IAM370- Author Introduced as “The happiest man I know”

Author of a trilogy of books on confidence: Lead a Life of Confidence, Stand Out From The Crowd…without having point and laugh, One With The Universe.

Dale has been introduced as “The happiest man I know.” The impetus for his books on confidence came from the fact that with 18 months over a half dozen people told him “I want your life.” Since then many more have echoed that sentiment.

• CEO Hack: Creating and sustaining alignment
• CEO Nugget: Manage energy and not time
• CEO Defined: One who finds a way to serve a need in the marketplace guided by values

Website: https://teachingconfidence.com/

Twitter: @DaleFurtwengler
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dalefurtwengler/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TeachingConfidence

Full Interview

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Transcription

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:29

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I've Dale Furtwengler of Teaching Confidence.

Dale, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Dale Furtwengler 0:41

It's wonderful to be here. I appreciate the opportunity.

Gresham Harkless 0:44

No problem. Super excited to have you on and what I wanted to do was read a little bit more about Dale so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing.

Dale is the author of a trilogy of books on confidence, Lead a Life of Confidence, and Stand Out From The Crowd without having people point in and laugh. One With The Universe. Dale has been introduced as The Happiest Man, I Know. The impetus for his books on confidence came from the fact that within 18 months, over a half dozen people told him I want your life. Since then, many more have echoed that exact same intimacy.

So Dale, Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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Dale Furtwengler 1:21

I am.

Gresham Harkless 1:22

Awesome. Let's do it. So to kick everything off, I want to hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story and why everybody says I want your life.

Dale Furtwengler 1:30

Well, it was interesting, because it astounded me when I first heard it. It's the life that I wanted, I created it the way I wanted it to be, but I really never considered it to be enviable. Until that started happening, and even then I was sceptical so I would challenge them on that statement, and they'd say, well, I want to be able to do what I want to do when I want to do it like you do. Or I want to be able to take advantage of opportunities and not worry about the consequences the way that you do. Or I want to take off more trout time to travel and not worry about the money.

So what they were telling me is they wanted to be free of fear, anxiety, and frustration. And it got me to thinking about well, how did I get there because I've truly lived that way for over three decades now. So I realized it was confidence. And I did a little 15-minute program on confidence for a group of business people. And afterward, over half the audience came up and said, You need to write a book on this. We did not look at life and confidence the way we do. And that was the impetus for what I'm doing today.

Gresham Harkless 2:38

Nice. Well, I definitely appreciate that. And I know we talked a little bit offline about the power of competence and how important it is. But I think too, that I remember reading Thinking Grow Rich. And I remember one of the lines that resonated with me the most was that most people's issue is confidence is not enough confidence. So they had like this like kind of mantra, I guess you should read and say every single day. But it just goes back to everything that you said that to get rid of some of those things. Sometimes we just have to have confidence in who we are and what we have at our disposal and our gifts and things like that.

Dale Furtwengler 3:14

Yeah, and there are so many misconceptions about confidence. And that's what the books and my programs deal with, is how to retrain our brains away from thinking that doesn't really help us doesn't support us and what we're trying to achieve, and actually robs us of a lot of the joy of living.

Gresham Harkless 3:35

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I definitely appreciate that. Because I think sometimes we forget that. It is something that can be trained. It's not something that we're born with or is innately within us. It's something that kind of happens over time, and we can have the power to retrain our confidence and put it back there so that we can reach the heights that we know we are able to do.

Dale Furtwengler 3:55

Righ. Yeah, a lot of people think that confidence is a trait that some people possess, and others don't. And the reality is that it's spectral and situational. So there's a spectrum that runs from rarely confident to consistently confident, and where a person fits on that spectrum at any point in time depends upon the situation they're facing. There are some situations in which you don't even have to think about what you need to do. You just do it and it's gonna work. And there are others when you're scratching your head, What am I gonna do with this? You just feel clueless. But we can train our minds in such a way that we consistently fall on that consistently confident end of the spectrum, regardless of what situation we're facing.

