August 27, 2025 • 34 mins
We all have an “Emotional Source Code” that is set when we were children. It’s what drives us and is why we do everything we do.
What if that code isn’t working to your advantage? You can change it! In this episode I discuss how to do that with my guest, Dov Baron.
For over 30 years, Dov Baron has been empowering inquisitive leaders and influential figures worldwide to explore their own “Emotional Source Code” and their organizations “Emotional Source Code” to discover how to generate Fierce Loyalty.
He is the creator and host of The Dov Baron Show podcasts (previously known as Leadership and Loyalty), named the #1 podcast for Fortune 500 Executives by Apple podcasts. The Dov Baron Show has featured hundreds of hours of interviews with top leaders, entrepreneurs, theologians, military intelligence officers, and artists.
What is Your “Emotional Source Code”?
Your Emotional Source Code is a thesis that has come out of a blend of quantum physics, neuroscience and psychology, organizational psychology and subjective personal psychology. It's profoundly insightful into what it is that drives us. Very often you'll meet somebody, and they'll say, “I really have this bad behavior, and I want to change it.” You might say, “I can help you with that.” Great. And then you help them, they change their behavior, and it doesn't stick.
They wonder “Why didn't it stick?” Maybe the problem is that they have a belief system or a value system that's holding that behavior in place. That’s when they realize they have to do some real work on their behaviors and to my beliefs.
Then they do some belief restructuring. They get happy because the belief's better now, and as a result, the behavior's gone away. And then a year later, they’re back in the same boat. Why? Why does it not change? Because you have an emotional source code. That’s what Dov calls your Emotional DNA.
Your DNA is not dominant. It's just the most... obvious place to start. What Dov means by that is you may have a predetermination for certain situations from something in your DNA. It doesn't mean they’re going to happen. It just means it’s there in your Emotional DNA. It's waiting to kick in. That's the same with your emotional DNA being in your Emotional Source Code.
Going Back to the Beginning
Your Emotional Source Code starts at the base level at the foundation of it, which is the origin of your Emotional Source Code itself. That’s the environment and the circumstance you grew up in. Now, you might be thinking “Oh, my God, we're going to spend 20 years on a couch talking to a therapist.” No, it doesn’t have to be like that.
Consider your parents, especially if you have siblings. Not only have your parents changed and matured over the years, but as parents, they as parents respond differently to their firstborn than they do to their thirdborn. On top of that, there's also an economic situation. There's a pretty good chance your parents were in better financial shape by the time they had their third kid than they were when they had their first child. They'd matured in age, hopefully emotionally. Their relationship had also matured, again, hopefully to make it better. And there was an economic change also.
That means you and your siblings didn't have the same parents. In fact, none of you did. You all had different parents. And so, as a result, you built your Emotional Source Code based on the environment you were in at a moment in time.
Dov was born into abject poverty with violence, crime, abuse, addiction all around him. That told him how to survive. He remembers thinking, “If I'm going to make it through this, I've got to work out certain things about how to be.” He would look at the world and think that's dangerous, that's safe. We all do it. It's not because of his background. You did it even if you had a wonderful childhood. You still did it because your primary objective is to survive.
Finding Meaning in Your Life
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the Idea Academy podcast. We all
have an emotional source code that is set
when we were children. It's what drives us
and why we do everything we do. What
if that code isn't working to your advantage?
You can change it. In this episode, I
discuss how to do that with my guest,
Dove Baron. For over thirty years, Dov has
been empowering inquisitive leaders and influential figures worldwide
to explore their own emotional source code and
(00:23):
their organization's emotional source code to discover how
to generate fierce loyalty.
He is a creator and host of the
Dove Baron Show podcast,
named the number one podcast for Fortune 500
executives by Apple podcasts.
The Dove Baron Show has featured hundreds of
hours of interviews with top leaders, entrepreneurs, theologians,
military intelligence officers, artists, and more. We dive
(00:45):
into topics such as how childhood beliefs and
identities are formed and what that means to
you as an adult, the five foundations of
your emotional source code, the one thing above
all else that you need to do to
change your emotional source code, and more golden
nuggets of advice. You're gonna love this show.
(01:08):
Duff, thank you for making time to be
here on the idea climbing podcast. I appreciate
you.
Thank you, sir. It's a pleasure and honor
to be here. I'm looking forward to serving
you and your audience.
And we're gonna be talking about what you
call emotional source code and getting out of
your own way before we get into the
tips, the tricks, the strategies.
When it comes to emotional source code, could
(01:28):
you tell me a little bit more about
it, and how did you discover it? What's
your story there?
Okay.
That's about four questions
stacked together. Thank you for that.
So the emotional source code,
has come it's a a thesis that has
come out of a blend of quantum physics,
(01:49):
neuroscience and psychology,
organizational
psychology and subjective personal psychology.
It's
profoundly insightful into what it is that drives
us.
So
very often you'll meet somebody and they'll say,
you know, I really have this this shitty
behavior and I wanna change it. I go,
okay, great. And you might say, I can
(02:10):
help you with that. Great.
And then you help them and they change
the behavior and it doesn't stick and they
go, why didn't it stick?
Well, maybe the problem is that you have
a belief system or a value system that's
holding
that behavior in place. Well, yeah, I guess
I have to do some real, some some
real work into my behaviors,
and to my beliefs. Yeah. Can I do
(02:30):
some belief restructuring? Yeah. Okay. You do that
and it's like, yeah, the belief's better now.
And and as a result, the behavior's
gone away.
And then a year later,
back in the same boat. Why?
Why does it not change?
Because you have an emotional source code on.
What I want you to think of that
as is your emotional DNA.
(02:52):
Mhmm.
So
your DNA is is not dominant.
It's just
the most,
obvious. So what I mean by that is
you may have a, predetermination
for something in your DNA. It doesn't mean
it's going to happen. It just means it's
there. It's waiting
to kick in. That's the same with your
(03:14):
emotional DNA being in your emotional source code.
So there's five levels to your emotional source
code and it starts at the base level
with the foundation of it which
is the emotional source code itself, which is
the environment and the circumstance you grew up
in. Now let me just make that simple
before you think, oh my god, we're gonna
spend twenty years on a couch
(03:34):
talking to a therapist. Tell me more.
No. Not that.
So here's what you need to understand.
Do you have a sibling, Mark? Two younger
brothers. Two younger brothers.
What's the age gap between you and the
youngest?
Almost ten years.
Do you think he grew up with the
same parent? Oh, she is it a boy
or a girl?
Boy. Boy. Do you think he grew up
(03:55):
with the same parents as you?
I'm gonna guess there are different people at
different points in their life.
Yeah. Right? So he didn't have your parents.
So your brother could be walking around completely
pissed off at your parents, and you might
be thinking they're fantastic
or vice versa
because he didn't have the same parents. Not
only have they changed and matured,
(04:17):
but you we as parents, I know because
I have kids, we as parents respond differently
to our first born than we do to
our third born.
On top of that, there's also an economic
situation.
There's a pretty good chance your parents were
in better financial shape by the time they're
their third kid than they were when they
had their first kid. They'd matured
in age, hopefully,
emotionally. Their relationship had also matured, again, hopefully,
(04:41):
to make it better.
And there was an economic change. They didn't
you so you two didn't have the same
parents. In fact, neither none none of you
did. You all had different parents.
And so as a result, you built your
emotional source code based on the environment you
were in. So I was born in abject
poverty
with violence, crime,
(05:01):
abuse, addiction
all around me. That told me how to
survive.
