I'm on book seven or eight at this point and I've really been enjoying getting back in touch with reading, inspiring creativity and some of the other components, pieces, mindsets even that come along with just sitting down and working towards revisiting or learning something new. You know, each time you read a book for example, one of my go-to books for the coaching business in general is the Prosperous Coach, written by Steve Chandler and Rich Litvin Every time I read that I'm able to pull a slightly different insight or a new perspective out of the content there. It changes my context on different things to some extent, right, but new insights is really the gold nuggets that are found when you go back and revisit previous content, and so I enjoy the process of being able to do that.

Dan Woerheide:

You know some other ways that I have been intentional. That led me the process of 75 Hard, led me to reflecting on some previous experiences. So I used to be in a community with the late Dan Miller, author of 48 Days to the Work and Life you Love. He was a great coach, a great mentor, and one of the things he encouraged in that community, about the same time of year actually, was to he challenged people to go and listen to the Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale and he challenged them to listen to that audio and or watch that video on YouTube for 30 days successively Successively, I think, is the word, but 40 days and 30 days in concessions, goodness gracious, 30 days in succession.

Dan Woerheide:

So you know, each day, taking that 32 minutes or so out of your day to focus on something intentional and in this case there's a lot of talk about being intentional about the way we carry ourselves in our day-to-day interactions and how we can create the physical outcomes from the ideas and the creativity that comes to us and how that works. So if you've never listened to it, I certainly encourage you to listen to it. So if you've never listened to it, I certainly encourage you to listen to it. I also have reread Think and Grow Rich, which sort of ties into the same, and eliminating those potential negative thoughts that come up on a regular basis. In fact, in the Strangest Secret there's a 30-day challenge that he talks about that incorporates restarting when you find yourself battling with those negative thoughts. So I'd like to consider myself fortunate that when and if they come up because they always come up right it's much easier for us to travel down a negative thinking pattern than it is for us to remain on the positive thinking side of things, and so when they come up, I'm able to address them or put them out, put them to the side without much difficulty. So that's one of the intentional practices that I've been incorporating lately and I'm going to be honest, I was at.

Dan Woerheide:

I have to go back and look at my calendar. It's been a couple of days now, but I fell off of the 75 hard program, and for probably one of the simplest reasons. In fact, a friend of mine had told me beforehand that that's one to watch out for. So I have been. You know, I told you Thanksgiving week was really busy week for us, for me and the people in my community, my circles, and I was really tired at the end of a day. I went and did my outdoor workout late in the evening and came home and took a shower and I just wanted to rest, I'm going to be honest. So I completely forgot about taking my daily progress photo and, yeah, I could have put it off and I could have, you know, hidden that from the world because you don't have a requirement to share them with anybody. But it comes back to that thought of positivity and what I most want to create in the world for me and those around me, and that that that progress photo got the best of me. So I woke up the next morning and I realized it and I was like, oh no, but some great things have come of it, right?

Dan Woerheide:

We're moving into the Christmas or holiday season, whatever you prefer. I call it Christmas. We're moving into the Christmas season and I decided that I'm not going to restart right now. I'm going to incorporate or continue to work some of the practices that I have been enjoying as a part of that challenge or that process, but I'm not going to restart. I'm going to take a moment to be able to enjoy some of the festivities and activities around the holiday season for me and the people in my circles. I would like to have a glass of champagne on New Year's and if I had continued 75 hard, it would have been mid-January before I could partake. I'd like to have a glass of wine with my Christmas dinner. I did not have any wine or alcohol whatsoever through Thanksgiving.

Dan Woerheide:

If that gives you any indication, it's been very recent at the time of this recording that I failed to do that photo, so I stayed true to the entire process throughout the duration. So I intend to continue to read on a daily basis at least. I love the idea of a minimum of 10 pages. That way, even when you're having a busy day, just being able to take that time and sit with yourself right, reading and consuming something positive or something that's going to contribute to my own growth is beneficial. I know that and I've realized that, and I'm so glad to reconnect to that process. So I'm going to stick with the 10 pages a day at a minimum.

