Merging Neuroscience and Entrepreneurship: Dave Goodall's Journey with TapMental and Family Success

Speaker 1: 0:10

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Emotional man Weekly Podcast. Today is my pleasure to introduce you to Dave Goodall, who is the CEO and founder of TapMental. It's a company that helps businesses increase annual revenue by helping them get back their time through Optimized System and increase the efficiencies, all the while customized for your business needs. He's also a father who's been happily married for 23 years and he has two daughters. Welcome to the show, dave.

Speaker 2: 0:39

Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me today. I'm excited for this conversation.

Speaker 1: 0:43

Me too. Dave and I really ended off on an earlier conversation, so I'm really excited that he's here on the show today. He is full of just great wisdom, earned through scars and experience. So why don't we start off with TapMental, dave? Talk to me about, first off, the name, I think is really cool. So talk to us what TapMental means and where that came about. What's your journey to this entrepreneurial endeavor?

Speaker 2: 1:12

Yeah. So TapMental to me is what I learned on my journey when I was married. In six years into my marriage with young children, my oldest at the time was undiagnosed autistic, so my internal self-talk was not the greatest, was painting. My career I was an electrical engineer and I was an IT systems development and management for service products, and I was fat, miserable, instead of self-talk around. I've got a daughter that's struggling and that I have another daughter that's thriving, and I got on this path. What I learned I was never a good student, but what I do have is I love to learn Started researching about neuroscience and then I learned that we run off our mental programming.

Speaker 2: 1:56

95% of our daily actions derive from our operating system and we don't even know it until we tap into our mental programming to see the dysfunctions that we've applied in our operating system and we keep hitting our head on the why does my life suck? But you're not looking at the root of our internal self-talk. So TapMental is hey, if you could tap into your mental programming, rewire your existing programming thoughts, feelings, emotions and internal self-talk to make your life amazing, wouldn't you want to do it? Which?

Speaker 1: 2:28

I would wholeheartedly say yes.

Speaker 2: 2:32

And then I think, part two to that question is how did I get here? Again, I was undiagnosed dyslexic until my senior year in high school. So, neurodiverse, whatever that means, I have since embraced it as a gift. I have now learned that I'm an avid learner and I see pattern recognitions because of my dyslexia that others can't see, and a little bit of my ADHD or whatever you want to call it excessive energy. I'm willing to take action where others won't. So where I once thought it was a negative, now I can spin it into a positive.

Speaker 2: 3:01

How did I get to entrepreneurship? I grew up with my grandfather. He ran a countertop manufacturing plant, so I was his right-hand man and I think the seed of entrepreneurship was planted in me at a very young age just by being around my grandfather. At six, seven, eight years old. You don't know what's going on, but that was.

Speaker 2: 3:19

You go down to the wood shop, he's got a team of eight, nine people and unfortunately he passed away when I was 10, but when you should go to a funeral in its standing room, only you don't know what's going on. Until you reach your 20s and 30s and you're like, oh crap, that man like imprinted on me, which goes back to the tap mental, our unconscious operating system. 95% of that is programmed before the age of seven. So, reflecting back on my grandfather, wow, he really imprinted on me this entrepreneurship at my prime years. I was so blessed to have gotten that time with that amazing man, so that was the seed of entrepreneurship. Grew up in middle-class America, columbus, ohio. My dad was an onboard electrician for the C-130s during Vietnam, so I was always running around with a screwdriver or a hammer.

Speaker 2: 4:09

We were always fixing stuff or fixing neighbors' phone lines or whatever which led to car stereo installations in high school and I just had that love for learning, even though I wasn't a good student. I loved to tinker and figured all out, so ended up going to school for electrical engineering, spent 10 years with Cisco Systems and IT and product customer solutions and consulting Across the street. Netapp Data Storage had bought some of Cisco's buildings and they were trying to roll out a similar program over there and I got involved with Walmart and Goldman Sachs and BP. So I was in the oil and gas industry and production and e-commerce. So I got to see all these different verticals while doing product solutions around their infrastructure of IT, communications, data storage et cetera.

Speaker 2: 4:54

So six years ago I was laid off from the tech industry and I realized that they were pipping me out. My fees that they were selling me for was six times what I was getting paid. And with the obsession with neuroscience I went on and I got a master's in neurolinguistics, programming, hypnosis. I really wanted to make a positive impact on my daughter. She was autistic and we really leveraged the mental pathways on how to help her rewire her thought systems for success.

