David Neagle is the founder of the multimillion-dollar global coaching company, Life Is Now, Inc. David helps thousands of entrepreneurs, experts, and self-employed professionals gain confidence and find the right mindset to increase their revenue, turning their endeavors into seven and eight-figure ventures.  He is also the author of Millions Within and the host of the Successful Mind podcast. In this episode, David talks about the near-death experience that inspired the name of his company, why having a successful mind should matter to someone who wants to have a voice of influence, how a person can change things when they feel stuck, the power of deciding you’re no longer going to tolerate what your mind tells you about things you don’t want to change or do, why people find it difficult to have conversations about money, why it’s important to pursue making more money on their own, his unconventional perspective of sales, the two main things people need to be clear on in order to make big changes, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

• David Neagle’s Website
• David Neagle’s Podcast | The Successful Mind Podcast
• David Neagle’s Book | The Millions Within: How to Manifest Exactly What You Want and Have an EPIC Life!
• The Successful Mind Podcast | Episode 003: My Personal Wake Up Call
• David’s Interview of Andrea on The Successful Mind Podcast | Episode 155: Movers & Shakers Andrea Wenburg, Voice of Influence

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Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Today, we have David Neagle on the line with us, and I’m really looking forward to this.  He is the founder of the multimillion-dollar global coaching company, Life Is Now, Inc.  Life is now, not later apparently.  Maybe you can tell us a little about that in a second, David. He helps thousands of entrepreneurs, experts and self-employed professionals gain the confidence, find the right mindset to increase their revenue, turning their endeavors into seven- and eight- figure ventures.  He is the author of Millions Within and the host of the Successful Mind podcast.

Andrea:  David, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.

David Neagle:  Thank you Andrea.  Thank you for having me.  It’s my pleasure to be here.

Andrea:  And so just real quick, what does it mean Life Is Now?  What’s the meaning of this?

David Neagle:  Life Is Now came out of an experience that I had in 1989, I had a near-death experience.  I had a pretty bad accident.  I was water skiing and I got separated from the boat and I was sucked through a dam and I was one of only two people to survive going through it.  And during that time of my life, I was not in a good place.  I was having real trouble in my life, but I wasn’t doing anything to fix it and I didn’t know how to fix it.  

The experience kind of woke me up to the idea that we don’t know how long we’re going to be here.  If we’re going to do something or change something, we really need to do it now. So, fast forward to 1999, when I started to put my business together, I was thinking about what do I want to call this?  And, you know, I was thinking everything really is about making decisions now, whether we’re creating something for the future, we’re changing something right now, it’s about what we do right now.  So, that was where the name came from.

Andrea:  Hmm, and I have listened to your story before about going through the dam and just that whole thing.  We’re going to make sure that we link to your story from your podcast here on the show notes so that the listener can go find it there because it’s quite a story.

David Neagle:  Yeah and that it is.

Andrea:  Do you find that people who have gone through near-death experiences or really intense crises that they tend to be more ready for big changes in their lives?

David Neagle:  Not only that, but what’s even kind of sad about it is that very often it takes something like that to precipitate a major change in a person’s life.  I went out in my career trying to help people make that change before they hit that kind of a wall or a problem or a catastrophe in their life. But, yeah, I mean very often when you go through something like that, you start to question things.  

It’s really fascinating, I think, Andrea, when you go through any kind of a crisis in your life, it shakes up what you know about your world.  You know, you start thinking to yourself, “Is any of this true?”  “Is it real?”  “What’s important?”  “What can I count on?”  “What do I trust it?”  It rattles the foundation of the illusion of safety that most people live in and it causes people to really think about what is true and real and important in their life from a very different place because it rattles their sets of security.

Andrea:  Yeah.

David Neagle:  And most people walk around in this illusion that we’re safe, everything’s going to be okay, just keep moving forward, not really taking things literally, too seriously.  And then something happens to shift that and it could be a death.  It could be an illness, it could be a partner has an affair on you that sometimes those things like that are the worst because you’ve trusted certain situations or people to be a specific way. And then you find out that they’re not that or you find out that the business or the job you have is it what you thought it was. 

