1KHO 801: Learn the Universal Path By Which Anything Becomes Successful | Dr. Henry Cloud, Your Desired Future

Summer gets busy fast. One minute you're easing into warmer weather and the next you're juggling sports schedules, swim days, camping trips, road trips, late nights around the fire and trying to keep the house from completely falling apart in the middle of all of it. And if you're a cat family too, there's still the everyday stuff waiting for you at home including the litter box. That's why Whiskers Litter Robot is such a game changer during busy seasons. It automatically cycles after every use so you're not constantly scooping or dealing with litter cleanup every single day. It just handles the dirty work for you and the Whiskers app notifies you about your unit like when a clean cycle is complete, when drawer levels are getting full or if the unit needs a 10 gym. You can always track things like your cat's weight and bathroom usage over time which makes it easy to stay aware of changes without having to constantly check in. Honestly during a packed summer having one less daily chore to think about makes a huge difference. Maintain your cat's litter while focusing on your growing family. Learn more about Whiskers Litter Robot models and starter kits today to get set up before the summer craziness arrives. Take an additional $50 off bundles with code 1000 hours when you shop Whiskers.com slash 1000 hours. That's an additional $50 off bundles with code 1000 hours at Whiskers.com slash 1000 hours. Welcome to the 1000 hours outside podcast. My name is Ginny Erich. I'm the founder of 1000 hours outside. And I'm so excited. I've been a fan. I mean for decades. I had never in my life thought I would have an opportunity to talk to Dr. Henry Cloud. Welcome. It's good to be here. I don't want to you've been a fan for that long. I don't want to say anything. I might screw that up. For decades. Okay. So I mean you are obviously people know you as the boundaries guy. I was going to show you. I'm like I felt like I have a pretty big stack of your books but I know you've written like 45 books. So these are the ones that I have here. The boundaries books of which there are many variations but I've got the original one here with the workbook because it's about when to say yes and when to say no. And then actually and I've got a book here about integrity. I book about becoming an adult which is we've got kids that are like in their later later high school years. So these have been great additions to our family. And then our daughter who is a teenager high schooler is reading safe people. I went into her room this morning and I was like I need to grab your Henry Cloud books. She's safe people. So she's 16 years old. She's reading safe people and trust and she said please tell him I really like his books. So her 16 year old 10th grade life. But the book that we're going to be talking mainly about today which is brand new is called your desired future. And this is about taking the steps that to get you where you want to go. So you know what's so interesting to me about this book in particular the new one. Your desired future is when you think of someone like you. I mean you've sold millions millions of books over 20 million books and you're and you're working with all sorts of people. You know when you think about boundaries you're thinking about people that are struggling with their relationships. But you have had so much experience working with high performers and you've seen people accomplish these incredible things. So it's interesting to have this book that's geared a lot toward business because you've worked with all these high performing people. So could you give a little bit of backstory on that part of it where you say you've got these people that come in. Everyone's pretty talented. You know everyone's got pretty good social skills. Everyone's got you know maybe different resources at their fingertips and what you see you've had a first row seat. Some people succeed and some people don't and you're like and a lot in the middle like doing some stuff but they know there's more that they would be able to do. They just can't figure out why. Yeah. Yeah. And so through spending time with all of these different people you have learned the sort of pattern recognition of okay these are the elements that go into actually really getting to where you want to be. You know it's really interesting that you see and you know we use the word success which I don't really like because a lot of people associate that with you know big houses and cars and all that stuff but I like the word fruitful that somebody's life is fruitful and however they are trying to you know make it work and be successful and that's you know relationships and family and circles of friends and extended family and career and calling and all of that. And what's interesting is that we the way I put it in the book there really is a universal sort of like the laws of physics. There's a universal path by which anything becomes successful and if you look at any successful endeavor it's going to have these elements in it but what's so fascinating is how they don't look alike when they're doing them. I mean if you took Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who did these incredible technological feats they look so different or professional athletes you know some of them are like you know Mr. Science and the others are you know winging it but you get below the surface and there is a universal path that all of them are doing even though they look different and so that's kind of what the book is about. I thought a long time ago in working for high performers if we could cut through all the noise and however you want to do it whatever your mission is whatever you're trying to achieve what are the laws of physics underneath that go into achievement and that's what the book is about. And it could be for a mom trying to get the kids in the van and on school on time by eight o'clock or a global enterprise. It doesn't matter I mean you got to work with the laws of physics whether you're building a jet or playing tennis. You can't violate these laws. Yeah yeah you're crafting a family you know you're at the beginning years of motherhood and you're