If I'm gonna make it through this, I'm
gonna work out certain things about how to
be. I look at the world and I
go, that's dangerous.
That's safe. We all do it. It's not
it's not because of my background. You did
it if you had a wonderful childhood. You
still did it because your primary objective is
(05:23):
to survive.
That emotional source code
determined the next level of your emotional source
code, which is your meaning.
You determine the meaning of everything.
So for instance, you're standing in the edge
of the crib and you're watching your mom
and dad have a scrap and they're scrapping
you, you know, you know, about
paying paying bills.
There's not enough money.
(05:44):
You don't stand there and go, you know,
at two years old and you go, you
know, I think my mom and dad need
some therapy. They got some serious issues around
money.
You don't do that. You look at this
scene and you go, money equals stress.
So I
if I have money, I'm gonna have a
lot of stress. If I don't have money,
I'm gonna have a lot of stress. So
what you'll find is somebody in that situation
will either
(06:06):
collect a ton of money, really gather in,
like, be
fixated on making more and more money or
they never break through.
They never financially break through because it's the
mind operates in polarity.
That's how it operates. So we assign meaning
to circumstances
and situations. Now money was just one example,
but it could be a million different ones.
(06:26):
And you have assigned them.
Then from that
base foundational
emotional DNA
to your meaning,
then you go, well, who am who can
I be
in this environment?
And that determines a lot of things you
can't be.
So for instance, in the environment I was
growing up in, there was no room for
(06:47):
me to be
highly intelligent. There was no room for me
to be more spiritual.
There was no room for me to be,
highly creative or intuitive.
All those things had to get pushed into
the shadows. They became
disenfranchised.
They become part of who I am that
I don't have access to because I've built
(07:09):
this identity in order to survive
based on the meaning I've got.
Now if I had this identity, I'm now
gonna need
a set of beliefs and values to hold
the identity in place and my behaviors are
gonna come out of that.
So that's the five foundations of your emotional
source code. Now this is not you, Mark.
It's not me. It's humans. It's how we
(07:30):
operate. And more interestingly,
it's how we build companies.
We build an emotional DNA into a company.
I've written
many emotional source code reports for very large,
you know, Fortune 100 companies to smaller,
entrepreneurial companies. But I've also written them up
for nations.
(07:50):
I wrote one for The United States. I
wrote one for England. I even wrote one
on Vladimir Putin when he invaded the, the
Ukraine. Not that he asked me to, but
I did it. Because one of my clients
who I politically advise, strategy wise,
said, why would he do this? It doesn't
make sense. And I said, okay. I'll do
you know, I did an emotional source code
profile on him. And it was like, oh
my god. It suddenly makes steak. Makes sense.
(08:13):
I did one on Donald Trump in 2015
and said, here's why he's gonna win the
election. And people were like, shut up. Don't
say that. I'm like,
it's not a prediction. This is how the
emotional source code works.
So once you realize you have emotional source
code, you become you're self aware.
Where do you start to change? How do
you start to change beliefs?
(08:33):
So the first challenge there is in the
statement you made. You're self aware. No. You're
not.
No. You're not. If you read if you
read a book, it doesn't mean you're now
intelligent about that book. Right? Most people are
just gathering information
and most of it is being filtered by
your,
(08:54):
habenga
habengula, which is a part of the brain
that filters out things for threat. So if
you if you read something in the book
that threatens your identity,
your brain naturally dismisses it. Takes discipline to
not dis to not It says that, oh,
that's a stressful idea. Let's not have that.
So you can have this understanding,
but that's different than the application of it.
(09:17):
You can't change the belief is it unless
you
look at,
if sorry. You can't change the behavior unless
you look at the belief and you look
at the value systems. You can't change the
value systems
and and the beliefs unless you change the
identity. And you can't change the identity unless
you examine the meaning.
So when
anything happens in your life, you look for
(09:40):
what's the meaning I've assigned here?
Somebody just said to me they won a
million dollars. How did I react? I was
kind of a bit pissed off but I
smiled.
Mhmm. It looked like I was happy. That's
interesting. There's a contradiction there. What was the
meaning I gave that? You I mean, I'm
obviously, I'm making up an example. Mhmm. Okay.
So this person just presented me with this
(10:00):
idea,
and I immediately wrote it off. What's the
meaning I gave that?
Is that a valid meaning, or is that
a meaning that validates my identity?
Tell me more. What do you what
what do you mean by meaning? Is it
is it a value based meaning? What is
it what is a meaning? How do you
assign it?
(10:21):
You you don't. It it's automatic.
You assigned it in childhood.
So let me give you an example.
What is love?
Oh, wow. That's a big question. That's the
whole point.
What's love?
It's
something you feel for for other people. Right.
(10:43):
So now let's go to,
an Italian village
in 1960.
And asked the
the noni there, the grandma there, what is
love?
What does she say?
She probably says feeding my family.
(11:03):
So what's the difference?
Meaning.
So meaning is expressed, is the way we
interpret something
way back in our childhood. That meaning may
be completely incorrect.
So, like, by testing the meaning, by asking
what meaning have I given this?
Right? You can then question, is that the
meaning?
(11:25):
I'll give you an example. Are you married,
Mark?
Long time girlfriend. Okay.
Then you know what you know what that
is. Right? So
you have no doubt had the experience
where your girlfriend has looked at you in
a certain way and you went, oh, shit.
I'm in trouble. Mhmm. Alright. Unfortunately, yes. Unfortunately,
yes. I have firmly planted my foot in
(11:46):
my mouth.
And in that moment,
you have no idea why.
Two things are happening there and those things
are meaning
on both sides.
You've given that look the meaning of I'm
in trouble.
That may not be the case. Maybe she
(12:06):
had gas and she pulled her face in
a certain way because she her belly was
hurting.
You don't know, but you gave it meaning
based on how you survived in childhood.
She, on the other hand, may be making
that face for a completely different set of
meanings for her. Again, the tummy ache or
something else altogether.
You do something you think is completely innocuous
(12:29):
and maybe even kind of kind and loving.
And she thinks you're being an asshole.
So what do you do? It sounds like
you're stuck.
Ah, very good. It sounds like you're stuck.
And that's how most people get to. They're
like, well, I'm stuck. No. You're not.
Because you have to examine
where that meaning came from.
(12:51):
Once you understand where that meaning came from,
it's completely dissolvable.
So I work with
very powerful
business leaders, with entrepreneurs, with,
athletes, entertainers,
you know, a wide array of political people,
as I said,
wide array of people.
And the first thing we've got to do
is like, where does this meaning come from?
(13:15):
So give me something that has meaning to
you. Doesn't matter what it is. Tell me
something that has meaning to you. Friendships.
Okay. Good. What do friendships mean?
Friendships mean a closeness, familiarity,
support.
That that's where immediately comes to mind. Is
closeness proximity?
(13:36):
Emotional closeness. Okay. Emotional closeness. What does that
mean?
Means that on some level you care about
each other.
What does that mean?
That's right. I can I can think I'm
being care I'm sure you've had the experience
where somebody thinks they're being caring to you
and you don't feel that as caring?
So what does it mean to you?
(13:57):
Somebody's caring to you. It means they support
me. Emotionally,
yeah.
They support you.
What meaning does does that have?
What's the meaning of support?
That I don't,
just through going through life, you don't have
to go through life alone. There's people that
will emotionally support you, lift you up, bring
you back if you fall, things like that.
(14:19):
Okay. So lift you up, bring you back
if you fall.
Okay?