Dan Woerheide:

I'm also going to stick with working out in the interim for seven days a week, but only one time a day instead of twice a day. Whether I work out outside or inside is dependent on what's going on for me that day and, I'll be honest, it's cold here in Florida right now and the idea of going outside for an exercise is not the most appealing, but it depends, again, on what's going on for me that day. So I have the option and I do intend to continue to work out seven days a week. For now. I do intend potentially in the future, once I've reached a couple goals that I have set for me personally, to potentially draw back to five or six days a week, and on some of those days between now and then, I do intend to take a second activity, for some of those days may go for a walk outside and just enjoy that, because I really enjoyed going out, throwing my AirPods in and consuming some podcasts that I haven't been able to keep up with consuming, so listening to the 32 minutes of audio, the you know the strangest secret that was during my walk time, and so I've got to shift some things around to ensure I'm still doing that daily. Anyway, there's a few of the things that I'm being intentional about, and I'll shift now into some other ideas I wanted to share with you today.

Dan Woerheide:

Up until this point, I've really focused on a couple things for you in your coaching or your consulting business or your online creator space, whatever it may be for you. But really I'm speaking more to people like me as coaches, and I've started talking about you know where to start and building your business and how. I believe we often start in the wrong place. We often start with that website or branding and getting the business cards and putting all the marketing pieces in place, and I think we're supposed to not supposed to might be a strong. I think it's much better to first get clear on why it is you're in business, why it is you want to be a coach, why it is you want to coach others some of those things and if you go back to some previous episodes, you'll hear what I've laid out on those ideas. And then we've talked about connecting with others and I did want to add some more of my lessons from this year around that, and I hope that I'm able to convey this clearly. I wanted to start with one of the lessons actually, that I've learned this year in relation to all of the things I'm doing. So the coaching business and connecting with people and producing this podcast is a great example, and this came up this morning in I participate I think I've told you here before I participate in a podcasting morning chat. It's hosted by Empowered Podcasting and Mark Ronickonick of ironic media. He's a great host. We walk through a lot of different topics, not solely focused on podcasting, but generally focused on podcasting, and this year, or this year, this morning we talked about one of the you know what, what were some of the lessons or what was one lesson that you've carried away from this year as it relates to your business or to podcasting, and for me, I shared that it was really about eliminating any expectation for a particular outcome. Right, so let's start with this podcast.

Dan Woerheide:

My sole focus for this podcast was to produce consistent content for myself. I'll say that again. I wanted to build this podcast and focus on producing consistent content for me, not necessarily in this episode or any of the episodes generally speaking, but the show as a whole. Right, I used to have, in other podcasts, a desired outcome from creating that content. I always felt the need to use my podcast to sell something versus being able to share what's on my heart or my mind. On my heart or my mind, and you know, I had the intent of creating content in a way that was going to be most appealing for the audience I wanted to serve, versus what I'm doing now, which is creating this content for me. I'm working on a mindset that I had around creative experiences and, specifically, writer's block, if you will. The ideas, the creation flow. Those are the things that I wanted to work on.

Dan Woerheide:

So this podcast is again for me to create content consistently that I enjoy. I want to enjoy the process of creating it. I want to enjoy the process of producing it, editing it, which I do very little editing. You probably have heard that by now, but I don't like to spend a lot of time on that. Instead, I want to focus on improving for me and, in turn, I hope that it's something that's beneficial for others. That's why I do publish it for consumption, but that's not the goal.

Dan Woerheide:

Why I do publish it for consumption, but that's not the goal. The goal isn't to increase my download numbers. The goal isn't to grow my audience. Or there's no expectation, or or does desires is the wrong word, but there's no attachment that's the word I'm looking for to creating new clients as a result of producing this show. I'm certainly not going to turn any of those things away, but for me, it's about removing those expectations and focusing solely on the process and enjoying the process of doing this, because I wanted the podcast to be something I enjoy, not something that I felt I had to show up and do for any other reason. So by focusing on enjoying it, I'm able to be a bit more creative in the ideas and the things that I share and, you know, I'm more in tune with the questions that people are asking me because I know that I can share that with others, I can speak that with others, I can speak more about them and practice that aspect of it. But, again, I hope that it is also beneficial to other people, not the expectation that you're going to take any specific action or that you're going to call me and say, ok, dan, I have to work with you because this is what you said going to call me and say, okay, dan, I have to work with you because this is what you said. If you want to call me or you want to reach out to me, I'm absolutely not going to turn you away.