Speaker 2: 5:23

So when I was laid off five years ago I was giving a severance to my wife hey, man, you've been doing this for 20 some years. Now you've got all these extra tools in your tool bag. Why don't you go back to what your grandfather was doing and meet that business owner that sent that 2 million marks, where they've got the good foundation. Now they want to expand to five and 10, but they really don't understand how they're talking to themselves or how they're talking to their team members. They're going to need a team. They're going to need to understand who they are as a person and their value system and everything. Tapmental was born five and a half years ago, and that's what I do Now. I meet those business owners that are entrepreneur-minded. Maybe they don't have an education or hated school as well, or maybe they're amazing students, but now they're in a situation where they're finding skill sets that they don't have and they need someone to jump in the trenches with them. That's where we come in.

Speaker 1: 6:11

I think something you said that was interesting, that's you need to your situation. Did you say that your wife approached you about starting this company? You said, yeah, I go. Your wife said, hey, you have all the severance. What do you do with it? Does she Nudge you to starting your own company, or yeah?

Speaker 2: 6:33

I had always, 15 years into my career, I'd always had this dream of owning my own business. We, we get the we become drug addicts. I guess I could say in a simplistic way you're making a multi six figure salary, you've got the retirement and the benefits, and although it gives you a good life, it doesn't give you the great life. So, although I was miserable and fat and attached to a phone 24 by 7, and I'd always talked about it, done research and I'd always been doing all this stuff and when the time came, my wife's hey, shut up or put up. Put up or shut up, do it now or I don't want to hear another damn word about it.

Speaker 2: 7:08

Right, this is your check. This is God nudging you off the cliff. Either you take it or you go get another job, and I don't want to hear about it ever again. So that's the way the conversation took place. I love that. I said I think what us men desire to have is that warrior wife that's hey, you're protecting me and now I'm protecting you. This is something. It's important.

Speaker 1: 7:26

You go do it or I'm sorry that it's honestly a nudge, but almost that permission to go out and to fail Can. We all want to succeed, but really what we need to do is give ourselves the permission to fail.

Speaker 2: 7:39

Yeah, and that's. It's interesting. I love what you said there because Two to three years into the business we're making good money, we're building up the revenue, we're getting the reoccurring revenue. And I could sense frustration in my wife. We we expected to be further along at this time. But it was neat because my daughter does fast-pitched softball and a couple of the dads that are their business owners too, and one of the dads in the group was like wow, it's amazing, dave's made it three years. That's the pivotal year.

Speaker 2: 8:09

And there was a gentleman that had built his business in the first two. You're just, you're getting the bills paid. You know what I mean. You're figuring out who you are, your systems, your product, who do you need in your team, and you're just, you're building that all out. And it wasn't until that gentleman said something my wife you should be proud of him, even though she was frustrated as hell because she's still the tech industry, she's providing all the health benefits and all this other stuff, but in that moment she's well, I had no idea what it took you in the trenches for three years figuring this out and the feedback. It really shifted her perspective. Now we're in our fifth year. Now we're doing that upward trajectory. It's like you're getting kicked in the butt and then all of a sudden you like, okay, my head's above water. Now we have to get here. Now it's that trajectory, but you got to get through those first three years, yeah but when you're in the trenches, when you're in the middle, it is taught yeah.

Speaker 1: 9:03

So what kept you from giving up? I don't quit, I.

Speaker 2: 9:07

Was the kid that was bullied, right. I think I graduated. I remember wrestling in seventh grade. I think I weighed 68 or 72 pounds or something like that. I was the little guy I didn't hit puberty till I was like 25, right. I couldn't grow facial hair till I was 30. That's why I have a beard, so it's.

Speaker 2: 9:22

And I've always been the underdog, right. I took up skateboarding and I was the one that built the ramps and Everyone wanted to be like Tony Hawk and I'm like, why not do it? Let's launch off ramps. So I was always that kid that was like give me a challenge and I'll do it. And and actually I don't think we talked about this last time, maybe we did, but I've completed two a half Ironman events.

Speaker 2: 9:41

My, my wife signed us up for this charity thing of a triathlon and it was just like a sprint. I'm like everybody should be able to do that. It's like a 5k run, 12 mile bike and a half mile swim. And I swam swim team and I was Athletically active as a kid. So I was like, if I want to make it hard, I'm gonna go do the half Ironman, we're gonna. We're gonna do a full two mile swim and 60 mile bike and we're gonna do a half, half marathon and I hate running, but it was one of those things where it's like you, you set a goal and you, just like you were saying earlier, you keep falling on your ass until you cross the finish line and I think that's part of the success in my business and I bring that same attitude to my clients. You started this, the circus that. Let's make the show amazing, the greatest show on earth. Let's do that.