So so
take that a little bit deeper. What does
that mean?
You're not alone or I'm not alone.
Ah, I'm not alone.
What's the meaning of not being alone for
you?
(14:39):
I mean, the knee jerk reaction is just
having somebody else there. I mean, that's what
comes immediately to mind. Go hang out at
the mall and have somebody else there. That's
not the answer, obviously. So what does it
mean?
Having I think it would mean, but what
I mentioned,
the the the emotional support.
So so it means you have somebody there
who can give you emotional support.
(15:00):
Yeah. I think so. Right. Okay. Good.
Where was that lacking in your childhood?
You don't have to answer me, but you
do need to think about it. I don't
because I'm not gonna ask you to expose
yourself here. If you want to, we can
keep going. But if you don't want to,
that's fine. I'll try you know, it's up
to you. I had an emotionally distant father,
(15:21):
abusive father.
There you go.
So you didn't have that emotional support, so
this becomes a thing of great meaning to
you
because it's reliant upon this deficit in your
childhood.
So you highly value somebody who can be
there for you, can emotionally support you because
you didn't get it.
(15:43):
You have transposed that into your life. It's
not you, Mark. It's what we do. It's
humans.
It's what we do. Like I said, this
is neuroscientifically
based. It's psychologically based. So that's what you
do. So you price them a much higher
value
on that
than somebody else who maybe had completely supportive
parents.
(16:03):
It means more to you. What's more is
you also have a,
a higher fragility around it, which means you,
you have a hyper awareness of when you
feel like somebody's not doing that.
Right? It's like, oh, that was a bit
off. And the person's like,
it was nothing for them. But for you,
it sets off the warning lines that there's
(16:23):
a hyper vigilance, a hyper awareness
that this is not something's off here. That's
your emotional source code
Playing out in how you are doing business.
Playing out in how you are building friendships,
and associations.
All of those things are playing out. So
now you've got you've gone back to the
meaning. Here's where it came from.
(16:44):
So you go, okay. So now I'm friends
with Charlie. I thought he was my mate.
I thought he was a good buddy. I
thought he was really there for me. And
then he did this thing and it's kind
of really pissed me off and I don't
trust him so much anymore. Mhmm.
Alright. Is it real? Well, possibly.
Is it a lie? Also, possibly. Let's find
(17:04):
out.
In that moment,
when Charlie did x,
what about it reminded me of my childhood?
Well, when he said it this way, it
was kinda dismissive like my dad was.
Or when he did it this way, he
kind of had that
(17:24):
arrogance and pissosity that my father had when
he was drunk. Oh, okay.
So now what I'm looking for, I'm now
not dismissing and paying attention now.
I'm now saying,
is this a character trait of Charlie?
Or is this a bump in the road?
Because I don't know about you, but I
put my foot in my mouth a lot
in my life.
(17:45):
Right? Yeah. And if you judge me on
that moment,
I'll have nobody in my life.
Because we're all hit bumps in the road
for whatever the reasons and the circumstances are.
But if things show up consistently, you can
recognize a pattern and you go, oh, it's
a pattern. Now if you go, oh my
god, this pattern's been going on for ten
(18:06):
years with Charlie,
and I've never done anything about it.
Here's the news. You're trying to change Charlie.
You're actually continuing that relationship
because you want to heal the thing in
your childhood.
So you want Charlie to be
changed by his interaction with you because that
will tell your psyche there's nothing wrong with
(18:26):
me. Because look, I got Charlie to be
loving towards me and Charlie was just like
my dad who couldn't be loving and I
couldn't get him to be loving to me.
So I got Charlie to be loving to
me. Ah.
And here's the fascinating thing about it. You're
building fuck businesses on it.
You're building entire businesses
on your emotional source code. You're serving people.
(18:49):
You're trying to sell them things based on
your emotional source code.
Not based on the truth. Not based on
who they are. Based on
your emotional needs. Tell me more about that
based on your emotional needs. What do you
mean?
With the business? I'm glad you're intrigued.
So
(19:11):
what is it you can we do personal?
Sure. Okay. What are you selling
to the world in as your as your
business? What do you sell? One of them
is events.
Events. Okay. Yeah. You're selling events. But events
is a is an outcome.
What are you actually selling about those events?
(19:32):
Networking business relationships.
You're selling relationships.
The opportunity for relationships.
Yes.
What was the emotional need in childhood?
Relationships.
Damn. That's good. You're selling what you needed.
(19:54):
When you get that,
when an entrepreneur gets
that, their world becomes
wow.
Now I know what it is. I'm not
selling events. Who gives a shit about events?
I'm selling the opportunity for fantastic connected relationships
with people who actually give a shit about
you.
Now you've got You're not selling an event
anymore. You're selling this emotional fire. You're excited
(20:17):
about because you're going to give the world
the thing, the very thing you needed.
And when you do that, it feels so
damn good. It's not a sale. It's a
it's a piece of your soul
reconnected.
It's like, oh, yes. I'm on the path.
Because so many people are that yeah. You
say, what's your mission? What's your purpose? They
tell you something. I'm like, you know, honestly,
because I'm direct. I'm like, no, that's bullshit.
(20:39):
Mhmm. Wait. What do you mean? I read
Simon Sinek's book, Start with Y. Fantastic. It's
good book. It's a great book. And it
says, start.
Start with Y. It's not the end.
Go deeper into your emotional source code. Find
out what the emotional need was. That's what's
driving your purpose. When you get that, it's
like, okay.
Now I know what I actually have to
(21:00):
offer.
So what do I do with it? That
that makes sense now
continuing your thought that you just put out
there kind of on my behalf. Okay. Now
I know what I have to offer. I'm
offering the the opportunity
to build
relationships.
What do I do with that meaning
to keep improving and not do what you
mentioned earlier? Six months fast forward six months,
(21:22):
I revert to the old meaning. How do
I maintain that new meeting and have an
moment that's longer than just a blip in
the radar for a couple months? Who gives
a shit about moments? What you actually want
alright. I'm gonna be very, very direct here.
We all maybe you're not old enough, but
I'm certainly old enough to remember watching Oprah
every week.
(21:43):
Me and about, you know, I think it
was a 100,000,000 other people. Right?
We watched Oprah every week. And if you
watched Oprah every week, you had multiple
moments during that hour.
How did it change your life?
It didn't.
It gave you bragging rights. And what bragging
rights are is you got to tell other
people about this
(22:03):
and you got to look smart and wise
and it changed nothing.
So most of us are running around like
chickens with our head cut off looking for
the next moment.
So what? Who cares? It won't do anything.
I'm gonna be direct now. So if you're
offended by strong language,
plug your ears. You don't want a moments.
You need
(22:24):
fuck it moments.
Moments that make you go fuck it. I
am not doing that anymore.
Fuck it. That's not actually who I am.
That's not the way I wanna live. If
you don't have that level and I use
that term on purpose because if you don't
have that level of of of emotional energy,
remember it's your emotional source code. If you
don't have that level of emotional energy, you're
(22:46):
not going to change anything.
Nothing is going to change because of a
good idea.
Antonio DeMarzio, who who is a great neuroscientist,
talks about
that we like to think that we are
rational beings.
We are not. We are emotional beings who
make rational decisions
after.
(23:06):
We know we do nothing more than rationalize
our emotional decision.
We are a post rational
creature. When you understand that, you go, well,
okay. Then I don't have to justify it
to get connected to what sets my heart
and my soul on fire. Not with some
rah rah,
but with starting with
(23:27):
fuck it. I've been selling
events.
