Eben Pagan | The Inner Work of Scaling a Business - Radical Responsibility Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You know, I was a dating guru, and like I said,
I was the world's most unlikely dating guru because I
really had no sense at all. All of my intuitions
about girls and when I was a kid were wrong,
and all of you know, all my intuitions about women
when I was a young man were wrong. I was
doing everything like exactly backwards. And then I learned how
the whole thing worked. I learned how the mating game worked,

(00:21):
and the mating dance and flirting, and it was all
this very counterintuitive stuff to me. But then once I
learned it, I was able to go and teach, you know,
a whole generation of young, kind of socially awkward men
because I had been through it and I could translate
into the language of someone who wasn't confident. And so
wherever you're not confident, or wherever you feel like you

(00:41):
just haven't been able to figure things out in a
certain area, or where you don't have intuition, go to
work there, figure it out, solve it, because then all
of a sudden you can help so many other people.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Welcome to the Radical Responsibility Podcast. I'm doctor Fleet Mal
and I'm excited to guy you on a journey of
authentic transformation. In each episode, I'll bring you insights from
leading experts to explore trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology,
and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness, and life optimization. This

(01:15):
is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change,
helping you find alignment with the person you are always
meant to be. Let's get started. What if transformation isn't
just about thinking differently, but feeling differently. Science shows us

(01:35):
that true change happens when we align not just our minds,
but also the neural networks in our hearts and guts.
This heart mind connection is the key to deeper healing, resilience,
and expanded awareness. That's why I created the Heart Mind
All access, membership and community, a space designed to help
you rewire your nervous system, cultivate heart intelligence, and live

(01:58):
with greater clarity and purpose. With over one thousand hours
of transformational teachings specifically curated to meet your needs, You'll
learn from world renowned meditation teachers, neuroscientists, and experts in neuroplasticity,
all sharing powerful tools to help you shift your mindset
and heartset, regulate your emotions and unlock your full potential.

(02:23):
You'll also gain unlimited access to every summit and course
we've ever produced, a Treasure Trouble Wisdom worth over ten
thousand dollars in growing, plus live gatherings and an inspiring
global community to support your journey. If you're ready to
step into a more heart centered, connected and conscious life,
I invite you to join us. Clip the link to

(02:43):
learn more and start your journey today. Have you ever
wondered what truly sets successful entrepreneurs apart, not just in business,
but in how they live and lead. In this episode,
I sit down with Even Pagan, a brilliant mind and
deeply reflective entrepreneur whose journey from financial insecurity to multi

(03:04):
business success reveals something deeper than strategy. Even shares how
real growth happens not from chasing hacks or hustle, but
by doing the inner work, developing emotion regulation, aligning with
your calling, and serving from a place of authentic connection.
We explore how mindset shapes outcomes, why teaching is one

(03:24):
of the most powerful tools for learning, and how coaches
and so entrepreneurs can build meaningful businesses rooted in service
and clarity. Whether you're building your first offer or scaling
a thriving practice. You'll find both grounded insights and spiritual
depths in this conversation. This isn't just about growing a business,
It's about becoming the kind of human being who can

(03:46):
hold that growth with wisdom, presence, and purpose. My name
is doctor Fleet Maull, your co host for the session,
and I'm really thrilled to be here today with Evan Pagan. Welcome, Evan,
Hey Fleet. Great to be here, though I know it's
really unfair to ask you to encapsulate it in just
a couple of minutes, but I would like to touch
in on your origin story a little bit eman as

(04:07):
an entrepreneur, a teacher and an entrepreneur, How did you
fumble into that or make the leap into that? I
remember when I first tuned into you, you would build
quite a business just with you and a whiteboard and
teaching from that whiteboard I think, in a basement studio
and teaching great content. So how did this arise?

Speaker 1 (04:25):
Well, I mean it really all started when I was broke,
which was for about the first twenty five years of
my life, and I had these very cool hippie parents
who moved out to the backwoods of Oregon to raise me.
They wanted me to kind of grow up in the country,
and so I grew up you know, this kind of farm,
this very off the grid kind of lifestyle, and I

(04:45):
mean kind of culturally. I had no influences that had
figured out business, money, success, entrepreneurship. I was a long
haired rock and roll guitar player, and I got up
into my early twenties and you know, I was making
seventy five dollars a week as a guitar play and
ten dollars an hour in my manual labor job, and
I just said, I want to have nicer things. You know,

(05:05):
I'm tired of driving two and three hundred dollar cars.
And so I got a real estate license, assuming like, okay, well,
people that made a lot of money they seem to
have either made the money in real estate or invested
it in real estate. And I was kind of a
miserable failure there because I was a long haired kid
trying to sell real estate with a two door Camaro.
And then that led me to learn, well, to have

(05:26):
a business, you need to get clients, and so I
discovered sales and marketing, and finally, after several years. I
put all the pieces together and I learned how to
get clients. That was really the game changer was realizing
that business. You know, you don't just hang out your
shingle and then all of a sudden, you know, you
make millions of dollars, but you actually have to learn
the skill of how to create value for people, how

(05:47):
to advertise, how to market, how to get clients. And then,
as you mentioned there, I wrote a book of dating
advice in the early two thousands and I put that online.
My good friend Dean Jackson showed me what he was
doing there and kind of mentored me a little bit
and done. It took off, and I built it into
a really successful online company. But I'm so curious. I
have to learn everything about everything, And so I learned
about business and growth and scaling and hiring teams and

(06:10):
started teaching that. And yeah, I've just taught a bunch
of different topics. Now launched several startups, have an AI
startup called daily dot ai that now delivers positive daily
news to over six million people. I'm just interested in
a lot of stuff. Fleet I really love being an
entrepreneur and I love helping other people to become more
independent and make value for other people.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
It's fascinating and fabulous and inspiring. And I got to
ask you, though, were you in relationship with Lala at
the time that you started putting out your dating advice.
Was that before Oh.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
No, no, no, no no. I met Annie. Let's see about
to think this one through, but probably about eight or
nine years after I was, you know, a dating guru
kind of thing. So I went through that whole phase
of my life that was kind of over, and you know,
I was onto a couple of new things, and then
I met her and she of course loved Coach, and.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
Then we fell in love and yeah, yeah, it kind
came full circle there. So were you a dating expert
when you put that out there?