Speaker 1: 10:25

So talk to me about cuz. During all that time in every business owner and actually anyone who lives has experienced this but the stress, the emotional pressure of of going through that and how do you bear that emotional suffering, the emotional weight Without it destroying you or your family?

Speaker 2: 10:52

That's awesome. You just pitched my product being loving neuroscience. Our thoughts, our feelings and actions creates our life, creates our world. The words we speak this is a word bubble the words we speak externally and internally triggers a thought, feeling, an emotion which basically creates what we see in this world.

Speaker 2: 11:11

On my journey, I learned To transition to if I'm getting knocked on my ass. This is a learning opportunity. If I ask for strength, I have to be put in tough situations to make me strong. If you don't have, if you ask for strength and you get knocked on your butt and you don't develop the mental attitude, you're gonna quit. So the stress to me. I learned to just switch it to a different perspective once I learned what was value, what my values were, and I sat down and created my vision in my plan and I really understood who I was under as a person and what was important to me my family, my kids, future, generational wealth, every opportunity to follow my ass like I was like bring it faster. That's happening at first, yet hurt because it was new. Because when you're equipped with world, you protect it and out here it's all on the line. So you have to develop that mental attitude to embrace getting kicked on your butt, because that's where the learnings happen.

Speaker 2: 12:09

Did I take a personal? Sometimes? Yeah, I couldn't reflect on some early stages of transitioning from corporate to creating my own business. Walks around the neighborhood with my wife going what am I doing? Am I strong enough to handle it? And I've shared with people before. Running the marathon part of the Iron man was a hell of a lot easier than entrepreneurship because I Could say, okay, run to that mailbox, then you get to walk to the next one. There's no walking in entrepreneurship, it's you keep going, let's go, and yeah. So I hope that answers your question.

Speaker 1: 12:41

Yeah, yeah, talk to me about during. There's a phase that most entrepreneurs and just families go through where they may be willing to sacrifice time together or sacrifice their health to achieve what they view as a short-term objective. Hey, we're just going to do this for a short time, until we get this done, and then I can spend more time with the family. I'll be able to take care of myself. I just need to reach this milestone and then I can take care of these other priorities. But the problem that a lot of people who go through burnout is that milestone keeps getting pushed out. Yeah, because they think catastrophe, cataclysmic catastrophe, will occur if this milestone is not reached and that catastrophe just never disappears until, all of a sudden, the wife or the spouse is coming to you saying, look, change or we're done.

Speaker 1: 13:46

And sometimes the habits are so ingrained at that point it's difficult to make the changes and then the break happens. So talk to me, how did you avoid that or overcome it?

Speaker 2: 14:01

Yeah, on my journey, getting my coaching and sitting down with some very amazing people and Dr Matt James was one of the people that through the teachings of him he's, you've got to know your values and you got to live to them. That was a game changer for me about four years ago and I've got them right here. And when it comes to business and I think it's my life it's number one value is integrity, and then I have to align with purpose. I have to create prosperity and I got to be having fun doing it. So purpose. One of my purposes on this planet is to be a husband and a father, and so anything I do in my business has to align with my purpose. How do I empower these business owners to step in their power while not negatively impacting my family? They can. I heard another very powerful. He's a coach to the billionaires, but he's look, he goes. I trade energy for money. I can't go into this multi-million dollar company and give all my energy to this CEO and go home to my daughter and have nothing left for her. That's not how it works. So I think to answer your question is I really stepped into my values, stepping in with integrity and purpose and those are my top two. Every decision I make has to be with integrity and has to align with my purpose and, that being said, my business probably could be further along financially.

Speaker 2: 15:25

But my oldest daughter, with her autism part of our therapy and what we did together as a father daughter she raced mountain bikes for three years, so whenever she had a travel event, I was there. I pre-rode the courses with her. We got the hotels. We traveled. My youngest daughter does high, competitive, fast-pitched softball. We've had 28 nights in a hotel across June and July. We're on the road. She's talking to colleges, she's on camps.