That's nonsense. No wonder I'm having frustration.
No wonder I can't get people to to
to to buy into what it is I'm
selling. I'm not selling events. Here's hey, Dov.
I'd like to talk to you. Yes. What
is it? I am in the business
of putting people together in the most profound
(23:48):
environments
where they have the greatest opportunity to build
really deep and powerful relationships.
We call them events, but this is what
they're really about. No. I'm interested as opposed
to, oh, you're just another schmuck selling events.
That's awesome.
Does that make sense? That makes perfect sense.
So it's embracing it and leaning into that
(24:08):
meaning then? Oh, you must you must lean
into it from the point of
it's not the meaning I gave it. It's
the meaning of what it is I needed
that I couldn't get.
Now people go, oh, well, I had a
wonderful chat that I'm like, give it a
rest. Then what do you mean? John Bradshaw,
one of the greatest psychologists of all time
said, ninety seven percent of people grew up
(24:30):
in dysfunctional families and the other three percent
are liars.
Now what it means is it's doesn't mean
your dad beat you every Tuesday. He might
have done, but that's not what we're talking
about. The fact of the matter is
it's not possible to be a perfect parent.
So even if you had great parents, there
(24:50):
were things you emotionally needed. You just couldn't
get. Not because they were bad people, because
maybe maybe there were half a dozen other
kids. Maybe there was no money. Maybe there,
you know, dad had to work seventy hours
a week just to make ends meet. There's
a million other reasons
that doesn't make them abusive,
But it makes them so that you miss
something emotionally.
(25:11):
And so you've got to look at what
did I emotionally need because that's actually what
I'm trying to get.
And if I lean into that,
then I'm I'm get it by giving it.
You are healed by healing. You get you
give what it is that you want. And
that's a business formula that I teach very
powerful entrepreneurs.
(25:32):
Very very powerful. One company we work with,
new CEO, he came in. I I was
and I and I was helping him with
this. And he's like, I wanna change this
company. I wanna change what it's about.
And I said, okay. Let let's really look
at that. How long are you gonna be
in the seat? Because the average in the
seat is two to five years. Because I
want ten years in the seat. I wanna
(25:52):
walk it through to profound change.
I go, then that's gotta be built on
your healing.
And he's like, what? What is that? I
never heard of this. So we talked about
this. This. He trained changed the meaning of
the company, of the organization,
and it increased
the annual
profits by a 100,000,000
in the first quarter.
(26:15):
By changing the meaning?
By changing that meaning. And because he's he
just said, we're not about x, which is
our product, which I can't mention. We're not
about x.
We're about this,
and x facilitates it.
X just facilitates it. Just like your events
facilitate it.
But what we do is we think we
(26:36):
think it's the product. We go, I gotta
focus on my events are better than Charlie's
events. Oh, now you're in competition. You're a
waste of time.
Right? You've commoditized yourself immediately. And most as
soon as soon as you commoditize yourself, you're
out of business. Might as well just pack
it up.
But what you've done there is shifted out
of commoditization
into something that is emotionally visceral,
(26:56):
not just for you, but for them. Now
to be clear,
the wonderful thing about that is
you'll put some people right off
and you better cheer for that. That's fantastic.
Because you won't be selling to people who
don't wanna buy.
Mhmm.
You're only selling to people who are like,
that's exactly what I want. You know what
(27:17):
yes is? You want of course.
I get it.
So how do you get them Is it
explaining it what from an emotional standpoint till
you have them, and I use air quotes,
get it?
Yes. It it's explaining it as I said,
thinking like, so doing the work I just
outlined
(27:38):
to find out what it is you need
and then how you can give that to
the world
via your
product,
your whatever is your x that you offer
to the world. How am I going to
meet that need in the world using this?
Now,
I will tell you that sometimes an entrepreneur
goes, I can't.
I'm in totally the wrong business.
(28:00):
I, you know, I gotta get out. Okay,
great. We gotta find someone else for you.
That does happen. I won't say it doesn't,
but mostly it doesn't have to happen.
It's
like, oh, I can see why I got
this.
So for instance,
one of the firms I work with is
a, financial organization.
(28:20):
And there are four senior partners I work
with privately and collectively.
Those are those four of my individual and
collective clients that I work with.
Not one of them has even a similar
background.
The four partners have incredibly different backgrounds.
(28:41):
But when we boil down to get to
their corporate purpose, which is what we, the
work we've been doing lately. So we did
their new individual purpose, which again is not
that why it's deeper than that, that meaning.
And then we put those together and we
go, what's the collective purpose?
And each one of them is like, well,
of course, I went into finance.
(29:02):
I came from an incredibly broke family. I
was always fearful it was gonna be any
money. The other one's like, well, of course
I got into finance.
Money was made bad.
Another one's like, well, of course I got
into finance. I grew up in
business. I mean, it doesn't like, we've all
got our own reasons for getting in. But
then the question is, well, okay. I I'm
in this.
(29:23):
So, of course, I got into it. I
understand. How does it meet that need I
want?
And that is that is entirely unique and
subjective.
But that means that each one of those
four
is selling the services of that organization
in a entirely unique way and having massive
success as opposed to having some bullshit formula.
(29:43):
Well, we do this and we're always on
that and we're about integrity. Shut up.
Here's why this company matters to me. Here's
why I'm doing this. This is, you know,
this is what we're about. That's coming from
a totally personal place. Now the person in
front of you can really connect with you
and connect with what you're offering.
(30:04):
This
has just been
amazingly
insightful with everything we I mean, we've covered
a lot of ground in a short period
of time. When it comes to emotional source
code and assigning meaning or recognizing meaning,
If you someone's listening or watching thinking, okay.
I I get it. If you're to say
if you're gonna embrace it, at least do
this one thing. At least do this one
(30:26):
thing. What would you tell people to do?
I would ask you to ask this sync
simple question,
which is, what is it that I needed
in my childhood that I could not get
or could not get enough of? So you
might go, well, I got it. But but,
yeah, maybe you just didn't get enough of
it. Right? So
(30:47):
it's again, it's not about making your parents
or their parenting wrong.
They might have been terrible parents. They might
have been marvelous.
It's not about that. It's what did you
need that you couldn't get or couldn't get
enough of? That's the number. That's step number
one.
And then asking yourself,
how can I get that need met
via my business?
(31:09):
And how can I meet that need for
others who don't even know they need it,
but they need it? Mhmm. See, most people
are walking around as you just talked about
earlier. They're unconscious.
They don't know what they need.
Right? If I just said to you, what's
the purpose of your events? What's the meaning
of your events? You probably wouldn't have got
to where you got to today.
Right? So and that's not because you're daft
(31:30):
or because you're ignorant. It's because you you
don't know what to ask. You don't know
how to get that. But now you do.
And so once you go through that process
So I do a I do a,
an analysis with people where I'll help them
at least get to this level.
You can book a private appointment with me
for, for forty five minutes to an hour
to do that.
(31:52):
All my clients who work with me longterm
have to go through a, vetting process. And
it's a it's a it's a much bigger
process, and it's considerably more expensive because we're
actually going to tear down the emotional source
code and rebuild it. But that part there,
that's the part you can do. You can
play this
video over and over again. Keep listening to
(32:12):
it and stop it and pause it and
take notes and stop. And if you feel
like you can't do it alone, sometimes you
can't, that's okay. You can reach out to
me, dav@davbaron.com.
That's my email. It's and that's my private
email. I give it out. You can reach
out to me. You can book an hour
with me, and I'll help you to get
to this place just like I just did
with Mark.
