David: What is your favorite quote?
Dan: My favorite quote?
David: Yes.
Dan: Stay out of trouble.
David: Okay, and what is your favorite book?
Dan: My favorite book?
David: Yes.
Dan: My favorite book is a book by Dorothy Leeds called “Smart Questions.”
David: “Smart Questions?”
Dan: Yes. It helps people to prepare to compete.
David: Okay. What was the decision you took in the past that made a change in your life?
Dan: The decision to constantly redefine myself. Because I've had people who were in their 20s say to me, “Dan, I don't know what I wanna do when I grow up,” and I said, “I feel the same way and I'm 72. I don't know what I wanna do when I grow up.”
David: And what is your favorite success that you are proud of?
Dan: I've got a lot of them. I'm very proud of the people who I've helped to win and to get what they want. And you know, I'm very, very fortunate. People only come to me when they wanna win. They have the desire to do something different, they wanna be different than other people. They wanna do stuff, they wanna think differently, act differently, behave differently. And whether it's a company or an individual who runs a company, and they want to win. And so, I get the opportunity to work with people who are driven. I don't have to convince them to win, they just want to win and they want the tools to do it. And they know that what they have right now has worked well up to now, but the bar gets raised. That's the big issue today, is people are really good at what they do, a lot of people. And they hit a plateau and nothing happens, they don't change. And a bar got raised, and they didn't know that it got raised. So, it's aways important to understand where the bar is. Are you playing on a level playing field? Are things what you think they are? Is everything the way you think it looks? Sometimes not.
So, it's how do you take control of that? And that's the kind of stuff I do. But you know, somebody asked me am I gonna retire, I said, “From what? I'm having more fun doing this.” I mean, I've gotten to travel throughout the world. I've met people in 16 countries I've worked with. I've got people in France that I've worked with. England, Singapore, Southeast Asia, and it's just been a trip. But you know, I'll go and I'll speak to an executive for executive leadership development, and when I'm there he says, “Come here, can you help me with my golf game?” Both things at the same time. I was in Geneva with a woman who was a client, and we were at the airport and she said, “I'm uncomfortable flying home, I'm not comfortable flying.” So, I said, “What if I can make the flight faster and easier, and you'd be much more comfortable?” So, we sat at the bar, and I did some hypnosis and she got on the plane and she wrote me back. She said, “This is fantastic.”
David: It's a good re-run for you.
Dan: It is, I love it.
David: I read something about children. You wrote a book about children. Can you talk about this book?
Dan: Yes, I have a copy of that book with me. I discovered back in the 80s that parents had a tremendous amount of difficulty explaining death to their children. When somebody in a family died, parents didn't know what to say to their kids. They didn't wanna hurt their kids, they didn't want to impact their children negatively, but they needed a way to communicate with their children. So, I devised a way, I was teaching it at a college of physicians and surgeons here in New York, to doctors and nurses and that, as just a way to help parents do something that was extraordinarily difficult. And that book was called, “How Do We Tell The Children?” It's a guide to helping parents explain death to kids. That was the first edition. The second addition included helping parents explain, talk to children when somebody in their family was dying. And then, the third and fourth editions had to do with traumatic loss. When somebody was killed in a battle, or plane crash or something like that, something that was unexpected. And that was, fortunately, that was five stars or four stars on Amazon since 1986. It's called, “How Do We Tell The Children?”
And it's the same concept with that book that I have with the current book. Of course, I knew it was very difficult for people to read that kind of a book. I put a crisis section in the book, some small gray pages, that people could get almost everything they needed in a crisis by reading just four or five pages. The same thing I tell people about this book is not to read the book, to go down the table of contents and to read what's in the table of contents, and your subconscious mind will tell you what you should read next. The back of this book has a section called, it's the beginning of our next book, which is called, “There's Money in Mistakes.” And I believe that it's important today for people to realize that people who do what we do, really includes helping people avoid very, very costly mistakes and errors. And that's the focus of why I do all this. I do this because I love to see people win, and because I get to take a ride, you know. And it's very diverse, it's all over the place.