Speaker 1 (07:07):
Well, I mean I had become I mean, for a
few minutes there, I was the number one dating guru
in the world, which is very strange. I like to
say I'm the world's most unlikely dating guru because I had,
you know, no girlfriends when I was a kid. I
had no idea how this all worked, and I had
to kind of go, you know, learn it step by step.
But I can say that possibly because I mean, you met,

(07:27):
you know, my wife Annie, She's amazing, and I guess
it worked.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
Yeah, absolutely, obviously it worked. Then, Annie is absolutely amazing.
We're really happy to have recently interviewed for our Relationships Summit,
so very excited that. You know, entrepreneurs inevitably deal with
fear and confidence issues and it's pretty easy to get
stuck and overwhelmed and all kinds of things. And oh no,
you emphasized the importance of really looking at our fears,

(07:52):
facing our fears to build resilience. Also being able to
have multiple perspectives, which I guess is kind of a
human psychological flexile ability. And being able to have multiple
perspectives that fairly advanced human trait. And so I wonder
if you could talk about that a little bit.

Speaker 1 (08:06):
On the road to entrepreneurship, well, being an entrepreneur is
such a cool adventure because you get to learn so much,
you get to create value for other people, and in
a lot of ways, it's kind of this ultimate personal
development accelerator because wherever you haven't worked through your own stuff,
that's where you get blocked as an entrepreneur. You know,

(08:28):
when I got started, I was terrified of calling people
or reaching out to people or talking to people. In fact,
this is before I learned about dating, which it turned
out that was a kind of root cause there as well,
and so therefore I wasn't able to get any clients,
and I had to learn to overcome this kind of
inner challenge and this fear that I had. But when

(08:50):
I learned to it made such a massive difference because
I learned, oh, people aren't that scary. And in fact,
most of the time, almost all the time, if you
reach out to people and you know you have a
good kind of high value offer that you're making and
you're doing it in a high integrity way, most of
the time, people are really actually happy to hear from you.

(09:11):
And if you do you know, if you do it correctly,
not only are they happy to hear from you, but
they're really glad you showed up in their life so
that they can get involved with your business.

Speaker 2 (09:20):
Right.

Speaker 1 (09:20):
But if you believe that people are scary and that
they're going to reject you, and you're afraid of them,
then they're going to show up that way because you're
not going to be prepared. You're going to be showing
up expecting people to not want to hear from you,
So you're going to behaving like a person who is
feeling like they're annoying a part, you know. I mean
it's just it's all a big self fulfilling prophecy in
a lot of ways. And so so yeah, I mean

(09:42):
we have to learn to overcome our fears if we
want to succeed. And I think entrepreneurship is such a
great path. Business is such a great path to learn
this because it has the dual payoff of being able
to take your natural your gifts, your intelligence, your genius,
and then go use that to create a lot of
value for other people, so you can make an impact,

(10:03):
You can help real people in their lives, and then
you can have a more scalable income. You know, it
has a kind of endless upside potential. And so for
all of these reasons, I think it's a very important
phase of life to go through.

Speaker 2 (10:17):
And I think you've described yourself as an introvert, so
to being able to step out from that and become
a public teacher and so forth. I've actually heard from
quite a few successful entrepreneurs who teach and you know,
teach frameworks and models and so forth, who have all
said they start off as an introvert, so there seems
to be something there about overcoming some of our native

(10:37):
challenges that allows us to succeed.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
That's the interesting thing. I mean, as you you know,
if you get into psychology, if you get into you know,
Carl Jung's work and so forth, you start realizing, okay,
life is set up such that you do something for
several decades, and then you get to this kind of
middle phase of your life and you start changing and
a whole different dimension of your personality comes out. So

(11:03):
if you were, you know, kind of a more stoic
person and more closed off emotionally, and maybe more kind
of pragmatic and rational, you get to the middle of
your life and all of a sudden, you start feeling
all these feelings and you start caring about people and
wanting to express yourself and wanting to make you know,
and wanting to contribute. Or if you start off your
life in the first several decades, you're more of an

(11:23):
emotional person, much more sensitive, maybe very empathic, you like
connecting with people. You get to the middle of your
life and then a whole other side of you comes
out and then says, hey, you know what I've done
enough supporting of other people and living for other people.
It's time for me to express myself and live for myself.
And entrepreneurship allows you, in my experience, to explore these

(11:45):
different dimensions of your personality. And if you look at
your fears, your weaknesses, the places where maybe you feel
like you don't have as much confidence, if you look
at those as your biggest opportunities to then go and develop.
When you do, you learn to overcome them. All of
a sudden, Now you're one of the few people that
actually faced their fears and found a path. You went

(12:08):
on the hero's journey. So this becomes this massive asset
that you can come back. So for example, you know,
I was a dating guru, and like I said, I
was the world's most unlikely dating guru because I really
had no sense at all. All of my intuitions about
girls and when I was a kid were wrong, and
all of you know, all my intuitions about women when
I was a young man were wrong. I was doing

(12:29):
everything like exactly backwards. And then I learned how the
whole thing worked. I learned how the mating game worked,
and the mating dance and flirting, and it was all
this very counterintuitive stuff to me. But then once I
learned it, I was able to go and teach, you know,
a whole generation of young, kind of socially awkward men
because I had been through it and I could translate

(12:50):
into the language of someone who wasn't confident. And so
wherever you're not confident, or wherever you feel like you
just haven't been able to figure things out a certain area,
or where you don't have intuition, go to work there,
figure it out, solve it, because then all of a
sudden you can help so many other people. Yeah, I
think you made a really important point there. You had

(13:11):
been through it, right, so you're teaching what you learned.
You didn't you weren't just naturally great at dating, but
you had actually gone through the struggle and learned it
and overcome that, and then you're able to teach it.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
So that's I think that's really key. So today we're
focused on the entrepreneurial mindset, which seems so foundational our mindset,
and in some way we could even talk about the
heart set a little bit sometimes, But what do you
feel is like the most critical shift in mindset that
an entrepreneur needs to make to be successful, and then
that may evolve. There may be more shifts coming along

(13:42):
as we develop our business and things change or we
scale and so forth.