And you start to really question what can I trust in my life?  What is actually real?  It really shakes the core foundation of a person when they go through that.  So, in that questioning, if they’re questioning intelligently and they’re actually really looking for answers, they usually come up with some pretty significant shifts over time for their life.

Andrea:  Hmm.  I’ve also found that people that have gone through that sort of pain.  People who have really experienced pain seemed to be more willing to think about the things that they want to change and actually do something about it.  And it does seem like just super significant when it comes to wanting to make a difference, to get out of the status quo and move out of a comfort zone.

David Neagle:  Yeah, I agree.  I absolutely agree with you.

Andrea:  So, what does having a successful mind, your Successful Mind podcast, I guess I’m really fascinated by the titles that I have to work with what you do.  Why does having a successful mind matter to someone who wants to have a voice of influence?

David Neagle:  Well, I think the reason is this, we’re not taught how to think when we’re growing up, most people weren’t, anyway.  And the inability to do so, I mean, we just take mental activity is the idea of thought and I guess clinically it’s thought but really being able to think productively for one’s life is something very, very different.  And being able to observe the world in situations that we’re in, evaluate it well and then make solid concrete decisions, plans, and goals for how we’re going to navigate that is extremely important in a person’s life.

But we don’t learn it as children. So, very often we find people making decisions, choices, plans, and setting goals and they’re not aware of the consequences.  They’re coming from a place where they’ve never really evaluated the cause and effect of different things in their life.  And avoidance is also a decision and that’s a big one because there’s a lot of things like pain that you just mentioned in a person’s life that they will avoid because they don’t want to have to experience what that’s actually like to go through any kind of a significant change.  I mean, I think the idea is that if we can learn to think better, we can then make better choices and have better outcomes and live richer and more fulfilling lives.

Andrea:  And I know that you see a connection between the way that people think and what they feel and then how they act.  How do those three things sort of interplay?  Which one should somebody work on first, you know, do they take an action first?  Should they work on their mindset first if they’re wanting to get out of a spot where they feel stuck?

David Neagle:  Well, if a person is stuck, the first thing to understand is they’re resisting changing something.  There’s something in their life they’re resisting because the universe is actually pretty clear for each person.  But if we’re stuck, we’re resisting something.  And if we’re in confusion, something that we’re evaluating in our thought processes is not true.  Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in confusion. So, the idea would be that a person gets clear on what they want or what they don’t want.  It could be one of the other, because very often a person’s in their life and you’ll ask them, “What do you want?”  They’d be like, “I don’t know.”  “Well, what don’t you want currently in your life?”  

Well, that they can pretty much tell you.  The things that are making them miserable or sad or they’re just not happy with. So, what I was saying was that the thoughts that we think correlate with emotional patterns in our life and that’s generally based on past experience.  So, what’s really interesting about this is that the first seven years of our life, we don’t have the ability to critically think.  We’re basically coming all from our subconscious mind.  

Our conscious mind is not developed yet and that’s the part that gives us the ability to think critically. The subconscious mind doesn’t have the ability to reject anything that’s going around it.  It just totally accepts everything in it.  And then it creates patterns to navigate through life, to hopefully to keep us safe.  In the process of this, we have an emotional correlation with how we see other people experiencing life.  What is their emotional state around what they’re experiencing and then we go into kind of a mimicking pattern around our parental figures and people of authority.  So, that’s really how most people set up their emotional base through life.

Now, once we get past the age of seven, what’s even more fascinating is that everything that we’re experiencing in life, our subconscious mind it’s already been preprogrammed with how to respond, tells our conscious mind what to do with what we’re experiencing on some level.  And because we haven’t had all that many experiences yet by the age of seven, most of it is an emotional response first to what we’re experiencing.  And then we tried to make some kind of intellectual sense over it. So, if we’re going to make a change, one of the things that we need to do is to make, create an intellectual truth around what it is that we want to create and then determine how do we create the supporting emotion that goes with that.  

So that now we start to really link up a really good thought or idea and a really good positive emotion to go with it that correlates with it well.  And then we take the action that we need to take to create the change in our life.  When we get the feedback of that, we can either make corrections because it’s not quite right or it’s a good reaction.  It’s positive.  So we accept that reaction and then we begin to reprogram our subconscious mind for the success that we’re looking for.