Speaker 2: 15:51

It's my business that's created financial ability and flexibility to be on the road with my daughter to help them achieve their goals. Now there's times I take client calls in the car and I ask permission with my daughter hey, I'm on the road with you to get you here. Can I have permission to go handle some work? While I'm on the car, you're listening to Spotify anyways, or watching Netflix, so we just have a conversation as a family. If we want to be able to do this, the dad's going to have to sacrifice this and mom will have to sacrifice that, but at the end of the day. I think my wife and I have done a really good job representing my roles and responsibilities, my wife's roles and responsibilities, and really allowing them to step into their roles and responsibilities, because now they're teenagers and we've got three cars with four drivers and trying to allocate who gets what resource, when We've got two teenagers that are working and active in sports. It's just. It goes back to my values of integrity and purpose.

Speaker 1: 16:49

Now, one of the things that we all have to work on is, let's say, we've done the work, we've established our values, we've done the thought work to think through in these specific circumstances, or we've thought through past mistakes.

Speaker 1: 17:04

This is how I'd want to approach the situation again, with through this value and this dives down deep, I think, to a lot of the work that you do is that we had some thoughts or perspectives or beliefs that have spanned decades, and changing those is not as something as easy as flipping a switch. What have you done to help you align, perhaps your natural biological bias, to avoid paying, pursuit pleasure, conserve energy, and you're kind of the programming, your childhood programming or societal programming, because we don't operate in the vacuum. We have all these societal beliefs and marketing pitches constantly being given to us that we soak up growing up. So how have you transitioned from old programming to new programming? What does that look like and what are some of the challenges? Can you provide any experiences that you went through where what that transition looked like? How long did it take you? What was the process?

Speaker 2: 18:17

So I love the question. What I heard there is, I immediately thought about neuroplasticity. So our neuro infrastructure, neurons, neurites, our thoughts travel a highway in our body and once we get a belief that that road, that highway is built, right but plasticity, plastic, it's plastic. We can develop and create new thoughts, feelings and emotions. Right, we can take an old thought and rewire it. I was in Colorado with my daughter. She was at an invitational softball tournament last year and the head coach of the organizations.

Speaker 2: 18:50

You're the narrator of your story. You get to dictate what your journey means. Don't allow others to MP and make it a good story. Right. Take Michael Jordan. Right. Didn't make us high school team Now seen as the goat. Right. What was his journey? What was his internal conversation after not making the high school? How did he turn that into a positive?

Speaker 2: 19:15

So, to answer your question, for me it comes down to self-hypnosis. People talk about meditation and mantras. You have to take your experience and get it down on paper. And if this is what I believe to be true, but I want a different outcome moving forward, how do I leverage my past as that building blocks for me to be able to step into the future that I believe either today is not possible or not true. How do I get me to believe that future that I want is true? I really have to really look and reflect on my past and physically do it, pen to paper. This is why people hire me, because they won't take the time to do it. And I sit down and I'm like what's your future? Well, I'm going to hold you accountable because if you don't do this, we're going to drift through life and you're going to continue to get what you get Until you sit down and look at what actually happened and look through the truth. Not some bullcrap story, but really what happened and knowing what you know now, with the skillset you got from these failures and successes, what's capable and the self-hypnosis is rewriting your story.

Speaker 2: 20:22

If I look at my career, I'll give you a quick example. I was working at Cisco Systems when they bought this company, stratocom. Stratocom had invented the first analog to digital voice over IP chip conversion. They were the first company to invent voice over the Internet. I was part of the team that was putting on routers and stuff, but I was surrounded by so many freaking smart people I thought I was an idiot.

Speaker 2: 20:44

Now, when I can go back and look at my story. My narration is wow. I was part of the team that was in the front and infrastructure that makes cell phones possible. Today I could say I was the geek in the background. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was like but no, I was on the phone calls at three o'clock in the morning doing London to New York, trying to run voice calls under the ocean. I did that Wow. So I could sit here and say you're an idiot. You weren't the engineer that wrote the code, but I was there configuring and testing and developing with teams during that process. I get to choose a story, so a lot of us will choose our stories to be the crap we experienced and they haven't taken the time to see the amazingness behind the story and the crap you were in at that time. So it's self hypnosis, meditation, mapping out your future and seeing it, feeling it, believing it.

Speaker 1: 21:35

And how has that helped your family? How has that helped you as a father, how has that helped you as a husband?

Speaker 2: 21:42

As a husband in our first couple of years of marriage. I wasn't the nicest guy in the world. I'll be off, I'll step in with integrity. I was basically an a-hole, like I was in my own crap. I was in life's not fair. Why is life happening to me? And I think my kids were young enough they don't really know it, but they probably saw that transition of old Dave to new Dave, angry and pissed off with the world and I'm a victim of?