Speaker 1 (13:46):
Yeah. Well, I think the key mindset to have, the
thing that really separates entrepreneurs from most other people is
that entrepreneurs look around reality and everywhere they see gaps, problems, frustrations, inefficiency,
they see opportunity. Right, So, entrepreneurs look through the world
and instead of being frustrated and just like being saying,

(14:09):
oh man, it's you know, it's too hard to get
my car fixed, or oh you know, this particular service
is wasting my time, or I can't find a good
handyman or whatever, they say. You know it's hard for
me to find a handyman. That's probably a good business opportunity.
I should start a business, and I should go and
get a bunch of really great handyman and then I

(14:29):
can be the one to call and then I can
send out a handyman. They kind of you know, they
turn lemons into lemonade. They always see that other way
of looking at things. I'm thinking right now of man
that I met several years ago who sold his company,
I think for seven hundred million dollars and I was
talking to him, and he worked at YouTube and they
were getting lots of calls at YouTube for running a

(14:50):
certain kind of ads before their videos, and YouTube was
growing so fast they weren't interested. They just didn't have
time to do it or pay attention to it. And
he said, well, I'll do it. So he left and
he went and started a company, built it and I
think they sold it. I think it was seven hundred
million they sold it for. And so that's an entrepreneur
is someone who's looking for all those places where people
want things or they need them, or they have frustrations

(15:13):
and they're not getting them solved, and they go, hey,
this is a place to create value. And there's an
unlimited kind of landscape of those opportunities in life. The challenge, though,
is that not all of them work, and you have
to solve a bunch of different puzzles in order to
turn one of these opportunities or challenges or frustrations or

(15:35):
places where value could be created to turn it into
a product, a service, a business, something that's actually a
value delivering machine that throws off money and profit. So
it's not like you just go, oh, I've got a
handyman business idea, and then the next day you know
you're making a million dollars. You actually have to go
solve a bunch of sequential problems, like, you know, how

(15:58):
am I going to advertise, who are the hand How
am I going to make sure that the you know,
the quality of the service is good. How am I
going to get referrals? How am I going to make
sure I make a profit? But each of the puzzles
to me anyway, while they're challenging, each of them, is
it's like a little Rubik's cube that allows you to
learn a new set of skills and then learn more
about how the world works, and how relationships work, and

(16:20):
how money works and so forth. So yeah, I think
the key mindset is entrepreneurs look through the world and
they see those gaps, They see those places where you know,
there's a lack of something that everybody wants, or where
there's a frustration or a problem, and they say, there
I could create a product or service that could help people.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
That's such an important distinction. Some people say entrepreneurs are
born and some maybe some of us are kind of
born with entrepreneurial instincts or that pelection. But people can
train themselves to be entrepreneurs as well. And kind of
what you were describing there is I think a majority
of human beings kind of live in a state of reactivity.
And also that reactivity becomes habitual, it comes out of
our childhood. And you're talking about entrepreneur lives more in

(17:02):
a state of curiosity instead of a state of reactivity,
and that implies they have some skills of self regulation.
And now you not only teach business and marketing, but
you teach personal development. I wonder if you could just
point to the importance of having some way to regulate
ourselves so that we can be in a more proactive,
curious stamps in life instead of just being back in

(17:22):
this reactivity all the time. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (17:25):
Yeah, So my favorite mental model, I'm a collector of
mental models, and I love Charlie Munger's idea of the
lattice work, where you need one hundred mental models from
diverse areas of life that you use in your mind
to understand situations, to be productive, to communicate, to make decisions,
and you know, plan vision and so forth, and then
you become very creative. Okay, so my favorite mental model

(17:48):
is called the triune brain. And it's a model that
comes from doctor Paul McClain, who was a neuroscientist, and
he studied comparative brain anatomy and he noticed that we humans,
we have kind of these brain structures in common with reptiles,
with mammals, and then kind of with higher primates with apes.
And so some people don't like this model, but it's

(18:11):
so useful to me because I use it almost like
a metaphor that we have a part of our brain
that is the ancient reptilian part of the brain, that's
really the physical brain, and it runs the autonomic nervous system,
and it keeps us alive and it keeps us reproducing. Right,
it's the fight or flight brain, and it's the survival
and sex brain, but it runs the physical world. And

(18:31):
then we have another brain that emerged beyond that, right,
that's the mammalian brain, and that's the emotional social brain,
and that allows us to have these emotional feelings and
have attachment bonds and have these complex relationships with family
and tribe and community. And then we have the thinking
part of the brain, which is the human part of
the brain, which is the dense kind of cortex, and

(18:53):
particularly the prefrontal cortex, very dense, nerve packed part of
the brain that allows us to do this abstract thought
or we can use symbols and language and so forth. Okay,
So I'm not trying to talk about, you know, some
brain anatomy class here, but what I am trying to
say is that we basically have three brains in one.
We have a physical brain okay, that runs the physical
that deals with the physical world. We have an emotional

(19:16):
social brain that deals with relationships and feelings. And then
we have a mental brain that deals with abstract thought, calculation, planning, language,
and so forth. So you're talking about self regulation, and
I think that it's because self regulation is a big
part of the zeitgeist right now. It's a big part
of the conversation. And I think most people think of

(19:36):
this as an emotional phenomena, right. Self regulation is emotional,
and it is our emotional state is very important. But
I think that it's key to really see that physical regulation,
emotional regulation, and mental regulation that we need to practice
in all three dimensions. Okay, And if you just want

(19:56):
to have a real wake up call in life, okay,
try three different things. Okay. Number one, try fasting Okay,
if you've never fasted, just try fasting one night, go
to sleep the next day. When you wake up, don't
eat any food the whole time you're awake. Go to
sleep again, and then wake up whatever thirty six hours
later and eat. Then just watch your emotions and your

(20:18):
mind through that experience, and just watch what it does
to do that.