Thank you so much for this, dove. I
(32:32):
appreciate you. This has been
amazing.
You're very welcome, sir. Listen,
the point of the the point of it
is very simply this.
I believe
it's not the truth.
I believe we're here on the planet to
serve.
I'm here to serve.
And the best way for you to serve
(32:54):
is to meet your need
and to help others meet that very same
need. And that's why there is no competition.
You can have six other people lined up
next to you all put on events and
and there's no competition once you understand the
emotional source code. It evaporates.
Some of my closest friends are the people
(33:15):
who should be my competitors.
They should be. On paper, they should be.
We're all corporate consultants.
We know we're working around purpose and culture
and blah blah blah. You know, oh, you
know, it's cheese. I don't know. Why? We're
not in the same business.
It looks like it. The label on the
top is the same. The con the label
on the box is exactly the same. The
contents of the box vastly different.
(33:37):
This is your way out of competition.
This is your way to serve in the
world in a way you never even imagined.
Once you get that,
it's not only
financially very profitable,
but it's deeply, soulfully
fulfilling.
And that's what matters.
That's a beautiful way to end it. Thank
(33:58):
you again, Dov. I appreciate you.
You're very welcome, sir.
And scene.
Thank you for joining us today. I hope
you enjoyed the episode. I also hope that
you'll subscribe to the Idea Climbing podcast and
rate us on iTunes.
Visit ideaclimbing.com
to learn more about Idea Climbing and hear
(34:19):
more episodes about mentoring,
marketing, and big ideas.
Welcome to the Idea Academy podcast. We all
have an emotional source code that is set
when we were children. It's what drives us
and why we do everything we do. What
if that code isn't working to your advantage?
You can change it. In this episode, I
discuss how to do that with my guest,
Dove Baron. For over thirty years, Dov has
been empowering inquisitive leaders and influential figures worldwide
to explore their own emotional source code and
(00:23):
their organization's emotional source code to discover how
to generate fierce loyalty.
He is a creator and host of the
Dove Baron Show podcast,
named the number one podcast for Fortune 500
executives by Apple podcasts.
The Dove Baron Show has featured hundreds of
hours of interviews with top leaders, entrepreneurs, theologians,
military intelligence officers, artists, and more. We dive
(00:45):
into topics such as how childhood beliefs and
identities are formed and what that means to
you as an adult, the five foundations of
your emotional source code, the one thing above
all else that you need to do to
change your emotional source code, and more golden
nuggets of advice. You're gonna love this show.
(01:08):
Duff, thank you for making time to be
here on the idea climbing podcast. I appreciate
you.
Thank you, sir. It's a pleasure and honor
to be here. I'm looking forward to serving
you and your audience.
And we're gonna be talking about what you
call emotional source code and getting out of
your own way before we get into the
tips, the tricks, the strategies.
When it comes to emotional source code, could
(01:28):
you tell me a little bit more about
it, and how did you discover it? What's
your story there?
Okay.
That's about four questions
stacked together. Thank you for that.
So the emotional source code,
has come it's a a thesis that has
come out of a blend of quantum physics,
(01:49):
neuroscience and psychology,
organizational
psychology and subjective personal psychology.
It's
profoundly insightful into what it is that drives
us.
So
very often you'll meet somebody and they'll say,
you know, I really have this this shitty
behavior and I wanna change it. I go,
okay, great. And you might say, I can
(02:10):
help you with that. Great.
And then you help them and they change
the behavior and it doesn't stick and they
go, why didn't it stick?
Well, maybe the problem is that you have
a belief system or a value system that's
holding
that behavior in place. Well, yeah, I guess
I have to do some real, some some
real work into my behaviors,
and to my beliefs. Yeah. Can I do
(02:30):
some belief restructuring? Yeah. Okay. You do that
and it's like, yeah, the belief's better now.
And and as a result, the behavior's
gone away.
And then a year later,
back in the same boat. Why?
Why does it not change?
Because you have an emotional source code on.
What I want you to think of that
as is your emotional DNA.
(02:52):
Mhmm.
So
your DNA is is not dominant.
It's just
the most,
obvious. So what I mean by that is
you may have a, predetermination
for something in your DNA. It doesn't mean
it's going to happen. It just means it's
there. It's waiting
to kick in. That's the same with your
(03:14):
emotional DNA being in your emotional source code.
So there's five levels to your emotional source
code and it starts at the base level
with the foundation of it which
is the emotional source code itself, which is
the environment and the circumstance you grew up
in. Now let me just make that simple
before you think, oh my god, we're gonna
spend twenty years on a couch
(03:34):
talking to a therapist. Tell me more.
No. Not that.
So here's what you need to understand.
Do you have a sibling, Mark? Two younger
brothers. Two younger brothers.
What's the age gap between you and the
youngest?
Almost ten years.
Do you think he grew up with the
same parent? Oh, she is it a boy
or a girl?
Boy. Boy. Do you think he grew up
(03:55):
with the same parents as you?
I'm gonna guess there are different people at
different points in their life.
Yeah. Right? So he didn't have your parents.
So your brother could be walking around completely
pissed off at your parents, and you might
be thinking they're fantastic
or vice versa
because he didn't have the same parents. Not
only have they changed and matured,
(04:17):
but you we as parents, I know because
I have kids, we as parents respond differently
to our first born than we do to
our third born.
On top of that, there's also an economic
situation.
There's a pretty good chance your parents were
in better financial shape by the time they're
their third kid than they were when they
had their first kid. They'd matured
in age, hopefully,
emotionally. Their relationship had also matured, again, hopefully,
(04:41):
to make it better.
And there was an economic change. They didn't
you so you two didn't have the same
parents. In fact, neither none none of you
did. You all had different parents.
And so as a result, you built your
emotional source code based on the environment you
were in. So I was born in abject
poverty
with violence, crime,
(05:01):
abuse, addiction
all around me. That told me how to
survive.
If I'm gonna make it through this, I'm
gonna work out certain things about how to
be. I look at the world and I
go, that's dangerous.
That's safe. We all do it. It's not
it's not because of my background. You did
it if you had a wonderful childhood. You
still did it because your primary objective is
(05:23):
to survive.
That emotional source code
determined the next level of your emotional source
code, which is your meaning.
You determine the meaning of everything.
So for instance, you're standing in the edge
of the crib and you're watching your mom
and dad have a scrap and they're scrapping
you, you know, you know, about
paying paying bills.
There's not enough money.
(05:44):
You don't stand there and go, you know,
at two years old and you go, you
know, I think my mom and dad need
some therapy. They got some serious issues around
money.
You don't do that. You look at this
scene and you go, money equals stress.
So I
if I have money, I'm gonna have a
lot of stress. If I don't have money,
I'm gonna have a lot of stress. So
what you'll find is somebody in that situation
will either
(06:06):
collect a ton of money, really gather in,
like, be
fixated on making more and more money or
they never break through.
They never financially break through because it's the
mind operates in polarity.
That's how it operates. So we assign meaning
to circumstances
and situations. Now money was just one example,
but it could be a million different ones.
(06:26):
And you have assigned them.
Then from that
base foundational
emotional DNA
to your meaning,
then you go, well, who am who can
I be
in this environment?
And that determines a lot of things you
can't be.
So for instance, in the environment I was
growing up in, there was no room for
(06:47):
me to be
highly intelligent. There was no room for me
to be more spiritual.
There was no room for me to be,
highly creative or intuitive.