Speaker 2: 22:08

I can't, because of the circumstances, whether how I grew up, how I was educated, the parents I had. We can all make excuses all damn day. I think for my family, seeing that I no longer made excuses for who I am, even every now and then I'll be like I'll yell and scream. I like to get my voice gets up. I'm still yelled at it. Why do you yell? And then I'll be like, oh, because of how? So good, that's an excuse, okay, so what I'm hearing guys is you don't like when dad gets loud. No, we hate it. Okay, cool, can you help me work on that? Because I think unconsciously I get louder because how I grew up in the household is I felt like I wasn't heard. That's why we get loud, there's an unconscious response to why we do the things we do. You get to the root of the programming, share it with the people you care about and go on. Yep, that's an issue of mine Can you help me work on? I will continue. Remind me whether it's a safe word or something like that.

Speaker 2: 22:56

So, to answer your question, my kids saw evolution of myself and probably as my journey influenced my wife to evolve herself, and then even my daughters on their journey as school, because they're both neurodiverse.

Speaker 2: 23:11

My youngest is dyslexic and dysgraphic. I'm like, yeah, that's your current struggle, we'll get you tutors, we'll get you help, but you got to show up and do the work. If you currently struggle with math today, what do you need to do? What tools do you need in your toolbox so that math gets easier? You're probably never going to be a math guru, but at least I can get you to the collegiate level so that if you want to join this company someday, you know how to look at a P and L and know what our gross margins and revenue profit margins are. If you're going to run this business someday, you need to know that right. So how do we get you this tool. So yeah, to answer your question is just it's the growth opportunity, it's they watched me do it and then now I leverage that same belief and communication with them. If I can do it, you can do it and we'll do it together.

Speaker 1: 23:54

So let's move on to this question. I think what you just shared is so important that oftentimes, the key thing I think you just shared here, one of the nuggets I want to pull out, is that your spouse and your children saw the impact it had on you and that led down to want to pursue their own journeys yeah, make their own change. A lot of times when I am talking with clients or interviewing other people, we often think that the problem is external to us. If only we could change the circumstance. Things will be better. Sure, perhaps couched in your own experience. Why that's not true?

Speaker 2: 24:39

What I've learned on my journey is we, as humans, were meaning making machines. We have to apply meaning to everything. It's a story, right, and? And the external resource is just an excuse for you not to not have to take action, although it could be somewhat true. What's the truth? I think we have. There's truth and truths. There's an S at the end of it and the S at the end of the truths is our perspective of the situation, and the S stands for sorry, I'm going to cuss, it's our shit.

Speaker 2: 25:09

Truths with the end of it is our perspective of the situation, but we don't take the time to really look at the reality in the truth, like a truth would be. If I stand up on this nest and jump off, the truth is I'm going to hit the ground. Oh, that person doesn't like me because of A, b and C. How do you know? Did you talk to him? Have you had a conversation with him? That's just a perception of the situation that you made up.

Speaker 2: 25:34

So the external resources it's an excuse to not have to take action, because here's what I do know on the journey it will change until the pain exceeds the fear of change. Even though we hate where we are. It's comfortable because I know what I'm going to get If this sucks. I know it's going to suck like this tomorrow, but if I try to change and it gets worse, I don't know if I can handle that. It's when the pain starts to exceed the BS stories. I'm telling myself of the fear of that change. The pain is the trigger to get you off your butt.

Speaker 2: 26:10

Like you asked for X, I gave you Y God universe. Whatever you believe is I believe. When you ask God for something, he's okay. Here's the show. It's going to suck, but it's going to give you the skill set and the tools you need to receive exactly what you just asked me for. I think we have it backwards. We go to God in fear of getting me out of the crap. It's no God put you in the crap to give you exactly what you wanted. Go get it. I hope that answered your question.

Speaker 1: 26:37

Yeah, yeah, it's almost like I'm going to Lord of the Rings here at the Hobbit. Sometimes we ask for treasure, so then God gives us an adventure. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 26:49

But I think that's how it works. Yeah, I think that it's the story right and right. There is just popped in my head the way I've rewritten my story where I used to be the victim and sitting in the crap. I've now shifted of oh God's got great things for me. I'm asking him for X, so he gave me Y, and if I really am grateful for the crap I'm in and really search for the learning or the lesson, it will get me closer to that Y right, and that's a story shift that I have adopted. That now doesn't allow me to sit in the crap. Do I get knocked out of my ass? Do I sit in the crap a little bit? Yeah, but I can't sit there for long. It's. I think the rewriting of my story and the way I converse of the crap I'm in. It gets me out so much quicker and the fear is gone. Right Now it's a full. This is going to be fun.