Andrea:  Could we take that to a practical level of, OK, so somebody wants to make a change in their health.  I know that’s something that you’ve been talking about a lot more recently.  If somebody is wanting to make that big shift, they know they want to make a change here, but they’re struggling because they may be start and then they end up failing or they start and they fail and that sort of thing.  They get into that sort of rhythm of feeling like they can’t take it all the way to the finish line.  How do you put what you just said about beliefs, emotion, and action, how do you put all that into play in that kind of a scenario?

David Neagle:  So, here’s the reason why people do this, why they’ll say “I’m gonna do this in my life.”  And then either they start doing it and fail or they procrastinate, they don’t do it, or they forget to do it.  Nothing ever actually changes.  The idea is that we have to go through a transformation of who we are.  If we just take part of our behavior and say we’re just going to change that one part without changing all the parts that support the thing that we don’t want to be doing or don’t want to be experiencing, we’re pretty much doomed to going back to the old behavior. So, it requires a transformation on all levels in order for us to be able to do that.  

So like if a person, if they want to get in better health, they have to look at how do they view health, like what is their belief around health.  They have to look at how do they view the things that make them healthy and the things that don’t make them healthy.  And then what are the emotions that go with those things? So, very often when a person is not healthy, it’s because they’re doing things to numb out or escape from the world in some way.  Some people do exercise in a way that dumps them out for the world, but a lot of people don’t.  

And they’ll do things like they’ll watch TV, they will eat things that are not good for them, they will drink too much, they become a couch potato, or they’re doing things to escape in some way. So, it’s not just about changing the behavior but changing kind of the substructure under it of what’s causing that behavior.  Like why are we actually doing that when we do know better?  So, the ideas that we really take a look at who we are overall and create a person that wants to embody wellbeing.  

And so, it’s looking at all of the things that support health and all of the things that don’t support it.  Removing the things that don’t support it and completely embodying it from a place of “I’m no longer going to associate with what doesn’t.  I’m going to be this new person.” And then you have to be doing an act like that person every day.

Andrea:  That is so significant.  I just want to pause there for a second because becoming that person is such a huge piece of what I’ve heard you talk about that I think is so important.  Can you just reiterate what it means to, you know, think that way?

David Neagle:  Well, what it means is that you’re no longer going to tolerate the conversation in your mind about doing something that you don’t want to do.  So, when we set a new goal or we decide that we’re going to be something different in our life, having a new experience, or live a different way, then most people start to make that change but they’re battling that voice in their head that says, “You can’t do this.”  “Go eat the pizza.”  “Go eat the ice cream.”  “Don’t work out today,” or whatever.  So, they’re always having this argument between the old self and the new self that they want to be. When we transform, we have to go to a place where that we will no longer tolerate the conversation at all. 

So it’s much different level.  It’s where we sit down and consciously say, “OK, here’s all the things that I want to do to make the change.  But what I need to eliminate is this idea that I have this conversation in my head.”  And we have the ability to stop that conversation, we just don’t engage.  It would be like engaging somebody in your life who’s constantly all they want to do is argue. Well, after awhile you find out that’s all they want to do.  They don’t want to be productive.  So, you stop engaging that person and if the person doesn’t stop, you remove that person from your life. 

So, it’s the same thing with the voice in your head.  You stop engaging that argument and you don’t leave things around that will allow you to, in a moment of weakness or being tired, go back to the way that you did things before. So, if you’re going to be healthy, like you don’t keep ice cream in the house so that when you’re tired at 2:00 a.m. and you can’t sleep, you don’t reach for the ice cream.  You put something positive that’s going to support the direction that you want to go as a resource to help you get there.

Andrea:  Hmm, so good, so good!  OK, let’s move this conversation toward money.  This is not a comfortable subject for me historically.  I’m much more comfortable with it now than I used to be.  But what are some of the reasons why people are uncomfortable talking about money, thinking about finding success around their financial success.

David Neagle:  One of the reasons is because we have a lot of shame around it.  We have a love-hate relationship with money in our society, and very often money is a representative of how we value ourselves, or let’s take this back a little bit.  It’s a representative how our parents valued themselves.  So, the amount of money that they made or didn’t make really kind of set up their social status in the world.  

