IAM2095 – Life Coach Helps People Break Through Their Limited Beliefs

In this episode, we have Dana Grant, an International Master and Business Coach, host of global retreats, keynote speaker, and co-founder of Cauliflower Foods.

Dana shares her inspiring CEO story from hosting master classes in Paris and Amsterdam to co-founding the Women’s Success Summit.

The conversation highlights the importance of breaking limited beliefs, understanding subconscious programming, staying true to oneself, and giving oneself permission to start.

Website: Dana Grant
Instagram: The Real Dana Grant

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Full Interview:

Transcription:

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Dana Grant Teaser 00:00

I created it out of the love and desire of helping people break through their limited beliefs, drop into their core values, understand what's driving them, understand that we cannot trust all the thoughts that come into our head, and that 95% of how we show up in the world is programming. It's the stories. It's our subconscious of things that we've created, and it is our responsibility for that 5% to redirect. It's like the one degree. You're one degree off and you're in a plane. You're gonna end up on a different island. Let's reshift that one degree.

Intro 00:33

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 01:00

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Dana Grant. Dana, excited to have you on the show.

Dana Grant 01:08

Oh, I'm so excited to be here with you, Gresham. It's nice.

Gresham Harkless 01:11

Yes.

Dana Grant 01:12

Such a good energy. Our little talk already. Such good energy.

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Gresham Harkless 01:15

Yeah, absolutely. We had a phenomenal talk. We should have just hit record there. But, of course, before we jump in and actually have the the conversation that everybody's going to hear, I wanna read a little bit more about Dana so you can hear about some of those awesome things. And Dana is an International Master Life and Business Coach, host of global retreats, keynote speaker, and co-founder of Cauliflower Foods. In 2018, she expanded her work across the globe hosting master class in Paris and Amsterdam, and continues to hold intimate life changing retreats in Italy.

She is co-founder of the Women's Success Summit and a proud mentor for the Chico Start and CSU trusted peer mentor programs. Dana has worked with some of the most respected professionals in multiple fields today. Her background as a Business Lobbyist, years of working with addiction, and her extensive experience in the corporate and solopreneur world has allowed her to create programs utilized by professionals around the globe to assist in process transformation. And one of the things we were talking about before we have Dawn is in it really stuck with me is Dana said that everybody can be that, being an entrepreneur.

And I'm sure a lot of the things that she does and things we'll talk about today will bring that to light. But one of the things that really stuck with me as well is she had this message where she says, “situations don't stay stuck, people do”. So I think she probably helps out so much in terms of us getting unstuck and realizing the potential that we have. So, Dana, excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO Community?

Dana Grant 02:36

Oh, I'm so ready. This is yeah. I'm excited. Yeah. Let's let's do it.

Gresham Harkless 02:40

Let's get it started then. So to kick everything off, what I wanted to do is rewind the clock a little bit, hear a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

Dana Grant 02:49

Wow. I think I was born a CEO. I come from a generation of factory workers in Oakland, I'm like five generations of Oakland, California. And he just knew he was so hungry to own his own business. And I watched that at a very young age. I watched him struggle and build and sacrifice. He owned a delivery truck. He worked for it first, and he delivered back then candy and cigarettes.

It was and I was always so excited to get the candy when he came home, the big white van. And but it was the dream. We had the campers in the cabin. I watched our life build out because his dreams were coming to fruition. My mom was a stay at home mom and until the divorce in ‘72. But he continued to believe in that dream, and I believed in him. There was no perfection. There was a lot of dysfunction in my life, but I recognize now that deep seed that was planted in his belief system that carried on to me.

Gresham Harkless 03:53

Nice. I appreciate you sharing that so much. So I wanted to to drill down a little bit more and hear a little bit more about Cauliflower Foods, what you're doing there, but also how you're working with and serving the clients and and the people that you work with. How do you make that impact in the world?

Dana Grant 04:06

Cauliflower Foods, it's interesting what we claim. Now I when that started, I was the passion was incredible. I love to create. I love working with organic food. I love veggies. So it was just a natural that this was born. But the story now this is a important part of the pivot of the story. I knew that I only wanted to do it for two years. Now in order to run a company like that and my story was I'm not smart enough. I don't know the dynamics. I can't do it. So I manifested all of that. And I also pulled in a business partner that I thought was smarter than me that could run that bit. And, actually, she took it all the way. And it's bravo bravo. But I had started an LLC, a life coaching company, because that was my desire to do. I tripped into creating that for my love of food and my love of creating. I'll probably do it again.