All those things had to get pushed into
the shadows. They became
disenfranchised.
They become part of who I am that
I don't have access to because I've built
(07:09):
this identity in order to survive
based on the meaning I've got.
Now if I had this identity, I'm now
gonna need
a set of beliefs and values to hold
the identity in place and my behaviors are
gonna come out of that.
So that's the five foundations of your emotional
source code. Now this is not you, Mark.
It's not me. It's humans. It's how we
(07:30):
operate. And more interestingly,
it's how we build companies.
We build an emotional DNA into a company.
I've written
many emotional source code reports for very large,
you know, Fortune 100 companies to smaller,
entrepreneurial companies. But I've also written them up
for nations.
(07:50):
I wrote one for The United States. I
wrote one for England. I even wrote one
on Vladimir Putin when he invaded the, the
Ukraine. Not that he asked me to, but
I did it. Because one of my clients
who I politically advise, strategy wise,
said, why would he do this? It doesn't
make sense. And I said, okay. I'll do
you know, I did an emotional source code
profile on him. And it was like, oh
my god. It suddenly makes steak. Makes sense.
(08:13):
I did one on Donald Trump in 2015
and said, here's why he's gonna win the
election. And people were like, shut up. Don't
say that. I'm like,
it's not a prediction. This is how the
emotional source code works.
So once you realize you have emotional source
code, you become you're self aware.
Where do you start to change? How do
you start to change beliefs?
(08:33):
So the first challenge there is in the
statement you made. You're self aware. No. You're
not.
No. You're not. If you read if you
read a book, it doesn't mean you're now
intelligent about that book. Right? Most people are
just gathering information
and most of it is being filtered by
your,
(08:54):
habenga
habengula, which is a part of the brain
that filters out things for threat. So if
you if you read something in the book
that threatens your identity,
your brain naturally dismisses it. Takes discipline to
not dis to not It says that, oh,
that's a stressful idea. Let's not have that.
So you can have this understanding,
but that's different than the application of it.
(09:17):
You can't change the belief is it unless
you
look at,
if sorry. You can't change the behavior unless
you look at the belief and you look
at the value systems. You can't change the
value systems
and and the beliefs unless you change the
identity. And you can't change the identity unless
you examine the meaning.
So when
anything happens in your life, you look for
(09:40):
what's the meaning I've assigned here?
Somebody just said to me they won a
million dollars. How did I react? I was
kind of a bit pissed off but I
smiled.
Mhmm. It looked like I was happy. That's
interesting. There's a contradiction there. What was the
meaning I gave that? You I mean, I'm
obviously, I'm making up an example. Mhmm. Okay.
So this person just presented me with this
(10:00):
idea,
and I immediately wrote it off. What's the
meaning I gave that?
Is that a valid meaning, or is that
a meaning that validates my identity?
Tell me more. What do you what
what do you mean by meaning? Is it
is it a value based meaning? What is
it what is a meaning? How do you
assign it?
(10:21):
You you don't. It it's automatic.
You assigned it in childhood.
So let me give you an example.
What is love?
Oh, wow. That's a big question. That's the
whole point.
What's love?
It's
something you feel for for other people. Right.
(10:43):
So now let's go to,
an Italian village
in 1960.
And asked the
the noni there, the grandma there, what is
love?
What does she say?
She probably says feeding my family.
(11:03):
So what's the difference?
Meaning.
So meaning is expressed, is the way we
interpret something
way back in our childhood. That meaning may
be completely incorrect.
So, like, by testing the meaning, by asking
what meaning have I given this?
Right? You can then question, is that the
meaning?
(11:25):
I'll give you an example. Are you married,
Mark?
Long time girlfriend. Okay.
Then you know what you know what that
is. Right? So
you have no doubt had the experience
where your girlfriend has looked at you in
a certain way and you went, oh, shit.
I'm in trouble. Mhmm. Alright. Unfortunately, yes. Unfortunately,
yes. I have firmly planted my foot in
(11:46):
my mouth.
And in that moment,
you have no idea why.
Two things are happening there and those things
are meaning
on both sides.
You've given that look the meaning of I'm
in trouble.
That may not be the case. Maybe she
(12:06):
had gas and she pulled her face in
a certain way because she her belly was
hurting.
You don't know, but you gave it meaning
based on how you survived in childhood.
She, on the other hand, may be making
that face for a completely different set of
meanings for her. Again, the tummy ache or
something else altogether.
You do something you think is completely innocuous
(12:29):
and maybe even kind of kind and loving.
And she thinks you're being an asshole.
So what do you do? It sounds like
you're stuck.
Ah, very good. It sounds like you're stuck.
And that's how most people get to. They're
like, well, I'm stuck. No. You're not.
Because you have to examine
where that meaning came from.
(12:51):
Once you understand where that meaning came from,
it's completely dissolvable.
So I work with
very powerful
business leaders, with entrepreneurs, with,
athletes, entertainers,
you know, a wide array of political people,
as I said,
wide array of people.
And the first thing we've got to do
is like, where does this meaning come from?
(13:15):
So give me something that has meaning to
you. Doesn't matter what it is. Tell me
something that has meaning to you. Friendships.
Okay. Good. What do friendships mean?
Friendships mean a closeness, familiarity,
support.
That that's where immediately comes to mind. Is
closeness proximity?
(13:36):
Emotional closeness. Okay. Emotional closeness. What does that
mean?
Means that on some level you care about
each other.
What does that mean?
That's right. I can I can think I'm
being care I'm sure you've had the experience
where somebody thinks they're being caring to you
and you don't feel that as caring?
So what does it mean to you?
(13:57):
Somebody's caring to you. It means they support
me. Emotionally,
yeah.
They support you.
What meaning does does that have?
What's the meaning of support?
That I don't,
just through going through life, you don't have
to go through life alone. There's people that
will emotionally support you, lift you up, bring
you back if you fall, things like that.
(14:19):
Okay. So lift you up, bring you back
if you fall.
Okay?
So so
take that a little bit deeper. What does
that mean?
You're not alone or I'm not alone.
Ah, I'm not alone.
What's the meaning of not being alone for
you?
(14:39):
I mean, the knee jerk reaction is just
having somebody else there. I mean, that's what
comes immediately to mind. Go hang out at
the mall and have somebody else there. That's
not the answer, obviously. So what does it
mean?
Having I think it would mean, but what
I mentioned,
the the the emotional support.
So so it means you have somebody there
who can give you emotional support.
(15:00):
Yeah. I think so. Right. Okay. Good.
Where was that lacking in your childhood?
You don't have to answer me, but you
do need to think about it. I don't
because I'm not gonna ask you to expose
yourself here. If you want to, we can
keep going. But if you don't want to,
that's fine. I'll try you know, it's up
to you. I had an emotionally distant father,
(15:21):
abusive father.
There you go.
So you didn't have that emotional support, so
this becomes a thing of great meaning to
you
because it's reliant upon this deficit in your
childhood.
So you highly value somebody who can be
there for you, can emotionally support you because
you didn't get it.
(15:43):
You have transposed that into your life. It's
not you, Mark. It's what we do. It's
humans.
It's what we do. Like I said, this
is neuroscientifically
based. It's psychologically based. So that's what you
do. So you price them a much higher
value
on that
than somebody else who maybe had completely supportive
parents.
(16:03):
It means more to you. What's more is
you also have a,
a higher fragility around it, which means you,
you have a hyper awareness of when you
feel like somebody's not doing that.