And you will find that if you have a money problem that there was some kind of judgment that your parents had either around people that had much more money than them or people that didn’t have as much money, in many cases both. So, we have to go in and really tackle what is in our internal money story and how is that connected to the love, the security, the appreciation, and the acceptance that we got from our parents.  Because very often people will hit this point in their lives where they struggle with actually making more money than their mom or their dad and I’m not talking about a little bit more.  I’m talking about significantly more.  And they lose that relationship because they actually saw their parents have the idea that making too much money was not good and they don’t want to be labeled that. So, what’s true is that if you start to make a lot more money than you’re currently making now, people are going to notice that. 

They’re going to see you and some people are going to judge you for it.  And we instinctively know this, so we move away from it, plus all the things that we have to do to make money cause us to combat the value system that we have, especially if we were raised middle class and not entrepreneurial.

Andrea:  So,  I’m tracking with you and I totally see this.  What do you think is the importance of, I mean, why would somebody choose to pursue making more money?  I could tell you my story, but I’m curious about the stories that you’ve heard over the years.  Why is it important?

David Neagle:  Yeah.  I think the number one important reason from a value proposition is this.  It teaches a person how to become financially independent.  So, if I learn how to earn money and I can do it regardless of whatever situation comes down in my life, I’m free.

Andrea:  Yes!

David Neagle:  If I’m totally reliant upon other people for money, I’m not free.  And then I have to make decisions based on the idea of acceptance or performance, which are not good because they keep me in a creative prison, so to speak, and I don’t get to live my life the way that I want.  We all know that more money will give us better vacations and jobs and colleges for our kids and all that kind of, cars, you know, all the material stuff, which is fine in and of itself.  If that’s what you want, there’s nothing wrong with those things.

But fundamentally, it’s to set ourselves free so that we don’t become slaves to not understanding how to bring money into our lives.  And that’s what I teach people. And it’s not just an interesting idea.  I don’t just teach it from the intellect.  We actually help people create multi-seven figure businesses and lifestyles and they can replicate it on their own over and over and over again throughout their entire lifetime.

Andrea:  I really do think that is just so significant.  You know, I even look at our kids, we have a 10 and 12 year old kids.  And one of the things that I’ve realized that they’ve begun to do is they’ve begun to think in terms of, “OK, I need money in order to pursue this thing.”  “OK, how am I going to do that?”  “What business do I want to create?”  “What do I want to sell, or what do I want to do that’s gonna…”  And I’m seeing them live in more freedom in that regard than I ever did when I was a kid for sure, because just what you said, they know how to bring money into their lives.  And I’m like, “Wow, that’s so significant for the rest of their lives.”

David Neagle:  It absolutely is.  I mean, either we develop the mindset and the skill set to be able to create whatever amount of money that we need whenever we need it, or we live a life in trade and a life where we come up with a perfect reason why we can’t be better or do better or contribute better in the world.

Andrea:  Yeah.  You know, when you talk about sales and transactions and all that sort of thing, I don’t want to get it wrong, but it seems like what you’re saying is that if I am dependent upon this next sale in order to be okay, then this is going to feel like a transaction, I’m going to be pushy and that sort of thing.  But if I know how to bring money into my life in that sense then I can offer what I have as a sale if somebody’s interested without it being as pushy and it’s an opportunity instead.  I mean, is that an okay way to describe what you are talking about when you talk about sales?

David Neagle:  Absolutely.  I mean, most people think that sales is something that you do to someone and for an unethical person or a person that’s under a lot of pressure from an employer to meet a monthly quota or something that would be accurate.  But really and truly sales is something you do for someone else.  Meaning that if you have someone, like when you make a sale, what we’re really doing is solving a problem for another person.  So, it’s important to be influential, not manipulative. And if we’re influential and we meet the other person’s needs and we get them to clarity about their decision, they’re either going to say yes or no.  And that’s all sales should be, is that we get them to be clear about their yes and their no.  If we do that properly and we understand how to do that, we will never have an issue with sales in our given businesses or employment.