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Dan Schaefer – How to become a loser?
Dan: My favorite quote?
David: Yes.
Dan: Stay out of trouble.
David: Okay, and what is your favorite book?
Dan: My favorite book?
David: Yes.
Dan: My favorite book is a book by Dorothy Leeds called “Smart Questions.”
David: “Smart Questions?”
Dan: Yes. It helps people to prepare to compete.
David: Okay. What was the decision you took in the past that made a change in your life?
Dan: The decision to constantly redefine myself. Because I've had people who were in their 20s say to me, “Dan, I don't know what I wanna do when I grow up,” and I said, “I feel the same way and I'm 72. I don't know what I wanna do when I grow up.”
David: And what is your favorite success that you are proud of?
Dan: I've got a lot of them. I'm very proud of the people who I've helped to win and to get what they want. And you know, I'm very, very fortunate. People only come to me when they wanna win. They have the desire to do something different, they wanna be different than other people. They wanna do stuff, they wanna think differently, act differently, behave differently. And whether it's a company or an individual who runs a company, and they want to win. And so, I get the opportunity to work with people who are driven. I don't have to convince them to win, they just want to win and they want the tools to do it. And they know that what they have right now has worked well up to now, but the bar gets raised. That's the big issue today, is people are really good at what they do, a lot of people. And they hit a plateau and nothing happens, they don't change. And a bar got raised, and they didn't know that it got raised. So, it's aways important to understand where the bar is. Are you playing on a level playing field? Are things what you think they are? Is everything the way you think it looks? Sometimes not.
So, it's how do you take control of that? And that's the kind of stuff I do. But you know, somebody asked me am I gonna retire, I said, “From what? I'm having more fun doing this.” I mean, I've gotten to travel throughout the world. I've met people in 16 countries I've worked with. I've got people in France that I've worked with. England, Singapore, Southeast Asia, and it's just been a trip. But you know, I'll go and I'll speak to an executive for executive leadership development, and when I'm there he says, “Come here, can you help me with my golf game?” Both things at the same time. I was in Geneva with a woman who was a client, and we were at the airport and she said, “I'm uncomfortable flying home, I'm not comfortable flying.” So, I said, “What if I can make the flight faster and easier, and you'd be much more comfortable?” So, we sat at the bar, and I did some hypnosis and she got on the plane and she wrote me back. She said, “This is fantastic.”
David: It's a good re-run for you.
Dan: It is, I love it.
David: I read something about children. You wrote a book about children. Can you talk about this book?
Dan: Yes, I have a copy of that book with me. I discovered back in the 80s that parents had a tremendous amount of difficulty explaining death to their children. When somebody in a family died, parents didn't know what to say to their kids. They didn't wanna hurt their kids, they didn't want to impact their children negatively, but they needed a way to communicate with their children. So, I devised a way, I was teaching it at a college of physicians and surgeons here in New York, to doctors and nurses and that, as just a way to help parents do something that was extraordinarily difficult. And that book was called, “How Do We Tell The Children?” It's a guide to helping parents explain death to kids. That was the first edition. The second addition included helping parents explain, talk to children when somebody in their family was dying. And then, the third and fourth editions had to do with traumatic loss. When somebody was killed in a battle, or plane crash or something like that, something that was unexpected. And that was, fortunately, that was five stars or four stars on Amazon since 1986. It's called, “How Do We Tell The Children?”
And it's the same concept with that book that I have with the current book. Of course, I knew it was very difficult for people to read that kind of a book. I put a crisis section in the book, some small gray pages, that people could get almost everything they needed in a crisis by reading just four or five pages. The same thing I tell people about this book is not to read the book, to go down the table of contents and to read what's in the table of contents, and your subconscious mind will tell you what you should read next. The back of this book has a section called, it's the beginning of our next book, which is called, “There's Money in Mistakes.” And I believe that it's important today for people to realize that people who do what we do, really includes helping people avoid very, very costly mistakes and errors. And that's the focus of why I do all this. I do this because I love to see people win, and because I get to take a ride, you know. And it's very diverse, it's all over the place.