Speaker 2 (20:22):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (20:22):
Another one, if you really want to wake up, is
try meditation. You know, just sit down and just try
for twenty minutes to still your mind. If you've never meditated,
and again, you'll realize immediately how out of control your
mind is. And another one could be next time you're
with your romantic partner or talking to your mom or
your brother, your sister and they do the thing that

(20:43):
normally triggers you to get upset, just stay very cool
and calm and don't let it bother you at all emotionally.
And what you'll see if you practice these things is
you'll see that you're really running on autopilot. That we're
being bounced around in life like a pinball and a pinball,
and we don't realize it. We don't really notice this.

(21:03):
And so when we're talking about self regulation, what we're
talking about is living more consciously, living intentionally and directing ourselves.
And so we can go down any of these rabbit
holes that you want fleet But self regulation is very important,
but we have to learn the practices and the methods
and the techniques to do it physically with our bodies
and in our physical world, with our emotions and our relationships,

(21:25):
and also with our thoughts and our communication.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
Yeah. Absolutely, And if I had to say, we teach
one thing at Hardmind Institute self regulation. We also teach
coregulation and other things. But I think it just self
foundational to being a successful human being, a conscious, successful
human being, whatever our endeavors are. For entrepreneurs that face
all the anxieties and the overwhelming the changes and the
UNCERTAINTC and so forth, it just seems so critical. It
seems like trying to be an entrepreneur without self regulation

(21:50):
skills is like walking through a mindfield blindholder or something.

Speaker 1 (21:53):
It's just very well said.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
So you know, we're also social beings, and we're really
influenced by the people we have with and emulate and
the mentors we have or don't have, and so forth.
And so I know you've talken about the transformative power
of choosing the right social influences, whether it's a human
being in general, but as an entrepreneur specifically. So I
wonder if you could talk about that a bit.

Speaker 1 (22:15):
Yeah, you know, somehow, when I was late teenage years,
maybe I got a copy of Think and Grow Rich,
which by now most people have ever read, and I,
you know, don't know, I don't remember how it showed
up in my life. Maybe found it a good will
store or something. And in there, Napoleon Hill says, no
great power or success as possible without the mastermind, right,
And the mastermind is a group of people that comes

(22:37):
together right with the conscious, intentional kind of focus on
the success of the individual members. So I read that
and maybe I played with it a little bit, but
I didn't really understand it. I didn't really get it, okay.
And then a few years later I got a copy
of Brian Tracy's Psychology of Achievement. And at this point,

(22:58):
this is maybe I was maybe twenty two or twenty five,
and I had been listening to Tony Robbins and reading
some Wayne Dyer and Dennis Waiteley and kind of you know,
going through the self help gurus. Back then and then
I found Psychology of Achievement and what an amazing program
that was, like it had the best of all the others,
plus you know, some other ideas. And in there he
talked about the psychological research around what's called the reference group,

(23:22):
and he talked about how your reference group is essentially
what shapes you, and that even if you're taken out
of your reference group and you go when you learn
a new set of behaviors, a new way of thinking,
a new way of feeling, that if you get dropped
back into your reference group, you just revert, you go
right back to who you were, because it has so
much power. And then I went on and later, you know,
learned about Robin Dunbar and this whole idea that if

(23:43):
you take the five people closest to you and you
average them out, that's you know who you are and
your self esteem. So this just became this recurrent theme
that I started seeing through life, and at some point
I was like, oh, maybe I should start doing something
with this and actually getting masterminds together and kind of
seeing how this works. And that's when you know the
game changed, because if you want to make a change

(24:04):
in your life, if you actually want to transform yourself
physically emotionally in business, you can read books, you can
sit at home messing around with it and so forth,
but nothing has the power of going and finding a
community of practice where there are real, actual people doing
the thing and you can see it and they're all

(24:24):
operating in a culture. It just reformats and reprograms your
whole system. And so yes, if you want to make change,
add social influences who have already achieved the thing that
you want to achieve. So it's just totally normal. And
if you really want to accelerate it, get a group
of them together, or join a mastermind or a community
of people that practice this way, and it'll have like

(24:46):
ten or one hundred times the impact of sitting at
home and trying to do it yourself. And again because
it normalizes it. You know, if you want to become
a millionaire, start a mastermind that's got eight or ten
millionaires in it and just start meeting up with them
and talking to them, and then you just realize, oh,
it's normal for these people to all be millionaires. It's

(25:08):
normal for them to have a business. Or you know,
when you show up and you're like, oh, man, i
had a problem, one of my customers asked for a
refund today, or one of my employees didn't show up
on time, or you know, and you're feeling like, oh,
why me? And then you go meet up with your
mastermind group of people who are already a level or
two beyond you, and they say, oh, yeah, yeah, you know,
that's normal, that's natural, happens to us all the time.

(25:30):
Here's what you do about that. Again, it just normalizes everything.
It makes everything totally natural so that you can just
kind of keep going. And so, yes, absolutely and do this.
It's a big deal.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
I love you use the term community practice. I'm very
familiar with that term from the work we do in
the public safety feel of bringing skill sets and mindfluance
based skills and there we can find it as a
group of professionals coming together to and hance their professional
skill sets together and just the idea of practice altogether
to realize and again this comes back to your personal development.
We're always practicing something. A question is what we're practicing.

(26:00):
But when we get in the mindset of practicing the
behaviors and skills that will lead to being a successful.

Speaker 1 (26:07):
Entrepreneur, Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (26:09):
So one of the ways that you stepped into further
levels of success was beginning to teach what you learned, right,
So you teach data, you learned how to do the
dating thing, you started teaching that, and you learned other
things you started teaching that. I have to keep giving
a shout out to. I don't know if it's, of
course you recommend anymore because it's the course you did
a long time ago, but you're waking up productive. For

(26:30):
me was a real game changer. So I recommend people
find out about that course. But could you talk about
the role of teaching in terms of developing yourself as
an entrepreneur.

Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah, this is like the coolest self development and success
hack that I think I've ever discovered, which is, if
you teach something, you not only learn it, but you
also learned it at a higher level. So, because what
you're doing when you're teaching something is you're thinking strategically
about the knowledge, and you're also thinking from the perspective

(27:03):
of the other person and imagining how they're hearing it.
And so I don't remember right now where I stumbled
upon this idea or how this worked, but at some
point I realized, oh, everything that I learned that's important.
As soon as possible, I should start teaching it. And
it just became a you know, a way of being,
a way of living. If I really want to learn something,

(27:24):
start teaching it. Another thing is that if you learn
things expecting that you're going to teach it, you learn
it in a different way too. It kind of encodes
itself into your neurology of your brain in a different way.
It's kind of like when you're in school and you're
you know, you're doing a reading of a textbook or
a story. If you're reading it to just read it

(27:48):
and you're like, okay, well, I'm just going to read this.
It's one level. But if you're reading it and then
you know that at the end of that hour, you're
going to be tested on the knowledge you read in
a different way, you think about it differently. Or if
you are reading it because you know you're going to
write a report, your brain is literally looking at the
knowledge with a different kind of perspectable lens, and you're

(28:09):
taking notes and you're rereading things, you're making sure that
you understand. And so if you kind of shift to
this mindset of I'm going to you know, I'm going
to learn a lot of really valuable things, and then
I'm going to make sure I teach every single thing
that I learned that's valuable. Changes how you approach learning,
It changes what you learn, It changes how you take notes,

(28:32):
how you think about things I have. I mean, at
this point, it's got to be hundreds of note files
with different sets of ideas and different topics. Dozens and
dozens of them are courses and programs and books and
things that I would like to do in the future
at some point. So I'm just collecting and I put links,

(28:54):
and I put insight, and I try to organize my
knowledge so that when the time comes to go and
teach on that topic, that it'll all be there. And
then if I'm going to create a course or do
a teaching session on that topic, I can open it
up and I can you know, kind of review and
so forth. But as a practice, just teaching every important
thing that you learn as soon as possible, call someone up,

(29:17):
go online, do a podcast, write a newsletter, restate an
important thing that you learn, and then make sure you're
learning about topics where you could teach on them or
where you could create a little video or do a
little course against just such a cool hack for learning
and making value.

Speaker 2 (29:35):
And I assume you didn't start off as a natural teacher, right,
You probably spent a lot of time looking into a camera, teaching,
practicing doing things. But over the time, I mean, I
think you're an amazing teacher today, But is that something
you incrementally learned over time?

Speaker 1 (29:51):
Yeah, if you really want to see, go see if
you can find a copy of you know, one of
the first videos I made when I first started teaching,
do wr dating. What I would do is I'd go
up and I had these PowerPoint presentations where I'd put
up a slide that would have like fifteen bullets that
were tiny, and I'd just read all the bullets and
then I would turn and I'd make a couple of comments,

(30:12):
and then I'd go to the next line and I'd
read all the bullets and you know, I just, yeah,
it wasn't there, But I kept going, And after doing
it for a while, I realized, oh, I need to
learn how to do this. I need to learn how
to be comfortable if I'm teaching things. And so I
went and started studying it, and I read books about teaching,
and I learned more about it, and then at some

(30:33):
point I just said, I am not comfortable when I'm
standing on a stage. I get nervous. I don't feel
natural there. So I need to figure that out. And
so I just started teaching and speaking at anything I could.
If anybody asked me, I'd go, I'd fly on my
own dime to go teach. I would take up I
said yes to every offer to do an interview or

(30:53):
a program, and I did a lot of my own courses,
and I just said, I'm going to do this until
I can just walk onto a stage or go into
an interview anywhere and be comfortable. So I just practiced
that and until I did, and then one day I
was like, okay, I feel pretty good about it. I
still get a little bit nervous before talks and teaching
and things, but I generally am okay now in any environment.

(31:14):
And you know, toast Masters is really good. I never
did toast Masters, but I did a networking group that
was similar, where you go in the morning, you know,
and you have breakfast and then everyone stands up and
gives like a little two minute you know, kind of
pitch or a thing, and you just practice, you know,
you just practice, So things like that can be really
helpful as well.

Speaker 2 (31:33):
It's all practice. I know you've worked with Tony Robbins.
His story always stuck with me that when he wanted
to develop himself as a great speaker, you know, most
people might get a gig a month, a gig a week.
So over five years, how many he went out and
sign up for any speaking He was speaking three four
times a day at the garden club whoever would listen
to him, and so he was getting like, you know,

(31:55):
one hundred x the opportunities most people get, and developed
themselves as a speaker so much more quickly.

Speaker 1 (32:00):
Like that, so most people can relate to typing. You know,
most people have learned how to touch type, and so
I used to hunt and peck, okay for a long time.
In fact, I would sit there and look at my
fingers and you know, type with three fingers and whatever.
Until I was in my late twenties and I needed
to get a date and one of my friends showed
me how he was doing online dating, and that was
the motivation. I needed to actually learn to touch type

(32:22):
because I couldn't type fast enough to chat. And so
I went and got a little book on you know,
had a touch type and I was like okay, f
r F, and you know all that kind of stuff.
But the point I'm making is that if you've learned
a touch type, something happens where after you do it
for maybe a couple few months, all of a sudden,
you stop thinking about the letters, and now you can

(32:46):
just take your thoughts and you can translate them directly
into the words, right into the keys, and then like
it unlocks a whole new level of productivity.