Gresham Harkless 4:51

Nice, I definitely appreciate that and I know that's probably a lot of what you kind of touch on and cover in your book. Could you drill down a little bit deeper and tell us a little bit more about everything that you worked on that you built? And also books as well.

Dale Furtwengler 5:06

Yeah, I've written a trilogy of books, one for each level of confidence. So there are three, and there are three levels of confidence. And the first level, we learn to be consistently confident, even when we don't have any background or experience. In the second level, we learn to train our minds to overcome some natural tendencies that get in our way. And what happens when we do that, is that people start to say to us, you don't think like other people? Do? Do you look at the world differently than other people? Do you see things other people don't see? And yet what you say makes perfect sense. Now, when people recognize that ability in you, two things happen. One is they seek your counsel, which gives you a tremendous amount of influence. And they invite you into their initiatives, which creates a lot of opportunities for you.

And so the third level of confidence, then, is learning how to tap into the power of the subconscious mind. Neuroscientists tell us that the subconscious, the conscious mind, I'm sorry, this conscious mind operates at the computer equivalent rate of roughly 30 to 60 bits per second. The subconscious mind operates at between 10 and 12 million bits per second, Wow, tremendous amount of computing power, and nobody's teaching us how to tap into that. And yet we do that inadvertently, from time to time. I call it the shower epiphany, you've wrestled with a problem all day long to no avail. And you go to bed at night wondering how in the world you're going to solve this problem. The next morning in the shower, boom, the answer is, and you're wondering, why didn't I think of that before? Well, what happened there? And what most people don't realize what happened is that when you wonder, how can I solve this problem? How am I going to solve this problem, You in essence assigned it to your subconscious, and your subconscious mind worked on it while you were asleep.

Now, the good news is you don't have to wait for bedtime and sleep in order to do that. You can do that any time during the course of the day. A friend of mine a few months ago, on a Saturday morning, I was working on some marketing material. And he sent me an email and said, I want to start a mastermind group, but I don't like the word mastermind. Since you're a contrarian thinker, I'm hoping you've got an alternative that I like. And I thought about it for a few seconds and didn't come up with anything. So I said, I sent back an email and said, I've assigned it to my subconscious, I'll let you know when I get an answer. And I went back to working on my marketing material.

When I got finished with it, one of the dogs came up and wanted to go out and the time it took me to walk from my office to the door to let the dog out. It hit me. I got back to my computer. I sent him an email, and I said, How about this? And he says, your subconscious works faster than mine? Well, it doesn't really. But what happened there was that my mind was free from any conscious effort, and focused effort. That's when the subconscious provides the subconscious will not interrupt the efforts of your conscious mind. But when the mind is free again, that's when it provides the answers to you. His mind was still focused on what he was doing his conscious mind. So his subconscious wasn't providing an answer.

Gresham Harkless 8:42

Nice. I definitely appreciate that. It's really powerful. Because I think sometimes when we have problems or issues, we're so obsessed with finding the solution to it. But what you're saying kind of ties right into what exactly happened with your friend where you're able to just release it, When you release it, you're still working on it, just not consciously, your subconscious mind is working on it. And you get that solution later on.

But sometimes if we obsess with it, we're controlling over trying to find that answer and push and push and push. We sometimes may never find it, or we sometimes get so frustrated that it just comes so much later. But it's kind of great to hear that and it's a great reminder to us.

Now, I want to switch gears a little bit and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be an app a book or a habit that you have but something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Dale Furtwengler 9:28

Okay, yeah, I think the real key to success for any CEO in any size business in any industry is creating and sustaining alignment. Are we enjoying I don't care what endeavor in life we're talking about whether it's business or not. Where we enjoy our greatest success is that is in those situations in which we're working with people who share the same values that we have so when, as a CEO, I'm looking at prospective customers, I'm evaluating them on the basis of their alignment of their values with mine.