like what do I want this to look like you have to have a vision. So it's a phenomenal book phenomenal because of course everybody wants to know what the answers are right the you know these are five steps five essential steps to take you where you want to go where do you want to go you know and everybody's going to have an ending destination that they want but the five steps are going to be the same so it's a fantastic book it's called your desired future. If you look at if I just put the five steps up there everybody mostly everybody who's ever tried to accomplish anything says oh yeah I know all that but what I tried to do in the book and showing the book was you might know these things and you might be doing these things but there is a design of how human brains are wired and there is a design to how these things have to be done that it's in the details you know of how you're actually doing it you might have a vision but is it the kind of vision that actually leads to results right or you might have you know the other parts of it and that's that's where it really gets interesting when when you're beginning to look at because here's our problem we all we all just go do things we create businesses or create families or create departments in our own image meaning we start to get active and we start to do in it start doing it but we're doing it in the way that we're wired yeah and the way that we're wired may be missing a few elements and that's where we get stuck yeah you had talked about you know sometimes people will have four out of the five things or they'll have you know they'll just kind of be off on one of these five essential steps and so you can really help to guide yourself in the direction that you want to go so one of the things that you talked about was you say you always get called in in one of three scenarios okay here's scenario one people are doing well businesses doing well they want to be better scenario two there's a known issue we got something wrong you know something wrong in our relationship there's something wrong in our company can you help us resolve it situation three i love the wording people or businesses are a real mess and they are about to blow up or disintegrate that's true so you say i always want to have at least one of these hairballs in my case load but not too many you know because they're hard they're painful they're difficult they're tiresome but they help you to learn a lot and then when you're successful on the other end it's really rewarding and so this is what you're talking about it's like you have worked with hundreds thousands of people over the years and you have seen what makes it work to get there you know many get there many don't and then there's sometimes there's a lot of brokenness in the in between and then like you said sometimes they're just hanging out in the middle you did a really cool thing in this book i wondered where the idea came from where you took these different essential steps and you tied them to the human body so one example is one of the steps which is about networking which i thought was really interesting i maybe we'll start there but the this one you were like well in your brain your brain is always networking you know it's always you know this neuron's connecting to that neuron can you talk about that framing i thought that was a really cool framing for the book your brain is amazing it's kind of almost the opposite direction what i what i did was you know there's all this performance literature out there and all this leadership literature and all this clinical literature and you know there's a lot of good stuff that we got to learn in order to be successful and fruitful but when you look at all of it you go are there really 10 000 things we got to know before we can pull something off and so what what i did was i did what's called a factor analysis which is where you look at everything and you ask well how many things are there really i mean there are thousand things but 600 i'm a really talking about this same thing that's the element that makes a difference and so i started to do that because i wanted to build a model that would would help people and then i asked the question one day i don't know why um but i i said what what's the model of the greatest performance company or whatever in the world and it just don't know me it's the human body wow there is not a performance machine even close to the human body i mean ai is trying its best to emulate and ai is the biggest thing going right and so i asked the question you know the basic thing we're trying to do is we're trying to get from here to there here's where we are in a marriage or here's who are in our health or here's where we are in sales and we're trying to get over here so i asked the question how does the human body get from here to there how does that work so i went into neuroscience and you know neurobiology and physiology and psychology and anatomy to try to figure out is there a system a path by which the the brain the body does this and it was unbelievable there is and it just so happened to perfectly overlay with the factor analysis of all the performance literature and so that's how we come up with the five and you you talked about vision and and there's really some some elements of vision that that really have to be present that your body needs to make something work or that you need to make a goal work except that goals and visions that never come to fruition but but what does my body do if i want to get from here to there because i'm getting to your point about you called it networking i called it engaging the talent so my body i'm sitting here with you and i go you know what this podcast would be a lot better if we did it from over there okay the human species is the only one capable of doing that that vision what that means is to imagine a future reality that you desire that doesn't exist right that's a vision martin luther king said i see a day when a man is judged by the quality of his character and not the color of skin that didn't exist by and large in in that day that's the vision now watch me as i tell my brain to go get there it ain't going anywhere by itself your brain can't move but what it can do unlike any other part of your body it