Speaker 2: 27:44

Like my wife was laid off two months ago, my daughter was her team folded when we were on Myrtle Beach. I think it hasn't been like an amazing summer because we've been limited on our travel, because we do have resources, but I don't want to spend $5,000 on a vacation, knowing when that income or health benefits and my daughter's on this college journey. We've invested tons of time and money and she's talking to colleges but now we don't have a team to play with this fall and in the last three weeks she's just played with several different teams and we're actually going up to Virginia this weekend to play with another team. It's maybe that team folded because she still has aspirations of D1 and the girls she's been playing with won't aren't playing at that caliber for her to get it. We've been asking God for D1 opportunities, so now we're in a team. That's oh yeah.

Speaker 2: 28:28

I posted on Twitter today and the coaches just from talking to them last night. She had an interview last night, already retweeted to three D1 coaches, four D2 coaches and three D3 coaches that she talked about last night. No one's ever done that for us before, even though getting caught at Myrtle Beach and all this other crap. We're like, oh my god, we've. Where's this been? Like we had to go through this crap and unknown and uncertainty and it's. Is this really happening? This is a gift. Like you can't make that up.

Speaker 1: 28:55

Obstacle is the way. Great book, great book. Well, let's let's transition to one of the last topics we like discussing on this podcast, and that is defining success, especially as a family. If, especially in a day where social media is all around us, we're surrounded by window shops, the shop windows Everyone's portraying like they're perfect, the perfect family, or what your family should look like, or you'd have happiness if you had XYZ, and so it's really. I think it's important to escape a lot of the comparison, the guilt, the shame, the sense of failure as a parent is really defining what success looks like for you as a parent. So you know what to measure yourself by.

Speaker 2: 29:45

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 29:46

So what have you and your spouse done to define success for your family, and how do you measure that?

Speaker 2: 29:55

I saw a gentleman a few weeks ago I think he was in his 70s and what he stated is he's how he's measured his success as a parent is being in his 70s and it's actually your kids wanting to spend time with you when they're in the 30s. Right, and I share in a lot of my coaching. I share, I coach their stories. I do metaphorical stories. I want to know when I tell a story, what do you see here, feel that kind of stuff. But, and I tell amazing stories about my family and our journey. But I want to be crystal clear. I don't have it all figured out and I'm not perfect, but my wife and I we use Montessori education early on and we did a free range parenting methodology for Gen X kids. So I was a latchkey kid and she had a mom that was at home all the time. So I think we did a combination of that. My wife's had a 25 year career in the tech industry but she's worked from home, probably almost 100% of it. So even though she's a working mother, she's been in the house and around and we've put them in Montessori education and some private education and then we transition into high school, where I think we put the right tools in their toolbox by giving them the freedoms go outside. Here's a knife window, a tree, here's a skateboard, here's some knee pads, if you want them. My kids, we've raced BMX, we've done rock climbing, we've done swim team, we've done camping, we've done snow skiing and Tahoe, We've done cliff jumping. I did everything I wanted to do as a kid. I exposed my kids, as Jordan Peterson would say, is expose your kids to doing dangerous things carefully. Right, and it's amazing. Now, because you're right, we're in the social media world and my kids are both on Snapchat and all that crap. I try to police it as much as I can, but I think and this might sound woohoo-y I try to bring a strong masculine sense to leadership in the household and my wife is a very strong, alpha, powerful woman. I encourage her to bring that femininity to the household. So there are times like Dylan coming home from softball.

Speaker 2: 32:05

I'm a mental coach. I work with a lot of athletes. I've worked with golfers and X-game athletes and all that kind of stuff. So I've got that mental strategy around performance and perception. So my daughter will come to me.

Speaker 2: 32:17

She's like how did it go? How did I do? What do you think and we'll go through my exercises Like how do you think you did? What could you do better? What are you proud of? But I don't ever. I was never that dad of a man. Why couldn't you hit the damn ball? Today She'll be like what do you think?