Dan Woerheide:

Here's the thing, right, this is something else I've been working on is, you know, I've called myself a transformation coach because I have, you know, an eclectic taste for coaching. I have an eclectic background and an eclectic work experience, life experience and there's a number of topics that I can and desire to coach on, but at the end of the day, I thought about this I'm a life coach period. If you are live some of you are going to frown or cringe when I say this but if you are live, then potentially I can coach you Now can I? I don't know, because I don't know what you're facing and I don't know if you bring to the table something that I don't have experience with. But until we have a connection and a conversation and we talk about some of those things, I won't know, and you might not know, if I'm able to be the one to serve you. I got way off track with that thought, but the idea really is that I'm a life coach at the end of the day. There are several areas in which I bring additional experience and expertise to that could potentially benefit someone, but really, and expertise to that could potentially benefit someone, but really, when you think about it as a coach.

Dan Woerheide:

This is what I wanted to communicate that there are 8 billion people in this world and you know we talk about niching down and and being specific in a in a one way or another. And again I'll say this, that there's nothing wrong with that. If that comes to you or you have that niche, absolutely pursue it. But if you're struggling to identify what that is for you, don't stress over it. There are 8 billion people in the world and people want most of them want one or two, if not both, of the following they want to feel better and or achieve more. Eight billion people in the world most of them, I would argue want to feel better and or achieve more. Now you can take that a number of ways right. Do they want to achieve more in their business? Do they want to achieve more in their personal life? Do they want to achieve more in their personal fitness journey? You know, there's a number of things that could come up and I can talk with someone and work with someone on a number of things within either of those realms, if you want to feel better or you want to achieve more. So there's something to think about. Anyway, I digress.

Dan Woerheide:

So this podcast is about creating content that I enjoy, and the process of creating the podcast is something I want to love and enjoy. So that's why I'm here. My work is the same that that person, that human in front of me or on the other side of the network I happen to be on, is ever going to become a client of mine. And I'll tell you that was a game changer for me when one of my coaches pointed that out to me. I was struggling with who to connect with and the reason I was struggling is because I had to attach this expectation of I want to create a client with this kind of person and that really held me back from just simply connecting with people and learning about them and loving on them as people and as true connections that I value, versus some sort of commoditized relationship. And when I removed I hope that you'll see the point here when I say you, but when I removed the expectation from those connections of any desired outcome, of creating a with other people, with that person, I don't want to be too ambiguous.

Dan Woerheide:

When we look at things too ambiguously it also can become challenging person, one individual, one conversation at a time, with no expectation of any particular outcome other than am I staying true to me and the process that I desire to pursue? And the process that I desire to pursue is to build relationships with people and if those people have challenges that they bring up in the confidence of our conversations, then it may shift to a place where I ask them if they'd like to discuss or dig into that a little deeper. Would you like to set aside a little bit of time to talk through that? In fact, I had a conversation with a pastor the other day who I won't share any specifics necessarily, but I had a conversation with a pastor the other day who was telling me that you know, building a coaching business coming from the pastoral world for him'd like to set aside some time separate from this conversation. I'd be happy to sit down with you and talk through that and see what we could potentially brainstorm. Is that something you'd be interested in potentially brainstorm? Is that something you'd be interested in? Again, there's no expectations and I laid it out, of course, that there was no expectations for this person as well, that you'll ever become a paying client of mine. I'd just be happy to sit down and brainstorm this with you and, you know, see what we can do to help you work through this challenge. And that's kind of where I wanted to go today was with the next phase, next step, of the Prosperous Coach method to building your prosperous coaching business, and that's moving from connections to invitations. I just gave you a real world example of what that could look like.

Dan Woerheide:

I was in a connection call with someone. We were having a good conversation. He happened to bring up a challenge that resonated with me. It was something that intrigues me and I threw it on the table. That you know. Hey, if you would be interested in setting up a time separate from this conversation, I'd love to brainstorm that with you. There's no expectation that you'll ever become a client, but if that's something you'd like to talk about, then what do you think? And we're working on getting something on the books. So, not attached to whether that happens, not attached to the outcomes from that conversation, to the outcomes from that conversation, I am attached to the process of being in relationships with people and listening, practicing my listening skills. You know that's something that I think we all benefit from, regardless of your work, regardless of the intentionality of the things that you're doing. If you can practice listening more, you can always build better relationships through those skills.