starts recruiting the talent that it's going to need to get there yeah okay says i'm gonna need a couple legs it sends out emails hey you want to join me and it sends out motivating emails with certain chemicals says i'm gonna need a couple of you know eyes to focus and it wakes up your eyes but it wakes up your eyes calling them specifically to that mission now that little thing right there this is incredible when your vision starts to move things begin to happen in your perceptual neurological systems that start to act as filters to keep everything out of your attention that's going to get in the way and you haven't even done it to do this you haven't even thought about it but look at it this way jenny when when you when you first start you know what i i want a new car you know this one's old and crappy and i i need i need a new car and you start thinking i think i want kind of one of those what happens you drive the same streets you drive the same and now you're seeing that car everywhere that is what a vision begins to do and then it starts to call into account the talent you're going to need to get there now here's the big thing people got to hear our daughter's a singer-songwriter she's in her early 20s and when she was a teenager she came and asked me dad how do people get to be singer-songwriters and i said well luci let me show you and i pull out my whiteboard her eyes roll you know another psychologist dad leif lefson crap moment and i said well first thing you got to have is your vision tell me about your vision and it was unbelievable i mean it was so like amazing i said all right well second thing is you got to engage the talent and she looked at me and she said well dad you and mom said i have talent i said luci i'm not talking about your talent i'm talking about other talent that you got to get to join you to help you get there the brain ain't going nowhere by itself you got to get some legs and some arms and and immediately she got to change she said you know what you i need a new guitar teacher the one i've got is not going to get me there wow we keep going over the same thing over and over and then i don't know how to produce an album and i don't know how to get auditions and so we said you're right on track so let's start looking around and you know we knew some people that knew some people i've had friends and i mean she didn't have a big production company go hire all this and we start to talk to people and lo and halt kevin jonas heard her sing and said oh my gosh i want to manage you wow and so but my point is everybody wherever they're sitting wherever you want to go there are some people around you paid or unpaid a mentor of friend you have got to and get and this is what CEOs do they hire their team right so you may be one friendship one introduction one mentor a personal trainer whatever that knows what you don't know and knows how to get that element move in that you don't know and that's what the brain does next it it tells the legs i'm going to need you need your help to get there so you know everybody looks at networking oh i gotta go meet i'm trying to get into finance gotta go meet people with money well great that's called fishing for customers but you might not know or be connected with the the actual talent that knows how to build a book a business right and that's why all the greats use coaches wow they all did i mean from sports to CEOs this time of year in homeschooling is really special you're wrapping up projects looking at how far your kids have come and helping them finish strong it's also a great moment to reinforce key skills and build confidence as you head into summer and as routines start to shift with travel camps and more time outside it helps to have something that keeps learning steady without over complicating your days that's where ixl can be such a helpful tool ixl is an award winning online learning platform that fits seamlessly into homeschooling it offers interactive practice across math language arts science and social studies from pre-k through 12th grade it personalizes learning for each child keeps them engaged and gives parents clear insight into progress what stands out is the real-time feedback and progress tracking kids get immediate explanations as they go and you can clearly see growth over time what's clicking and where a little reinforcement can go a long way it's a simple way to finish the year strong and keep skills fresh heading into the summer make an impact on your child's learning get ixl now and 1000 hours outside listeners can get an exclusive 20 off ixl membership when they sign up today at ixl.com slash 1000 hours visit ixl.com slash 1000 hours to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price i've got one of the most successful companies that everybody would know that i work with spends at a hundred million dollars a year on individual coaching for their leaders wow and they're killing everybody so you don't have to have a hundred million bucks to go our coach but there's somebody in your circle of friends that might know a little bit that might know somebody that knows something and or can come do this part for you see we don't have all the talent and ease yeah that's fine nobody does yeah nobody when elon started spacex he was not and is not a rocket scientist he knew physics and what he did was i want to go to mars so he goes he goes around the world and starts giving this vision to people that left what they're doing in aerospace to come join him and build this yeah so who's gonna help you that's the second thing and your brain does it better than anybody yeah yeah with all those neurons yeah it's so interesting i love the way that you framed it about the human body because it really helps you to remember the different steps you know nothing comes close to its complex inner working and systems that taken together accomplish a myriad of different and remarkable endeavors talking about the human body so i decided to ask the question how does a human body this amazing performance machine reach its goals and then you like you said you overlay these so you talk about vision people can pick up the book and read about vision you're like the worst vision statement is i want to make x amount of dollars oh good