Speaker 2: 32:30

And I was like how many bats did you have today? She's five. I said how many times you're on base? Three. I was like that's pretty good averages. What happened on? How did you get on the base? The three times you were on base she's like oh well, I got walked on one. I had an amazing bun and I had the slap hit. Man, I was just so fast today. Great, I was like I'm going to get on the way the other two that you didn't make it.

Speaker 2: 32:49

So we have those conversations of tell me your successes, the failures, what did you learn? So I'm like oh you suck. No, I don't have to tell her that crap. She's already feeling guilt and shame that she didn't get on base all five times. But if you translate that to school, my oldest, my youngest amazing in English and history. She loves the social sciences and the psychology. She's got her dad's thinking a little bit, but she struggles with math. That's where it's not bad, because I was an engineer and I was like great.

Speaker 2: 33:19

How do you approach these three classes that are allowing you to get straight A's and what's getting your way here? What do you need from us? What tools do you need? So that's been a lot of our parenting approach. If they're excelling in something, we ask what's the contribution to that success? Where are you? Tell me what you're thinking? What are your thoughts? How do you talk to yourself when you're doing that? Hey, when you're struggling here, what does that internal self talk look like? Are you telling yourself you suck, like I can't do this? This is not for me, because our words create a world. If you say you suck at math, you're going to get evidence of that. It shows up, and then that evidence is going to validate more of that self talk, and then it's just this vicious circle. Hey, if you're currently struggling with math and it's challenging for you, but you're up for the challenge, you need a tutor. Who is that tutor? Like Dylan, my youngest is going to a math museum and she's been through several tutors and there's this kid up there saying she's connected with Sam. Instant report. Now she doesn't go to tutor unless she and Sam come work individually. Oh, that's the tool you need Now. We got to figure it out. We got Sam's cell phone. We can text him. What's Sam going to be that? We all know when we suck at something and we don't need an external people to tell us that. We just need to have external people. Allow us to walk through that conversation.

Speaker 2: 34:36

If it's something you want to be successful out, how do you look at your successes and overlay them on where you're struggling to leverage that to make you better? For me, I went off track of your question. How do I measure success? How we measure success in our houses? Do our kids want to spend time with us? Since Dylan's softball team rumbled, my oldest was downstairs, was like dad. I'm feeling really jealous right now. Dylan's getting a lot of your time and I want to spend time with you. That's a failure and a success. It's oh crap. I didn't realize it was that much of an abstraction and you're feeling it right now. That's a failure because she does not feeling appreciated, but she had the balls to come to me. As I want time with you, I'm like, wow, I'm doing something right that my 19-year-old daughter wants me to take her out to dinner. She's like can we just go get a bubble tea or something? I'm like, yeah, we can do that. So it's your quest to success as a family.

Speaker 2: 35:33

I think Dr Jordan Peterson said it is when your kids are becoming the teenager age and they want to spend time with you. My youngest has a bunch of friends that all they do is talk crap about their parents and she'll come home and she'll say I don't understand, dad, they hate their parents. I know everything you've done for me I'm in the car all the time You've taken me to Colorado and here and that We've done this. And it's like my kids don't understand the other kids that despise their parents because we've given them the freedom Go mess stuff up, go break stuff Probably $5,000 later in car damages. I'm like, oh goodness, not that way. So in the world today we've got the drugs and all this other stuff and it's just having authentic conversations around sex and drugs and you can do stuff like my oldest daughter with her autism.

Speaker 2: 36:23

We've leveraged CBD in certain situations and I guess there's different grade levels of it and one night we get my oldest. It was a Delta 8 full potent gummy and even though it's not weed, it's got THC in it. She was acting weird later on and I'm like and I took one, I was like, oh, we're not going to do that again. I was like, if you didn't like that, don't smoke weed, because it's 10 times worse than that. So it's like being real right.

Speaker 2: 36:51

I think one of our daughter's friends had a high school graduation party and there was wine coolers and stuff. We were there. Drink half a wine cooler, what do you think of it? The part of me is that there's going to be a day there at college there's going to be a peer pressure and there's so much drug and girls and that kind of stuff. I'm like drink a half a wine cooler with me here.