Dan Woerheide:

Let's see, I had a couple other things that I was going to go on and share with you. I'm recognizing how long I've drawn this out already. So I talked about the connections. I talked about a real-world example of how to move from connecting to inviting, and then creating would be the next phase and then proposing. But we can talk about those in future episodes.

Dan Woerheide:

You know, before I move on, it's occurred to me the movie Gosh. I forget the name of it at the moment. I could take a moment and look it up, but in fact I'm going to do that right now. Let me just pop open a web browser here. Let me look this up really quickly.

Dan Woerheide:

The movie with Fred Rogers. Why can't I remember it right now? Fred Rogers movie. It was about the life of Fred Rogers, a beautiful day in the neighborhood. I don't know why, I didn't know that off the top of my head, but, yeah, what a, what an excellent portrayal of how to be in the presence of other people. There is a particular point in that movie where he tells the gentleman who's the reporter contacting him. He he said do you know what? And I forget the gentleman's name in the movie, but do you know what? Do you know who the most important person to me is right now? It's you, because I am talking to you, something to that effect. And what a great example real world how to really be present with other people.

Dan Woerheide:

And I think we get so busy in our lives and in our work and we get caught up in the things that we want to or need to do and I'll come to the needy part in a second but we get so wrapped up in all of these things that it's really easy for us to forget to listen, forget to be present. You know, when someone asks us a question or we ask someone else a question, rather as a coach, when you ask someone a question, you know if you're really busy or you're focused on a specific outcome, then it may be really easy for you to jump into your head and start thinking about the next question you're going to ask, instead of truly listening to the answer and being present with the person in front of you. Whether they're online, on the phone, it doesn't matter. Being present with that person is super important to creating genuine relationships, and those relationships, by the way, with no expectation for any specific outcome, can go a long way. So let me jump back over to my little simple list of notes here, because I did want to talk about that a little bit more.

Dan Woerheide:

Those relationships can have far-reaching impacts right beyond the benefit of your coaching business, beyond the benefit of my coaching business. You know those relationships could be much more. They can be. You know they might not directly want to or need maybe to pursue what you're people as a resource for something that they need. Being able to provide you as a coach or a resource for something that someone else needs what a great testament to being able to show up and be present for people. That's probably the number one way to express gratitude or to receive gratitude is to recognize that if someone takes the time to refer someone else to you, that is a tremendous statement about who you are and how you've shown up for that person. Whether you've worked with them directly or not. It's the relationship.

Dan Woerheide:

And so, nidhi, I did say I wanted to come back to that for a second, because here's the thing right If we show up with a specific outcome of needing to create an income for our business and that's the reason we're in a conversation with someone business, and that's the reason we're in a conversation with someone the truth is they can feel that, they can sense that neediness and it feels kind of we'll call it creepy. It feels kind of creepy, and if you've ever experienced this, you'll know what I mean. If you show up with that expectation, and so here's what I would say and what has been said to me right, if you're in that place of needing to create a client out of this conversation, or needing to create an income from this particular perspective client, then I would encourage you to find an alternate means of producing the income that you need, so that you can work on being present and producing the income you desire by being able to truly connect and engage with these people that may become clients in the future. If you don't need to turn a profit from a coaching conversation or from a connection conversation with someone, it's much easier to fall in love with the process. It's much easier to be present with that individual, focused on who they are and how they're showing up in the world, versus what's the next question I can ask to impress them or how am I going to approach the sales conversation with this person. There's a couple different aspects that you can look at, but it's much more beneficial if you don't need something from them and they don't feel that you need something from them. It's much easier to create a safe space where both of you can enjoy the process of connecting and learning about each other and naturally progressing into a place where, if there's a challenge, you can reach out and talk about that challenge with them. So let's see here.