Speaker 2 (32:57):
Right.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
So the typing, what you're trying to do is you're
trying to automate it, or create what's called an automaticity.
With public speaking, it's the same kind of thing teaching
public speaking. You want to learn it and practice it
as much as you can so that it becomes like
the touch typing, so that you can just now communicate
what you're trying to communicate. You don't have to think

(33:18):
about it anymore. Another metaphor would be like driving. I
like to use this one sometimes. You remember when you
first got your first driving lesson where you sat down
and you learned, Okay, push down the accelerator pedal, Okay,
that goes forward. Okay, now turn the wheel Okay, now
you have to push down the accelerator pedal and turn
the wheel to navigate. Oh, you want to stop, you
have to take your foot off the gas and put

(33:40):
it on the brake, and you have to do all
these things, and your cars jerking around, and you're feeling
awkward and you're getting scared because it's all unnatural. But
you practice for a few months and then all of
a sudden, you don't think anymore about putting your foot
on the gas or putting your foot on the brake.
It's all automatic. You don't think about which way you
turn the wheel, and then you can go drive some

(34:00):
And that's the key is you're not learning how to
put your foot on the accelerator pedals so that you
can accelerate. You're doing it so that it can become
one of the skills that you have, one of the
automatic kind of elements of being able to go somewhere.
And that is really key with public speaking, because again,
once you learn how to do it, once it becomes natural,
once it becomes something that's kind of integrated. Well, now

(34:21):
you can take your message and get it out to
lots of people, and that's where most people are stopped.

Speaker 2 (34:26):
So another thing you emphasize is adding ten x the
value that we're going to receive. I have a question
about that. You know, I certainly believe add value, add value,
add value, and as a principle of reciprocity, and a
lot of teachers of entrepreneurship and especially online teaching coaching
all the kind of ways we put ourselves out there
and teach and create value that way. And there are

(34:46):
some others that say, no, don't forget, you got to sell,
and they they say some people spend too much time
teaching and not of time selling. So it seems to
be some kind of balance in there. And I'm sure
it's not all black and white, but there's some kind
of balance in there of really wanting that value for sure,
having that mindset by adding value, but then also the
ways in which we create the desire or the need

(35:09):
for somebody to then you know, engage with our products
for more value.

Speaker 1 (35:13):
Yeah. Well, let's talk for a moment about what value
is what we're even talking about here. Okay, So an
exercise that I recommend when I'm teaching this stuff is
to take a post it note, So for everyone listening,
if you've got to post it. Note that's set, it's
around okay, Just grab one, okay, and then on it
write the question what is value? Put a question mark
after it, and then stick it up on your computer monitor,

(35:35):
put it up on your bulletin boarder somewhere where you'll
see it a few times a day, and for the
next month or so, every day just consider, ask yourself
a few times a day what is value? What actually
is it? And how does it work? And how do
we experience it? And why are some things valuable in
some things not? But most importantly, what's valuable to your
ideal client? Okay, to what I call your avatar of

(35:57):
your client. And in fact, if you want to talk
business and entrepreneurship, we should talk avatars at some point, Fleet,
so you might want to bring that in here. But
the point is, imagine that you are an ideal client,
and then go talk to a bunch of ideal clients
and find out what value is to them, what does
it actually mean, and how do they experience it? And

(36:19):
where do they have challenges and where do they have
opportunities and where do they have needs that you could
help fill. Because the problem is a lot of people
are teaching and teaching, and they're trying to give away
and they're trying to serve and they're trying to be helpful,
but they're missing because they're not connecting with their ideal client.

(36:39):
They're saying a bunch of stuff that's I don't want
to use the term narcissistic, because that's not it, but
it's kind of because it's they're talking about what they want,
and they're talking about what they would think is valuable,
but they're not really tuned into their ideal client. And
so when we're talking about creating ten times the value here,
what we're first talking about is asking what is valuable

(37:03):
to you? Okay? In other words, what are your big
fears and frustrations and challenges, and what are your wants
and your desires and your aspirations and your visions. I mean,
most people that have you been married to someone for
twenty or thirty or forty years, have never sat down
with the other person and said, okay, honey, let me
ask you something, all right, what is love to you?
What is it right? What is the thing that I

(37:25):
do that makes you feel the most loved? What's the
thing I could do that would make you feel the
most loved and then if you know, the person said, oh,
you know, well, thank you for asking. I would really
love it if you'd, you know, look me in the
eyes and give me a hug and tell me that
you loved me. They don't then say okay, well let
me try it. Let me see how do you want
the hug. Do you want it this way? How do
you want the eye contact? What's my voice tone? Right?

(37:49):
Because even if they say, oh, look me in the
eyes and give me a hug, they will then look
the person in the eyes, say it and give them
a hug in a way that doesn't communicate that they
love them because the other person was thinking a different
kind of hug and a different kind of voice. Town
they don't actually get the specs of what will help
their own romantic partner to feel loved, and they don't
go back and forth, and they don't ask the question, well,

(38:10):
what's the thing that I do that makes you feel
the most unloved or not considered or the thing that
annoys you the most? Show me that thing and then
let's see if that, you know, we can change that.
And so if we're not doing it with our romantic
partners and with our children, and you know with our friends,
this means we're probably not doing it with our clients.
But holy cow, when you start going through the world

(38:32):
and actually just getting the specs and asking people what
is value to you? What do you need? Where's your frustration,
where's your problem, where's your challenge, and you really pay
a lot of attention. I mean, this is the great
companies out there. Their customer focused. And that's what this
means is they're just maniacally focused on taking great care
of their clients and helping them out. So ten x.

(38:54):
The value starts with going and figuring out what value
means to the client and then delivering lots of that.
And then the second part of what you're talking about here,
and I know I'm getting off on a rant here,
but the second part then is then how do you
lead that into getting a sale? Because if you just
give everything away, you know, if you opened up a
you know, an ice cream shop and you just put
a big sign that said free ice cream forever, it's

(39:16):
going to be hard to turn that into a business.
At some point, you know, you can't give it all
away but make it up in volume. Right, That's a
way of an accelerated way to go broke. And so
you have to find that balance of having someone stand
outside and say free ice cream samples and then what's
the right mix of the samples so that someone says, Wow,
this is great ice cream. And then the person is

(39:39):
you know, trained to say, go walk in right there,
here's a cupeon and here's one for your friend, you know,
and tell them I sent you and you're going to
get a special extra thing. And then to lead that,
have that be an on ramp so that it leads
to a sale, and then follow up so that you
turn that customer into a lifetime client.