Because I know if those values are aligned, they're more readily going to do the things that I suggest to them. And they're going to enjoy greater success, they'll be there and have become long-term clients, and they don't care what price I'm charging,

Gresham Harkless 10:27

That makes perfect sense. And yeah, it's great to hear how that kind of starts with alignment, I think, we have to do that within ourselves. And then it starts to manifest itself, like you say, our teammates, who are vendors who are clients, and so on, and so forth. And as you mentioned, it goes into that culture that is on an entirely different level that builds upon that alignment. So I appreciate you for sharing that CEO hack with us. And now I wanted to ask you for a CEO nugget. And this is a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. And I know you've already given us a few, but what would you say if you could happen to a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self,

Dale Furtwengler 11:03

One of the things I would tell my younger self is to manage energy and not time. There's so much emphasis put on time management. It's a fixed resource. But if we align our efforts with our energy, then we accomplish a great deal more in a shorter period of time. So to give you an example, my personal biorhythm is that when I awaken in the morning, all the creative juices are flowing, I mean, that's my most creative time. So that's when I do most all the creative work that I'm going to do first thing in the morning, and then somewhere around 10 o'clock or so that energy wanes.

And then I shift over and I do the more mundane tasks, the bookkeeping, and correspondence or posting things that I've already created on social media or whatever, but the more mechanical tasks than my mind wakes up, just like that my body about three or four hours later, so around two to three in the afternoon, I hit a wall. And that's when I do my exercise because my body won't tolerate it before that. But by structuring my work and my efforts, my activities along the lines of my energy, I accomplish a lot more, a lot more quickly, and a lot more effectively. And I've actually gotten more playtime because I'm accomplishing things a lot more quickly.

Gresham Harkless 12:41

Nice, I definitely appreciate that, it seems, there are just waves that are coming out. And rather than finding those ways to try to put in this box or put in that structure, you're saying, Okay, this is how my body, how my mind works, and how things are going. So let me align my schedule or my activities in alignment with it. Now, I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Dale, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Dale Furtwengler 13:11

Being a CEO means that you're finding a way to serve a need in the marketplace. You're doing it with the values that you have. You're looking for others who share those values. One of the things that I found intriguing and I don't often read biographies, read Steve Jobs's biography, It wasn't him who said it but somebody at the senior level of Apple said, We don't create products for our customers, we create them for ourselves, knowing that we're going to have customers that are going to be other people out there that like the same things we do and they'll become customers.

To me, that's the key. You're fulfilling a need or desire, or you're creating one as Apple does something that people really want and appreciate. But understanding that not everybody is that. I'm focusing your attention on attracting the ones who really do value it and avoiding those who don't.

Gresham Harkless 14:20

Nice. Well, I definitely appreciate that perspective. And that definition is creating something because for yourself scratching your own itch, so to speak, and understanding that there is somebody in the right somebody's will be aligned with exactly what it is that you've created. So I appreciate that perspective in that definition. And Dale, I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know and then of course, how best they can get a hold of you and get a copy of all the books that you have.

Dale Furtwengler 14:49

All of the books are available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle versions. They can contact me at dale@furtwengler.com My phone number is 314-707-3771.

My website is teachingconfidence.com. There I write a weekly blog entitled for our Kids, and they can sign up for that on the website there and then it'll be delivered directly to their mailbox. I guess the one thought I want to leave with them is that with confidence, everything is possible.

Gresham Harkless 15:28

Nice. That's a great reminder for all of us. We will make sure to have those notes those links in the show notes, I should say, and Dale, againI appreciate your time. Appreciate all the awesome things that you're doing to remind us that anything is possible with confidence as well and I hope you have a great rest of the day.

Dale Furtwengler 15:45

Thanks, you too.

Outro 15:47

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating. Grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co.

This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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