Dan Woerheide:

I came across this Facebook post today. Oddly enough, of all places I was just scrolling, I'm helping to administrate a large group for podcasters that we're working on shifting the focus of, and I'll say that that is proving to be interesting, intriguing, keeps me curious about what works, what won't work, and working on creating more engagement there. But as a result, I ended up scrolling a little bit on Facebook this morning and I came across this post and it said no money, november was a success, dead broke. December is about to be popping and I took some notes on this because it was fascinating to me. I wrote down a few things here. So the first one is this thing had over 87,000 reactions and I broke down like this there were 50,000 likes, 35,000 laughing emojis, or whatever you want to call them, and then the heart emojis right, 1.3 thousand loves or heart emojis. It got beyond that. There were only 338 that expressed the sad emoji, 265 that expressed the care or the hugging emoji. I don't know if I'm even close to accurately describing those. 122 expressed the surprise emoji, or that's how I call it, and there were seven, only seven, who expressed that angry emoji. It is a result of this post no money. November was a success and dead broke. December is about to be popping.

Dan Woerheide:

Well, I immediately sent that to a friend of mine who has devoted a bunch of time and energy into the world of financial coaching and, as you know, if you've heard me talk before I did come, that's how I started in coaching officially, so to speak, was as a financial coach and I have a vested interest in seeing people thrive in that part of their world. But I sent it to a friend of mine because I know that she would resonate with that particular post and all of the things I was able to read from that. And I'm not trying to read too much into what all these reactions necessarily mean, but it was curious to me and what it said to me is what I shared with you earlier. Right, there's 8 billion people in the world and most of them want to feel better or achieve more, and in this one Facebook post there were 87,000 reactions telling me that there are potentially 87,000 people who want to talk about, or could benefit from having a conversation about, how to improve their financial health so very intriguing to me and I talked about the Napoleon Hill and focusing on the strangest secret and the book Think and Grow Rich shared with you a few of the things that I'm thinking on and some of the beliefs that I'm working with right now, right, ensuring that I'm reinforcing positive beliefs. In fact, I don't remember if I shared this in part of an episode or if I meant to share this in part of an episode, but that's probably the thought that I'll leave you with for today. I realize that I've rambled a little bit, but the thought that I want to leave you with today is something else that was shared in the Strangest Secret and in Think and Grow Rich, and that's the laws, the laws of nature. I looked up Newton's third law, so I recently had the idea of pursuing the relationship between business growth and coaching growth to Newton's laws. In fact, I did share this in my last episode, but it's worth sharing again.

Dan Woerheide:

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and what we put out into the world, therefore, is a law that we receive from the world, and to turn that inward. If we focus on negative things, negative thoughts, then we produce our own negative outcomes. Contrarily, if we is that a word. Contrarily, on the other side of that, if we focus on positive thoughts and positive intentions, we produce positive outcomes for ourselves and for those around us. So I'm going to encourage you today to keep that in mind as you move through this holiday season and into the beginning of 2025. Focus on the positive outcomes that you would like to see in your business and in your life and work on tuning out the negative thoughts, negative beliefs, that will come up in the process. And really, I hope that this year has been everything you'd hoped it would be and that I hope you're focused on generating positive outcomes for the beginning of 2025 and for the remainder of this year for that matter. Don't let up just because we're moving into the holiday season. There are people that need you and what you have to offer, that need you and what you have to offer. I'll close on this that this podcast.

Dan Woerheide:

I talked a good bit today about what this podcast is, how it came about, my focus and intention for this podcast, and one of the things that I did not share was my belief that we have an obligation, you have an obligation.

Dan Woerheide:

We have an obligation, you have an obligation. I have an obligation to share the messages that I have. I would normally hold on to, maybe, but share the message that's inside of us with other people, because if we don't and this is the reason that I'm publishing this podcast and the hope that it may benefit someone else the reason comes down to, if we don't do the work of sharing that unique message that each of you, each of us, has inside of us, then we are depriving someone else of something they desperately needed to hear, something they desperately needed in their life today. So I encourage you to continue to connect with other people, to focus on listening, to focus on creating those positive intentions and feeding yourself with positive thoughts and the resulting positive outcomes that, by law, will come from those things that, by law, will come from those things. Until next week, I hope that you'll do everything you can with intention and positivity.