Speaker 2 (39:56):
So you're really talking about really tuning in and learning
how to be in relationship and meets the needs right
ideal client. And you reference this idea of Avatar before.
So I'd like to frame this and another thing I
want to make sure we have time for you to
talk about. I would imagine there's quite a few coaches
are aspiring coaches in our audience. Maybe they already have
a coaching practice or a solopreneur they'd like to build

(40:18):
that practice, they'd like to be able to charge more,
or maybe they'd like to develop a coaching business. And
train other coaches, or maybe there's still someone who just
the idea of being a life coach or a business
coach or executives really appeals to them. They want to
step into that. So figuring out who their ideal client is,
figuring out that avatar is going to be really critical
to their success. So I wonder if you could talk

(40:39):
about that maybe in the context of that profession, because
I know you train coaches and you train people coaches
how to build a business.

Speaker 1 (40:47):
Yes, well, let's talk for a moment about what coach is,
what a coach means, what it means to be a coach.
So coaching is a sports metaphor. Okay, so it comes
basically out of being a sports coach. And this is
different from a therapist. Now a lot of people don't
realize this. A lot of people who are really empathic,
caring people are drawn to coaching, but they come in

(41:08):
kind of with this therapist mindset, like I'm going to
help all of these people. I'm going to support them emotionally.
I'm going to help them to get up the courage
to be able to do things in life. And sometimes
some of this is, you know, is part of coaching.
But coaching comes out of sports and it's about performance,
and coaching is about looking back into your past and saying,

(41:28):
how are you broken? Coaching is about looking forward into
your future and saying, what do you want to achieve?
What do you want to create? And then let's go
to work right now into turning you into a high performance, creative,
productive human being. Okay, so that's one piece. In terms
of being a coach, one of my definitions of coaching
is essentially that a coach is someone who supports people

(41:48):
through change. So most coaches who are successful, if you're
talking six figure, seven figure coaches, the bread and butter
for these coaches is three to six month coaching packages, okay,
where you earn thousands to tens of thousands of dollars
from each client for a coaching package. And what you
find the successful coaches, they're usually working with people who

(42:11):
have come into a challenge or a change or some
transition in their life. They woke up one day and
they were forty pounds overweight and their doctor said, your
cholesterol's high and you need to make a change, and
they're like, oh my god, how did I get here?
And then they go on a quest to lose those
forty pounds and that might take six or twelve months,
and then that's what they work with a coach on.
Or they wake up one day and they're single and

(42:33):
lonely and they're in their late thirties and they want
to start a family, and they're like, I need to
do something about this, and so they hire a coach
and they work with a coach to help them find
a partner and have a successful relationship. Where they wake
up one day and they're fired from their job and
they need to go find a new one, or they
want to launch a business or whatever. But coaching is
based on people reaching a stage in their life where
they want to make a transition, they want to make

(42:54):
a change, or they run into a challenge and so forth.
So when you get this, when you start to understand
that coaching is about supporting people through changes and helping
them achieve big visions in their life, well then you realize, oh,
I need to go find the best clients for me.
I need to find those clients that are like an
exact perfect match for my kind of intelligence, my experience,

(43:18):
my style right, my unique way of interacting with people,
and I think the best way to do this is
to just get out there and call everybody you know
from your personal network, professional network, anyone who you think
might be like a good client, and just call them
up and say, I'm a coach now, okay, or I'm
starting to be a coach, and you're the kind of

(43:39):
person that I would love to work with as a client.
And maybe it's a friend or someone you know from
the past who you wouldn't actually want them to be
a client, but what you're saying is you're the kind
of person who I would love to have as a client,
and so I just want to interview you. What are
the challenges you're dealing with in your life, what are
you trying to accomplish? And what you want to do
is you want to interview a bunch of people and

(44:00):
build a psychological profile, find all the common denominators that
kind of make these people unique for being good clients
for you. And when you put all of these traits together,
all these unique common denominators, and you create an image
of that ideal client, I call that an avatar, okay.
And most people don't realize this. It's really interesting. Fleet

(44:22):
most people have heard the term avatar or customer avatar.
Most people don't know that I am the one that
gave that name to it. I started teaching this in
my Altitude program in two thousand and seven and now
it's literally become the name through the whole industry, which
is very cool. And so the reason you create your
avatar though, Okay, so most people kind of get, okay,
I need to create an avatar. It's an ideal client.

(44:45):
But the reason most people don't get the reason and
the reason why is, you know, in this day and age, okay,
in the twenty twenties, the way to get clients is
to go online, run ads, create content, make videos, write
now news letters. In other words, get your message out
there to the world by creating some value in some way.

(45:06):
And when you're doing that, you need to have a voice.
You need to have a way that you communicate. Most
people flip on their phone and they start making a
video and they sound like a bored, scared person who's,
you know, writing a science paper that they don't want
to write. It's boring, it's flat, it's not interesting. It

(45:27):
sounds like they're kind of making some kind of a
writing a paper that they're trying to get an a
on and the content that's interesting is the content that
grabs you. You know, when it feels like the person
is talking right to you. It feels like the person
is communicating like somehow coming through the device, like they're
calling you up personally. And the way that you get

(45:48):
to that place where you can write, that way, you
can speak, that way you can create videos that way
is you build this profile of your avatar so that
you have someone to talk to in your mind. Now,
I know I'm put a lot of concepts together here,
but the point is that it's important to have a
sense of who your ideal client is and then to
have an image of that person in your mind. You

(46:09):
want to give them a name, you want to give
them a personality, and then to start talking to them
in your writing, in your newsletters, in your videos, in
your podcasts, and your marketing, because that's what gives you
that voice where you sound interesting, you sound like you're
talking to someone you know, and your clients start feeling like, wow,
it really feels like you're talking to me, and they
like having that relationship with you.

Speaker 2 (46:30):
And I would imagine once we really learn the principles
of coaching, we can probably get skillful of coaching people
through lots of different types of challenges. But I would
imagine a good place to start is that person we
were before we change made the change, and I don't know,
before we learned something, before we developed the capacity to
have something to offer that person we were. That's the

(46:51):
journey we know best, and we can probably communicate to
that person with the greatest ease in some ways.