you're like okay that's not good that's not a real vision it's not going to accomplish what you need it to do so you talk about specificity so whether you're talking about a mom kind of orchestrating your home or a business owner or an you know an entrepreneur or an employee like you need specificity so people can read that in the book but part of the reason is because your motivation is going to wane yeah and so you have to really know what you want and i loved this part in all of them you talked a lot about how and i did not really know this at all in all of these steps it actually is affecting your brain so you say okay you come up with this vision and you say it's going to send your train down the tracks but it's also going to help you start to lay the next tracks like where are we going further than this so you just give a lot of encouragement here believe that what is being done every day by someone just like you is possible to accomplish it seriously we cannot underestimate that and here's why most people if you talk to them and you're talking about somebody getting somewhere you know losing weight or working on addiction or you know building their marriage or increasing sales and they're not getting there and somebody critically and says well they just don't want it bad enough if you wanted bad enough you would do it they just don't want it bad enough and what they're speaking to there is motivation and everybody thinks you got you know if you wanted bad enough and if you can conceive it you can achieve it and all this stuff well here's what's true motivation is absolutely necessary and i talked about in the book where that comes from how to build it but it is not the number one factor that loads on the achievement of a goal the number one in fact motivation can be inversely correlated there's a proverb in the book of proverbs it says a desire accomplished is sweet to the soul but hope deferred makes the heart sick and jenny is so sad there are people that long i mean they're motivated they want their marriage to improve or they want their kid to improve or they want you know to reach this goal or change their financial picture or whatever it is they want to get out of debt for example our country is suffering from people in consumer debt and they look at this pile and they think or they look at somebody's marriage or they think well that's for somebody else i mean i can't i can't do that it's not going to work for me and they they kind of start to lose hope but what happens well the motivation goes down yeah you can't depend on motivation it wanes the number one factor is the belief that it's possible yeah number one is what i said in the book unless you're doing something that we've never heard of before 99 of everything that all of us are dreaming about doing somebody's doing it right now it is possible it is very possible stop blaming yourself you just don't know how and you don't know the path to take okay somebody's doing it this is why my buddy Dave Ramsey what does he do he has saved i mean i don't know if they've added it up before but it's got to be in the billions or something people who over the years have gotten out of piles of debt that they didn't think was possible right well what's the first thing he does is he he brings people on the air not first in every show but in the system he brings people on the air and they do the debt fee debt free screen they've been working his program and they'll fly to Nashville to get on camera and go i'm debt free and then they talk about how that happened that's why we need testimonials that's why an addict who thinks it's impossible gets sober goes to a recovery group you want to go around the circle yeah you know i've got 10 days of sobriety or i got 20 years of sobriety or whatever and the brain starts to learn wait a minute this really can be done i just need to know how to do it so the belief thing is a big deal and then kind of the the underside of that sort of the other side of the coin of the belief is what we know about anything anything anything stop dialing 1-800-GET-RICH-NOW whatever says something's going to happen easy or immediately you know that's just not but here's what we know once you believe it and then you know the incremental steps that second factor is consistent execution of the incremental steps that move the needle it's always a little bit at a time always always always always always always but you gotta know how to organize those and what they need to be because a lot of people execute perfectly very disciplined and they're doing the wrong things sure so it doesn't get you there sure sure these are incredible things to learn yourself and also to teach your kids if your parent if your children are at like these you know sort of teen and tween years can you give an example of that yeah like a parent a parent wants to help their kid right they go what's the big thing you gotta do we gotta prioritize and spend time with your kid so they start to spend time with their kid and it's not getting better it's getting worse well what's happening in that time see this is where this is where a path that's got to be so important and the specific activities that you're doing there matter yeah so yeah yes it's not rocket science but it is pretty much universal laws and yeah really anybody can do it anybody does do it when you walk across a dream you do it yeah this this path is um it's pretty simple but it's specific and and it's gotta be clear yeah and i love that the book like you had so many examples in here so the book is called your desired future so when you're talking about vision you're talking about the example of first star works so this is a place where you know these these kids they think they might not be able to graduate and then they they show no no no it's worse than that genie these are foster kids it's a group i worked with um in los angeles 90 something 99 percent 90 percent of foster kids don't graduate high school and virtually none go to college what first star does is they come in and pick them up in the ninth grade and they start to work with them and they have a program long story short i think it i think they might you could look it up i think they might say 100 of their kids graduate high school and 