I will probably create another product again because there's just such a desire, and I already know what that may be. But to run a company like that, I don't it my passion is not there. My passion shifted into life coaching, which, no surprise, was, again, another six, seven figure business because I created it out of the love and desire of helping people breakthrough their limited beliefs, drop into their core values, understand what's driving them, understand that we cannot trust all the thoughts that come into our head, and that 95% of how we show up in the world is programming. It's the stories. It's our subconscious of things that we've created, and it is our responsibility for that 5% to redirect. It's like the one degree. You're one degree off and you're in a plane. You're gonna end up on a different island. Let's reshift that one degree.

Gresham Harkless 05:46

Yeah. And that ends up being so powerful. And I almost wonder, does do you feel like that's part of what I would like to call your secret sauce? The thing you feel is actually part of makes you unique is that ability to, of course, understand the business, the life aspects. But I always say we forget about the human aspect of business and the human aspect of life, frankly, that those things, the subconscious, the pro all those things. Really lay a foundation according to, like, where we end up being, where our organizations end up being. Do you feel like that's part of what sets you apart and makes you unique?

Dana Grant 06:12

Perhaps. I think that our heart has to be connected. I think we're so especially as a woman out here, there's I'm a lot of energy. I'm a lot of power, and people can be intimidated by that, but I'm a lot of heart, and I stay connected to my heart energy because I understand that my drive is connected to my soul, and that is always asking. The alchemist in me is always asking what's right about this situation. The ego wants to make everything wrong and judge, and it keeps me just if I'm in a ten lane highway, boom, I'm out of my own lane. If I stay in my own lane, I'm connected to my heart, my desire, what moves me, what I'm connected to, what I'm paying attention to. Like, you pop up and I'm like, I love his energy.

And we we're just I let that guide me. I never navigate by the coulda, shoulda, wouldas and what it should look like, and I just show up on what I am. I claim all my I am’s. I'm grounded in that and I think our body holds a lot of energy and sometimes we have to heal from stories that don't serve us or really just relinquish them and say, you know what? Is that bringing me closer to the goal, to the business I wanna create, to the CEO that I am? We are all CEOs in our life. If we wanna take this to personal development, but a lot of people come to me and say, hey, I wanna build a billion dollar business. Okay. Are you the CEO in your are you the authority in your life? What's that? Okay. Let's start there. Because we are all our own authority. We have mentors and we look and we admire and we learn, but we are our own authority. We know ourselves best. No one knows us better than us.

Gresham Harkless 07:43

Yeah. I love that. I was gonna ask you a little bit more of what I call a CEO hack, which is an Apple book or even a habit that you have that makes you more effective and efficient. I wonder if that reset is part of or at least one of the CEO hacks that you really lean on that does help you to be more effective and efficient.

Dana Grant 07:58

People ask me that a lot. What do I do? What is my routine? It's I think it takes 20 days, they say, to build a habit. I say it's forty-five really, before the body starts understanding the rhythm of a routine. But I wake up in the morning, and it's just, I don't grab my phone, I grab lemon water, and then I love a half a cup of coffee. And that's what I limit myself to a day. I love the smell of coffee. I love coffee. But I also know that my central nervous system doesn't do well with a lot of coffee. So I don't do a lot of caffeine. So then I switched to herbal tea for the day and tons of water.

So all of these I build it in and that rhythm is I set my alarm for time management. I have an hour to read, meditate. What we talked earlier, I don't lead with being a psychic, but I doodle, which tells me stories, and it unfolds for my clients for the day. I see things, and through the doodling, stories unfold. And I love that. So I doodle for about a half an hour, and it looks like mindless doodling, but it's unbelievable things that are they're revelations. And then I put that aside, because I will look at my client list for the day or what's planned for the day. And I really never prepare for what I need to do. I prepare my energy, because everything is energy. We're all connected. We there is no separation.

And if my vibration is high because I've got clear energy and I'm not bogged down by and worry is just the inability to solve a problem. If I can't solve anything, I'm staying in my power, which is what is needed of me today. And with raising that vibration is staying hydrated. My form of meditation, my doodling, I always get dressed from because I'm on Zoom. I always wear sweats and my baby blue slippers on the bottom, and I always get dressed up as the halfway. But you know what? I own that. Sometimes I get dressed all the way. It just depends. But it's a Friday. You work through the week, and you just work with the energy, not against it.

Gresham Harkless 09:52

Yeah. That makes so much sense. Do you feel like that might be, like, what I would call your CEO nugget? Like, a little bit more word of wisdom or piece of advice. I usually say it might be something you would tell your favorite client, or if you have to a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

Dana Grant 10:07

My favorite nuggets. Let's see if I wrote any notes for my favorite nugget. I tend, like I told you, not to write too much down. My favorite nugget, I think, would be there's so many, but it might be, are you giving yourself permission to show up? I don't think people realize that they have to give themselves permission to show up, to create, to claim. If you don't give yourself permission, where do we start? You're back behind the starting line thinking, watching, comparison, and then, of course, the act of comparison. You're comparing, and you're like, I could never catch up to them. Of course, you can't, but you start where you are, and people need you where you are.