Right? It's like, oh, that was a bit
off. And the person's like,
it was nothing for them. But for you,
it sets off the warning lines that there's
(16:23):
a hyper vigilance, a hyper awareness
that this is not something's off here. That's
your emotional source code
Playing out in how you are doing business.
Playing out in how you are building friendships,
and associations.
All of those things are playing out. So
now you've got you've gone back to the
meaning. Here's where it came from.
(16:44):
So you go, okay. So now I'm friends
with Charlie. I thought he was my mate.
I thought he was a good buddy. I
thought he was really there for me. And
then he did this thing and it's kind
of really pissed me off and I don't
trust him so much anymore. Mhmm.
Alright. Is it real? Well, possibly.
Is it a lie? Also, possibly. Let's find
(17:04):
out.
In that moment,
when Charlie did x,
what about it reminded me of my childhood?
Well, when he said it this way, it
was kinda dismissive like my dad was.
Or when he did it this way, he
kind of had that
(17:24):
arrogance and pissosity that my father had when
he was drunk. Oh, okay.
So now what I'm looking for, I'm now
not dismissing and paying attention now.
I'm now saying,
is this a character trait of Charlie?
Or is this a bump in the road?
Because I don't know about you, but I
put my foot in my mouth a lot
in my life.
(17:45):
Right? Yeah. And if you judge me on
that moment,
I'll have nobody in my life.
Because we're all hit bumps in the road
for whatever the reasons and the circumstances are.
But if things show up consistently, you can
recognize a pattern and you go, oh, it's
a pattern. Now if you go, oh my
god, this pattern's been going on for ten
(18:06):
years with Charlie,
and I've never done anything about it.
Here's the news. You're trying to change Charlie.
You're actually continuing that relationship
because you want to heal the thing in
your childhood.
So you want Charlie to be
changed by his interaction with you because that
will tell your psyche there's nothing wrong with
(18:26):
me. Because look, I got Charlie to be
loving towards me and Charlie was just like
my dad who couldn't be loving and I
couldn't get him to be loving to me.
So I got Charlie to be loving to
me. Ah.
And here's the fascinating thing about it. You're
building fuck businesses on it.
You're building entire businesses
on your emotional source code. You're serving people.
(18:49):
You're trying to sell them things based on
your emotional source code.
Not based on the truth. Not based on
who they are. Based on
your emotional needs. Tell me more about that
based on your emotional needs. What do you
mean?
With the business? I'm glad you're intrigued.
So
(19:11):
what is it you can we do personal?
Sure. Okay. What are you selling
to the world in as your as your
business? What do you sell? One of them
is events.
Events. Okay. Yeah. You're selling events. But events
is a is an outcome.
What are you actually selling about those events?
(19:32):
Networking business relationships.
You're selling relationships.
The opportunity for relationships.
Yes.
What was the emotional need in childhood?
Relationships.
Damn. That's good. You're selling what you needed.
(19:54):
When you get that,
when an entrepreneur gets
that, their world becomes
wow.
Now I know what it is. I'm not
selling events. Who gives a shit about events?
I'm selling the opportunity for fantastic connected relationships
with people who actually give a shit about
you.
Now you've got You're not selling an event
anymore. You're selling this emotional fire. You're excited
(20:17):
about because you're going to give the world
the thing, the very thing you needed.
And when you do that, it feels so
damn good. It's not a sale. It's a
it's a piece of your soul
reconnected.
It's like, oh, yes. I'm on the path.
Because so many people are that yeah. You
say, what's your mission? What's your purpose? They
tell you something. I'm like, you know, honestly,
because I'm direct. I'm like, no, that's bullshit.
(20:39):
Mhmm. Wait. What do you mean? I read
Simon Sinek's book, Start with Y. Fantastic. It's
good book. It's a great book. And it
says, start.
Start with Y. It's not the end.
Go deeper into your emotional source code. Find
out what the emotional need was. That's what's
driving your purpose. When you get that, it's
like, okay.
Now I know what I actually have to
(21:00):
offer.
So what do I do with it? That
that makes sense now
continuing your thought that you just put out
there kind of on my behalf. Okay. Now
I know what I have to offer. I'm
offering the the opportunity
to build
relationships.
What do I do with that meaning
to keep improving and not do what you
mentioned earlier? Six months fast forward six months,
(21:22):
I revert to the old meaning. How do
I maintain that new meeting and have an
moment that's longer than just a blip in
the radar for a couple months? Who gives
a shit about moments? What you actually want
alright. I'm gonna be very, very direct here.
We all maybe you're not old enough, but
I'm certainly old enough to remember watching Oprah
every week.
(21:43):
Me and about, you know, I think it
was a 100,000,000 other people. Right?
We watched Oprah every week. And if you
watched Oprah every week, you had multiple
moments during that hour.
How did it change your life?
It didn't.
It gave you bragging rights. And what bragging
rights are is you got to tell other
people about this
(22:03):
and you got to look smart and wise
and it changed nothing.
So most of us are running around like
chickens with our head cut off looking for
the next moment.
So what? Who cares? It won't do anything.
I'm gonna be direct now. So if you're
offended by strong language,
plug your ears. You don't want a moments.
You need
(22:24):
fuck it moments.
Moments that make you go fuck it. I
am not doing that anymore.
Fuck it. That's not actually who I am.
That's not the way I wanna live. If
you don't have that level and I use
that term on purpose because if you don't
have that level of of of emotional energy,
remember it's your emotional source code. If you
don't have that level of emotional energy, you're
(22:46):
not going to change anything.
Nothing is going to change because of a
good idea.
Antonio DeMarzio, who who is a great neuroscientist,
talks about
that we like to think that we are
rational beings.
We are not. We are emotional beings who
make rational decisions
after.
(23:06):
We know we do nothing more than rationalize
our emotional decision.
We are a post rational
creature. When you understand that, you go, well,
okay. Then I don't have to justify it
to get connected to what sets my heart
and my soul on fire. Not with some
rah rah,
but with starting with
(23:27):
fuck it. I've been selling
events.
That's nonsense. No wonder I'm having frustration.
No wonder I can't get people to to
to to buy into what it is I'm
selling. I'm not selling events. Here's hey, Dov.
I'd like to talk to you. Yes. What
is it? I am in the business
of putting people together in the most profound
(23:48):
environments
where they have the greatest opportunity to build
really deep and powerful relationships.
We call them events, but this is what
they're really about. No. I'm interested as opposed
to, oh, you're just another schmuck selling events.
That's awesome.
Does that make sense? That makes perfect sense.
So it's embracing it and leaning into that
(24:08):
meaning then? Oh, you must you must lean
into it from the point of
it's not the meaning I gave it. It's
the meaning of what it is I needed
that I couldn't get.
Now people go, oh, well, I had a
wonderful chat that I'm like, give it a
rest. Then what do you mean? John Bradshaw,
one of the greatest psychologists of all time
said, ninety seven percent of people grew up
(24:30):
in dysfunctional families and the other three percent
are liars.
Now what it means is it's doesn't mean
your dad beat you every Tuesday. He might
have done, but that's not what we're talking
about. The fact of the matter is
it's not possible to be a perfect parent.
So even if you had great parents, there
(24:50):
were things you emotionally needed. You just couldn't
get. Not because they were bad people, because
maybe maybe there were half a dozen other
kids. Maybe there was no money. Maybe there,
you know, dad had to work seventy hours
a week just to make ends meet. There's
a million other reasons
that doesn't make them abusive,
But it makes them so that you miss
something emotionally.