Speaker 2: 37:09

Tell me how you feel. Do you like it, do you not? Okay, this is what it's supposed to feel like. If it's feeling worse, that means someone slipped you something later on and get one of your friends and get the hell out of there. So I don't again. I don't know if it's the right way. I'm trying to do free range parenting and educate them on real life stuff and I think because of that and that's my first is integrity. I'm showing up with integrity, following my purpose and my daughters want to spend time with us. And how to measure it. I don't know that you can. It's, I guess, for me, the conversation with my oldest, where she's can we go get a coffee tomorrow or get some tea. I guess those moments is a measurable moment, but I don't know that you truly can measure it. So it's just, you feel good, I don't know. It's a feeling Not being yelled and screamed up that I'm a piece of crap.

Speaker 1: 37:59

I don't know. So it seems like you're keeping your thumb on. Am I showing up aligning with my values, my purpose, and is the relationship reciprocal? Yeah, is it connected to the best that it can be within your control? Those we can't control, they're humans. Yeah, and that's the difficulty as a parent is that a lot of times, parents want to define success by who their children are.

Speaker 2: 38:28

Yeah, oh yeah, I've been there.

Speaker 1: 38:30

Sure, we can influence, but we can't control, and so I think I love the idea of asking yourself am I showing up with my values? Am I showing up as the parent practicing these values that are important to me and they identify like, all right, what does this look like? It's me taking my girl out. It's me being responsive to their needs within the boundaries of that that I can, and is there connection there? Yeah, I love that.

Speaker 2: 39:03

Yeah, it's frustrating because I think a lot of my daughter's friends have borderline helicopter parents. They're talk their, their friends are talked at. We talk with Right and when you're talked at, nobody likes to be told what to do. And this is the same thing I do with my business owners. I'm like they didn't do this and this. I'm like what do they like to do? Did you get to know him as a person or are you just barking orders at these people?

Speaker 2: 39:26

Again, looking at my daughters, I'm like you need, they need to do their laundry. There's some roles and responsibilities and when there's failing at it, I'm like I don't walk in. Oh yeah, piece of crap, you got laundry piled up here. I'm like, hey, I noticed your laundry is not done. What's getting in the way right now? What can I do to help you? It's because no one likes to be told what to do. I think it's just the way it's.

Speaker 2: 39:46

I try to talk to my kids and I try to share with my business owners. When you talk to your team members, talk to them as if they're people. What do you like to do? What do you hate to do some stuff? We just have to do the stuff we hate. I Don't hate email. Yeah, I can't wait till I'm at the point when I can hire someone to tell me hey, look at these three, everything else was junk. I'm not there yet, but I will be, because that's the part I hate. Text me if you want a quick response.

Speaker 2: 40:14

Again, my youngest hates laundry. It's fact like, but a lot of times will like what do we have to do to help you? Sometimes my wife and I will. Again, she's gonna be. She's gonna be 17, 16, so it's there's certain. I listen to jocco every now and then and he's led teams of Navy SEALs and this stuff, but he's talking about my 14 year old daughter. It can't get the trash can to the end of the driveway, but she's getting straight A's, her chores are done. I was like so am I gonna fight a 14 year old female over a trash can, over everything else she's doing right? No, I picked my battles. I choose how I converse over the things where my frustration is. Have I not taught her how to do it? Do have I not been specific and steer on my expectation? That's the other thing we do is we have a conversation in our head and we assume that conversation the way we communicated to our team Family members is the same thing.

Speaker 1: 41:06

They're not in your head. I think that's a Brene Brown I paint done. What does done look like. Well, Dave, I really appreciate everything that you've been willing to share with us your life experiences. Yeah, and just being open and open book.

Speaker 2: 41:22

Yeah, I love it so much.

Speaker 1: 41:23

I know I, I, I have some great one liners down here things that I'm gonna definitely apply my own life and I hope that for all of our listeners, you were able to get what you'd like from Dave as well. Now, dave, if there's an entrepreneur out there, a business owner, who now is struggling at that 2 million point, needs a scale, needs Systems and increase efficiency, what's the best way they can reach out to you?

Speaker 2: 41:50

Yeah, the website's got a book a free call. It's tap mental, tap me and TAL dot I. Oh, and there's a book, a call. You'll get on a 30 minute conversation with one of our team members. We'll help you figure out where you are, see if it's a fit. You'll get tons of benefit from it. We just want to have a conversation, just a real conversation. We're not gonna hop on the call to sell you anything. We just want to see who you are, where you're headed, what you've been through and if there's a way that we can help you get on your path, and we'll definitely offer those suggestions to you. Fantastic.

Speaker 1: 42:24

Things, dave, again everyone. This is been Dave Goodall. See you. And founder of tap mental. Thank you so much for being on the show today. Thank you, man, this has been awesome you.