They may not need that person that's 20,000 steps down the road. This is where all our power is. But if we're constantly giving it away by projecting outwards, we have to give ourselves permission to be new, to start at the starting point. Everybody wants to start. I thought it was a travesty when people could buy the blue checks. We worked hard for those blue checks, and now everyone can buy them. I think someone just told me the other day, and I'm like, really? And I'm like, oh, I'm glad. I hope that it's a form of protection. But or buy followers or buy you know what? Or you could build and you could be it's okay to be new. It's okay to start somewhere because somebody can see you starting, and it may give them the courage to start too.

Gresham Harkless 11:35

Yeah. It goes back to what you said about that vulnerability, and it's like giving yourself permission to be yourself and to trust the process and not beat ourselves up about where we are, where we think that we should be. And sometimes that comparison even to ourselves and where. We think that we are can sometimes be the the biggest downfall.

Dana Grant 11:50

And I think the biggest lesson you asked that, and it just took me to a story of after Cauliflower Foods, I created Cali Soul Coaching. And I was going to launch from there. I built a big site on recipes, all the things I loved. And it did well, but it didn't do great. I was still hanging on to the image of launching from there, which my knee I was totally my knees were cut off there. But I wouldn't let go of the identity of I created this. This is the launch. I thought it was clever. I thought when I finally surrendered and claimed exactly where I needed to be and I started at ground zero, I bought Dana Grant, the name danagrant.com. That's where I started. I took ownership of who I was. I was no longer that's something I created just like working for the chamber, just like setting records and working for health.

All those things are pieces of who I am, but they're not my identity. I'm Dana Grant. That's my ownership. I'm starting there, and I had to be I didn't launch from anything. I started fresh. I started new, and I had to be vulnerable enough to say, here I am. Here I am, world, starting over again. And there were many people that said, what happened over there? Let me tell you about that. There's the biggest, best lesson I ever learned. There's no victimhood. Victimhood will keep us in the maze. I love to call it the maze because it's big, it's vast, and our stories that we create keep us there. And if you wanna be a good CEO, a good authority in your life, you stay in your empowerment. Claim. Ownership. What do I need to do today?

Gresham Harkless 13:29

Absolutely. I love that. And again, that going back to that clicker and having the opportunity to get out of that maze sometimes by switching the button, changing the volume, whatever it is that it might be. So I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And our goal is to have different quote unquote CEOs on the show. So, Dana, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Dana Grant 13:50

Freedom, independence. It gives me the right to show up in my authority, be my own person, create limitless potential. I just I see this as just this limitless universe. And being a CEO means that I can do just about anything I desire because it's my cap I put on every day.

Gresham Harkless 14:16

I love it. Dana, truly appreciate that definition. And, of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know, and, of course, how best people can get a hold of you, find about all the awesome things that you're working on.

Dana Grant 14:31

Oh, gosh. Didn't wasn't ready for that. I just wanna leave people with the hope of empowerment that anything they're dreaming of today, anything they're wanting, needing, I do free mentorship too. They can reach out. They can book a 15-minute call, ask a question, and we can do a hot seat coaching session. We just it's called a power session. As an intuitive, I usually have a good idea when people show up and ask one thing, what they're really wanting to know, and I love to do that. I love giving back. I love to see people plant those seeds, and we're planting seeds every day. Every day, every day that we're wanting something, we're planting a seed. And I'd love to see that just to germinate that to just just watch it grow. So they can reach me at danagrant.com, therealdanagrant on Instagram. I like social media. I'm not always out there, but I love to interact. I love putting information out there. The my stories usually are my what really is going on in my world. But, yeah, I love to connect. Connection is key.

Gresham Harkless 15:30

Absolutely. And to make it even easier to connect, we're, of course, gonna have the links and information to show notes as well too. And Dana spends a lot of time, I'll say, on both sides of the mic being a guest, but also some awesome podcasts that you're you're working on and well too in your show. So truly appreciate you for taking some time out, and I appreciate that seed analogy as well too. I think learning that, of course, we have the seed, but also we have the choice where to place the seed and how to place the seed is something that we sometimes forget. So thank you for reminding us of that, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Dana Grant 15:58

You're wonderful. I love spending time with you, Gresham. Thank you. Thank you.

Gresham Harkless 16:01

Thank you.

Dana Grant 16:02

Grateful for you.

Outro 16:03

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by CBNation and Blue16 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 Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, and everywhere you listen to podcasts. Subscribe and leave us a five-star rating. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless, Jr. Thank you for listening.

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