(25:11):
And so you've got to look at what
did I emotionally need because that's actually what
I'm trying to get.
And if I lean into that,
then I'm I'm get it by giving it.
You are healed by healing. You get you
give what it is that you want. And
that's a business formula that I teach very
powerful entrepreneurs.
(25:32):
Very very powerful. One company we work with,
new CEO, he came in. I I was
and I and I was helping him with
this. And he's like, I wanna change this
company. I wanna change what it's about.
And I said, okay. Let let's really look
at that. How long are you gonna be
in the seat? Because the average in the
seat is two to five years. Because I
want ten years in the seat. I wanna
(25:52):
walk it through to profound change.
I go, then that's gotta be built on
your healing.
And he's like, what? What is that? I
never heard of this. So we talked about
this. This. He trained changed the meaning of
the company, of the organization,
and it increased
the annual
profits by a 100,000,000
in the first quarter.
(26:15):
By changing the meaning?
By changing that meaning. And because he's he
just said, we're not about x, which is
our product, which I can't mention. We're not
about x.
We're about this,
and x facilitates it.
X just facilitates it. Just like your events
facilitate it.
But what we do is we think we
(26:36):
think it's the product. We go, I gotta
focus on my events are better than Charlie's
events. Oh, now you're in competition. You're a
waste of time.
Right? You've commoditized yourself immediately. And most as
soon as soon as you commoditize yourself, you're
out of business. Might as well just pack
it up.
But what you've done there is shifted out
of commoditization
into something that is emotionally visceral,
(26:56):
not just for you, but for them. Now
to be clear,
the wonderful thing about that is
you'll put some people right off
and you better cheer for that. That's fantastic.
Because you won't be selling to people who
don't wanna buy.
Mhmm.
You're only selling to people who are like,
that's exactly what I want. You know what
(27:17):
yes is? You want of course.
I get it.
So how do you get them Is it
explaining it what from an emotional standpoint till
you have them, and I use air quotes,
get it?
Yes. It it's explaining it as I said,
thinking like, so doing the work I just
outlined
(27:38):
to find out what it is you need
and then how you can give that to
the world
via your
product,
your whatever is your x that you offer
to the world. How am I going to
meet that need in the world using this?
Now,
I will tell you that sometimes an entrepreneur
goes, I can't.
I'm in totally the wrong business.
(28:00):
I, you know, I gotta get out. Okay,
great. We gotta find someone else for you.
That does happen. I won't say it doesn't,
but mostly it doesn't have to happen.
It's
like, oh, I can see why I got
this.
So for instance,
one of the firms I work with is
a, financial organization.
(28:20):
And there are four senior partners I work
with privately and collectively.
Those are those four of my individual and
collective clients that I work with.
Not one of them has even a similar
background.
The four partners have incredibly different backgrounds.
(28:41):
But when we boil down to get to
their corporate purpose, which is what we, the
work we've been doing lately. So we did
their new individual purpose, which again is not
that why it's deeper than that, that meaning.
And then we put those together and we
go, what's the collective purpose?
And each one of them is like, well,
of course, I went into finance.
(29:02):
I came from an incredibly broke family. I
was always fearful it was gonna be any
money. The other one's like, well, of course
I got into finance.
Money was made bad.
Another one's like, well, of course I got
into finance. I grew up in
business. I mean, it doesn't like, we've all
got our own reasons for getting in. But
then the question is, well, okay. I I'm
in this.
(29:23):
So, of course, I got into it. I
understand. How does it meet that need I
want?
And that is that is entirely unique and
subjective.
But that means that each one of those
four
is selling the services of that organization
in a entirely unique way and having massive
success as opposed to having some bullshit formula.
(29:43):
Well, we do this and we're always on
that and we're about integrity. Shut up.
Here's why this company matters to me. Here's
why I'm doing this. This is, you know,
this is what we're about. That's coming from
a totally personal place. Now the person in
front of you can really connect with you
and connect with what you're offering.
(30:04):
This
has just been
amazingly
insightful with everything we I mean, we've covered
a lot of ground in a short period
of time. When it comes to emotional source
code and assigning meaning or recognizing meaning,
If you someone's listening or watching thinking, okay.
I I get it. If you're to say
if you're gonna embrace it, at least do
this one thing. At least do this one
(30:26):
thing. What would you tell people to do?
I would ask you to ask this sync
simple question,
which is, what is it that I needed
in my childhood that I could not get
or could not get enough of? So you
might go, well, I got it. But but,
yeah, maybe you just didn't get enough of
it. Right? So
(30:47):
it's again, it's not about making your parents
or their parenting wrong.
They might have been terrible parents. They might
have been marvelous.
It's not about that. It's what did you
need that you couldn't get or couldn't get
enough of? That's the number. That's step number
one.
And then asking yourself,
how can I get that need met
via my business?
(31:09):
And how can I meet that need for
others who don't even know they need it,
but they need it? Mhmm. See, most people
are walking around as you just talked about
earlier. They're unconscious.
They don't know what they need.
Right? If I just said to you, what's
the purpose of your events? What's the meaning
of your events? You probably wouldn't have got
to where you got to today.
Right? So and that's not because you're daft
(31:30):
or because you're ignorant. It's because you you
don't know what to ask. You don't know
how to get that. But now you do.
And so once you go through that process
So I do a I do a,
an analysis with people where I'll help them
at least get to this level.
You can book a private appointment with me
for, for forty five minutes to an hour
to do that.
(31:52):
All my clients who work with me longterm
have to go through a, vetting process. And
it's a it's a it's a much bigger
process, and it's considerably more expensive because we're
actually going to tear down the emotional source
code and rebuild it. But that part there,
that's the part you can do. You can
play this
video over and over again. Keep listening to
(32:12):
it and stop it and pause it and
take notes and stop. And if you feel
like you can't do it alone, sometimes you
can't, that's okay. You can reach out to
me, dav@davbaron.com.
That's my email. It's and that's my private
email. I give it out. You can reach
out to me. You can book an hour
with me, and I'll help you to get
to this place just like I just did
with Mark.
Thank you so much for this, dove. I
(32:32):
appreciate you. This has been
amazing.
You're very welcome, sir. Listen,
the point of the the point of it
is very simply this.
I believe
it's not the truth.
I believe we're here on the planet to
serve.
I'm here to serve.
And the best way for you to serve
(32:54):
is to meet your need
and to help others meet that very same
need. And that's why there is no competition.
You can have six other people lined up
next to you all put on events and
and there's no competition once you understand the
emotional source code. It evaporates.
Some of my closest friends are the people
(33:15):
who should be my competitors.
They should be. On paper, they should be.
We're all corporate consultants.
We know we're working around purpose and culture
and blah blah blah. You know, oh, you
know, it's cheese. I don't know. Why? We're
not in the same business.
It looks like it. The label on the
top is the same. The con the label
on the box is exactly the same. The
contents of the box vastly different.
(33:37):
This is your way out of competition.
This is your way to serve in the
world in a way you never even imagined.
Once you get that,
it's not only
financially very profitable,
but it's deeply, soulfully
fulfilling.
And that's what matters.
That's a beautiful way to end it. Thank
(33:58):
you again, Dov. I appreciate you.
You're very welcome, sir.
And scene.
Thank you for joining us today. I hope
you enjoyed the episode. I also hope that
you'll subscribe to the Idea Climbing podcast and
rate us on iTunes.
Visit ideaclimbing.com
to learn more about Idea Climbing and hear
(34:19):
more episodes about mentoring,
marketing, and big ideas.
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