90 something go to secondary education amazing why because they're following a path that has the elements and and it begins with belief and i think you know we've got a small little company here i know i was um a teacher and then i was a stay-at-home mom and now we've got this kind of small company with like me and my husband and then we have one employee a part-time employee named megan who's one who's wonderful what were you doing a part-time i was a teacher and no i mean what was the company stay home well 1000 hours outside is our company right so oh you know we sell some products and we've got the podcast and i speak sometimes and we've got this really cool app but i have a dream you know my my vision would be i think it's very cool to be able to hire people and to provide work for other people and you know our kids you know if they wanted to have the opportunity not that we would ever force them and so i i have the vision but if i really were to think about it until i read your book i don't know if i had the belief i would have thought i've never done this before i don't know anything about the world of work i'm not an entrepreneur i don't know many entrepreneurs talking about you know engaging the necessary talent piece but the belief when you said that i was like this is a really big statement believe that what is being done every day by someone just like you is possible to accomplish and the belief pieces where they started with these foster kids they created the circumstances so that these foster kids could believe that college was possible for them so this is just one of the five steps and then you talk about you know they spend these four years on that i spent one weekend a month and then they take them to UCLA and these kids are from horrible circumstances yeah and that's when a lot of people don't really have visions because you actually have a vision of something you've never even seen and they learn oh this is what a college is and then they start to learn and you know people that go to college are able to do a b and c and they start to work on those skills and then they learn this is a big one these kids learn that you know money's available but you don't have money's available for you to go to college and they start to figure out how you apply for that and how you but without that their world opened up if you go i think it's on their website they have a lot of quotes about about these kids that after you know they got through all this successfully like it's a huge percentage said what helped them more than anything was i started to see that this was possible for me yes yeah that gave me chills because that is related to anything i think that sometimes we have these desires of things like oh i wish you know i would like my life to be like that but you don't necessarily have a core belief that it could and so to start to see things and and to have that sentence like other people are doing it other people just like you you know the same talent level or same resources they figured it out you know there was a kid in the book you gave it's just such great examples and when you said at the beginning like you're like all most people would be like yeah i kind of know what you're talking about you know i need motivation i need a good team you know i got to have a step so but you're but the book really yeah but who do they go fun you know they're they're cut oh i need people i'm gonna ask cousin joey really because he's he's available you know what does joey bring to the party it's actually gonna help you yeah yeah you drill down i think to lower lower layers that i wouldn't have thought of like you have the the sentence desire plus belief is what gets the human body going and you had given a story of someone that came to was like i want to it was like a young guy i want to be a business owner but i don't have any money so i can't do it and you said will you start to laugh it's a guy i'm mentoring right now just as a favor and he he reads about business all the time and he has these entrepreneurial passions and and he comes from you know pretty tough background and he goes well i want to have my own business but i don't have any money and you know you can't make money if you don't have money and these this crap in people's heads that they've learned and i just burst out laughing i go it's just it's like if somebody told you the earth was flat you you just have to but they're trying to get to the edge right yeah these things are not true and they order people's lives yeah yeah so you say use reality to draw you away from your fears and limiting beliefs look around you know how look at the guy who started starbucks you know it it was an incredible amount of examples for each of the steps that really help you to understand that part of the that piece of the puzzle so like because i would have been like oh yeah i got a great vision but if i were to really drill down i don't really believe that i have what it takes and so then i think to look around and see well other people have done it it helps you to change your perspective i mean it was something as simple as shark tank these people don't have money they have a passion yeah they're bringing it there see they're starting to engage the talent and what do you hear a lot of them say that you know they say why should i invest in your company and they'll say because i have a great product but you have the ability to get me into walmart right you have the ability to to teach me about distribution see they're engaging outside talent and they're not stuck in their own little circle that's just the beginning i mean then we get into the real execution of all this yeah well let's talk about that i do want to do a plug for lucy's music though because i listened i went and listened oh you did yeah i did so she's got this song called crash and learn i was like if there ever was a song written by a psychologist's daughter i mean this this is a song like i'm fine i'm not no wait just need a little time for healing i've tried to run i've tried to hide i've hurt myself keeping it inside and she has a music video in that one so talking about engaging the necessary talent it's like someone had to figure out you know how how do you make this video and she's got