Speaker 1 (46:57):
Exactly. If you know, like me, if you were saying
and you couldn't figure out how to get a date,
and then you overcame a bunch of things and then
you learned how to get a date, you are really
an ideal person to teach people who are single and
are trying to figure out how to get a date. See,
most people don't realize where they were weak, where they
have now compensated, learned, developed strength, developed skill. They don't

(47:21):
really They go, well, yeah, but I'm not a natural
at surfing, or I'm not a natural at sales. I
had to go learn it. It didn't really come natural
for me. Turns out makes you a great coach because
you're relatable, you can make sense, you can go and
enter the world of the other person. I mean, do
you want to learn how to lose weight from somebody

(47:42):
who was thirty pounds overweight and then lost weight, Or
do you want to learn how to lose weight from
a supermodel who's never been overweight? I mean, come on, yeah,
it makes a lot of sense. So we're just about
to the end of our time here, Evan, thank you
so much. This has been illuminating. I want to ask you,
as though, something.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
About your journey. I have a whole day on scaling,
et cetera. But you've gone from being a solopreneur to
having multiple businesses to managing a team over seventy five.
I think it's set in your bio contractors through which
you run all these businesses. Can you say something about
that journey as we develop ourselves as an entrepreneur, because
I'm sure there's people on our audience who are at

(48:19):
all the different stages on that, whether they're just starting
out or trying to go from six figures to seven
or seven to eight. So I wonder if you could
talk to us a little bit about your journey and
maybe some of the key elements that kept you moving
forward and succeeding on that journey. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:32):
Sure, yeah, that part of my bio there that probably
refers to when my core business had that many team members.
Now I actually have several companies and businesses I've started
that have different teams that work for them. So I've
gotten to see this now in lots of different contexts.
But the key is Michael Gerber wrote a great book
several years ago called The E Myth. Now it's published

(48:53):
as The E Myth Revisited, and I recommend to go
get the original one because it's thinner, and to me,
it's just better. It's more condensed. And what he said
is the myth is the entrepreneurial myth, and it's the
myth that it's mostly entrepreneurs who are starting businesses. And
it turns out that most of the people who start
businesses are not really true like hardcore entrepreneurs. Most of

(49:17):
them are actually what he called technicians who can do
a particular skill and then they say, hey, I should
start a business doing this. So the person who can
clip poodles says, I'm going to start a poodle clipping business,
you know. Or the person who's you know, a good
chef says I'm going to start a restaurant, and then
they get themselves into business and they go, oh, no,
there's all this other stuff that I have to learn
how to do. And he says it can almost be

(49:39):
like a disadvantage if you know how to do the
work of the business. And what he recommends is and
I love this mindset. He says, you want to build
a franchise prototype. So as you make your business, you
want to build it such that you could franchise it.
So each time you have a process that's inside your business,
you want to make a little sop or standard operating procedure.

(50:01):
This way, if you have to hire another person do it,
you can train them quickly. You know how your business runs.
You want to make metrics and dashboards that you can
look at so you can see how all of the
different things work. You want to make hiring and recruiting
and training. You know, you want to do all this stuff.
So once you do find a product or service that
works and that you can start scaling. You have a

(50:23):
different set of puzzles to actually scale the business that
delivers such thing. But the mindset is a lot of
other people have done it. Steve Jobs, Okay, he said himself.
He said, you know the business stuff is not that
hard to learn. It's not that hard to learn, but
you do have to go and learn it, and it's
a different set of skills. And what's really cool now

(50:44):
is we've got books, we've got classes, we've got courses,
we've got generative AI. And if you look at each
of the different dimensions of building a business as another
personal development opportunity, you can learn so many things and
it can make your whole life make more sense sense,
you know. But scaling a business is about taking all
that stuff you did and then breaking it into different

(51:06):
specialties that you hire people to do. And what can
be cool is you want to hire people who are
better than you at each of those particular roles. And
right now, you know, kind of my main business where I,
you know, we're Annie and I my wife and I.
We teach and we do coaching. We probably have ten
or twelve people on our core team there, and they're

(51:26):
all better than me at the things that they do.
And it's really great to work with people who are
better than you at those kinds of things. Right, But
what you're good at is seeing the bigger picture, and
you become the conductor. You become kind of the orchestrator
and again it's another whole skill set to learn, but
it's super cool.

Speaker 2 (51:43):
So Im and I know you have a free, a
very cool free gift that you're offering to our audience,
So tell us about that.

Speaker 1 (51:48):
Sure, well, Fleet, because we're talking about entrepreneurship, I want
to offer all of the entrepreneurs and the budding entrepreneurs
my study of the core element of entrepreneurship. I noticed
years ago that all my friends who are really successful
business people, all the successful entrepreneurs, they had one commonality,
which is they were great at finding and developing, discovering opportunities.

(52:12):
They always seem to have lots of opportunity in their life.
So I made a multi year study of opportunity itself,
and I studied the mental models for opportunity, how to
create opportunity, how to develop it, And I wrote a
book called Opportunity, and I've got some great quotes from
Larry King and others about it, and I'd love to
offer the ebook, the digital version of it to your

(52:33):
audience for free. So anybody who wants it, will make
sure that you've got a link here to get it,
and you can just come to our website and we'll
send that out.

Speaker 2 (52:40):
To you wonderful and that link is right down below,
so I encourage people to do I'm looking forward to
reading opportunity myself. Thank you very much. Well, this has
been incredibly valuable Evan, and you just so exemplify. You know,
we're talking about mindset today, the learner's mindset, the growth mindset.
You just modeled that so beautifully. And thank you for
everything you shared with us, all the value keep bringing

(53:01):
to the world through all your programs and so forth.
So thank you for being part of the summit.

Speaker 1 (53:05):
Thanks Fleet, Thanks everyone.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
Thank you for joining me on the Radical Responsibility Podcast. Remember,
real change happens when we commit to our growth, face
our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If
you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe
and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment.
Stay grounded, stay present, and stay true to you. Take

(53:27):
care

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Eben Pagan | The Inner Work of Scaling a Business

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Eben Pagan | The Inner Work of Scaling a Business