Andrea:  Great!  So, if somebody is being influential in the sales process, from what I understand you just said, that’s means you’re bringing clarity to their situation so they can see the options in front of them basically.

David Neagle:  Correct.

Andrea:  Yeah.  That makes so much sense.

David Neagle:  And that they can make a decision, so that they can make a decision based on what’s best for them.

Andrea:  So the influence is in bringing clarity not in pushing them towards a particular answer.

David Neagle:  Absolutely not.  That’s extremely unethical because that’s all about you…

Andrea:  You said because that’s all about you and…

David Neagle:  It’s all about you and your agenda and it has nothing to do with them.  And sales should not be about you and your agenda, even though you have one, it is about developing your skill set in a way that allows you to communicate with another human being where they have trust and they want to buy from you and you’re looking for the right people to buy your product or your service and you’re helping them become clear about what the benefits are and if it’s something that they want or will help them.

If you look at every salesperson that does something unethical, what’s you say, pushy, right?  And let’s not even go unethical, let’s just say they’re pushy.  It’s all fear-based.  It’s based on, they don’t have enough.  It’s based on, they won’t sell enough or it’s based on, they don’t want to talk to as many people as they need to talk to or do the marketing that’s required or do the travel that’s required.  It’s all based on what they don’t want to do. If a person’s really coming from embracing that position and skill set in their life for what it is, and salespeople are the highest paid people in the world, they will do whatever is necessary from an ethical perspective to make sure that they’re hitting their numbers, which may mean that they have to see more people.  They have to talk to more people.  They have to do more instead of pushing people that aren’t sure whether they want your product or service into a decision that they’re not ready for.

Andrea:  So when it comes to making changes, and kind of circle back around, so whether that these changes be changes in your life around health or changes in your life around money, money mindset, money success, sales that sort of thing; what are the first steps for somebody who is really wanting to make a quantum leap, like you talked about, what are the very first things that they should be thinking about or doing or feeling in order to really start moving in that direction in making a really big change?

David Neagle:  There are two very important things.  One is that they’re very clear on what they want.  And the second one is what they’re prepared to sacrifice to get it.

Andrea:  Hmm.

David Neagle:  You have to bring in that part because if you don’t sit down and really consider what the sacrifices, you won’t accept it.  And then when you hit the first stumbling block or something that you have to change, it’s going to be the perfect excuse for you not to do it.  I think another thing is that one of the things that we do with our coaching clients is we help them unravel their stopping strategy or their failure strategy because it is a strategy for every person. Like how do you stop in life?  What causes you to stop?  

And what’s important to know about that is that when a person does that, when a person stops, they set a goal, they’re going to go after the goal and then somewhere along that journey, they quit.  They’ve actually come into agreement with some situation or circumstance in their life that is in that moment more important than the goal. So, we’re either setting weak or impotent goals that are not strong enough to help pull us through the difficult stages of moving through a goal or we’re letting other things sabotage that because they’d become more important because we haven’t dealt with some internal issue, we’re never going to move forward in our life.

Andrea:  Hmm, so good.  Alright, David so what are the different offerings that you have through Life Is Now, Inc.?

David Neagle:  Well, I mean, there’s a lot of different things.  Generally, we work with a business owners and high-end employees to better their life in various different ways, whether that is through coaching or through strategic, business building or a specific skill set.  But what people can do is they can go to our website davidneagle.com.  There’s a free download there called You Were Born to be a Success, they should read that.  They should really take a look at it and see how it resonates with them and where they want to go in their life.

Andrea:  Thank you so much for being here and we will make sure to link all of that in the show notes.  So, David, one last thing, what would be the parting words that you’d like to leave with people who really do want to have a voice of influence?

David Neagle:  Make a decision to embrace the opportunity that’s in front of you currently.  That’s the whole Life Is Now concept, like the universe doesn’t hold anything back and there’s something in front of every person right now that would give them the opportunity to do that and have that change in their life, but they have to make a decision to do it.

Andrea:  Alright.  Thank you for calling us to action for calling us to have a successful mind and to actually move forward in our lives.  David, appreciate you sharing your voice of influence with our listeners.

David Neagle:  Thank you so much, Andrea!  It was great being here!