this really cool upright piano with these candles on it in the middle of this room and there's like this ballerina and a typewriter it's very analog it's cool yeah jenny thank you for for plug in her music if you go to lucy cloud and crash and learn but she just released a new new lp ep ep i guess with a song on there um oh gosh what the ep is it called allowing time it's um it's not uh um to love somebody i think no that's not it that's the one i love anyway it's one of them that was just nominate for song of the year now get this none of that would exist without that conversation we had in the kitchen that morning when she was a teenager yeah that's where i you know we talked about this path and then she started work the path well the song crash and learn cbs television bought that song and the cw network bought that song and it went into network shows and she's getting asked to play all sorts of places now but there's a million kids out there just as talented well nobody's as talented as lucy but you know what i mean and and they have dreams but she started to do the path yeah and that's what i'm trying to help people see what that path is yeah and she engaged this other talent of course because there's a ballerina in this video so who the question is who do i need to help me get there and you talked about i think one of the things that was really interesting was your own story when you wanted you had this vision of wanting to have an integrated psychiatric hospital you're like i wanted to be more faith welcoming i wanted to integrate these different parts of health and so you you know you're with dr john townsen so this is like everybody knows the two of you for these boundaries books i didn't actually know this story but you're like you know you're kind of plugging away and in what you say is there's a whole lot of things that we don't know that we don't know i'm like that's a huge statement so you got to kind of bring in the people you're giving the example of bringing in people who understand how to this particular business path and so you might just be one step away or you might just be one higher away from success so that's talking about there's and there's a lot more in there too about your optimism you know like how is your what's your face communicating i was like this is great for a family unit too right you say it's hard to feel negative and not reveal it to others it leaks so check your face well i mean people just you know do the family dinner tonight and ask your teenagers how you doing fine well tell your face it's not telling me you're fine right right and this is for business too so talking about i would have never used that phraseology like you said everybody uses networks in the brain obviously there's networks in the brain but it's really about like who are the people that we could do this together with and you talked about in sports and you know and by together doesn't mean you have to take on a partner or they have to own half of your family or your endeavor it just means what talent is needed that's the thing what abilities are needed that i need to bring to the party that i don't possess because we don't have all of them yes so good it's very specific and so you think oh yeah i know this overview but you don't really know it until you read the book can can we get to so we're you know you got vision you got to engage the talent yeah the next one is the strategy yep you know how am i going to get there across the room well i could call an uber well that doesn't really make any sense or i could ride a scooter and then your brain starts to figure you know the best way for me to get there is to walk that's your strategy and a strategy has to have a plan and your brain it's unbelievable as soon as you start say i'm a walk across the room your brain has started to calculate a plan that has specific activities done by whom at what time we're not even conscious of this but your brain is the size you know it's going to take about probably 12 seconds 15 seconds to walk over there one leg is going to take a step every second about three feet on a particular direction all right well now we know how we're going to get there but a lot of people have never figured out a strategy they start to do a bunch of different activities to think they're going to get there but they don't relate to loading and moving the needle on any particular particular way and there's a thousand different ways in there i talk about two companies for example that you know all this growth chick filet is one they have a growth strategy and their strategy is to open new stores from inside the company with their people and their branding and their culture and that's why i'm a chick filet opens up near you you walk in and it works it's unbelievable this feels like chick filet it doesn't feel like bob's chicken sandwiches is trying to figure this out from day one so i compare that with a uh a regional bank pretty big regional bank that called me and said we have a growth strategy and i said what is it they said we're going to grow across the country i said how are you gonna do that they said buy acquisitions different strategy yeah they're buy little banks enroll them into their brand and he said what we need your help with this we need to make sure we build that they join us and that they get our culture and not infect our culture with a thousand different cultures we want our brand to have our culture and that is really interesting they said i said well what's your vision for the culture and they said we want when they walk into one of our branches we want to feel like they're walking into a chick filet now but now think about this very different strategies there's no one right way one company is going to grow their own another one is going to go adopt kids and bring them into the family and get them working in the family it's not a right or wrong thing but you got to know how you're going to get there because if you don't you're going to say yes to everything yeah it's going to pull you off track your body knows what it's doing but then the next point that's number three but then the next one is your body your brain has already started to build in a measurement and accountability system to answer the question am i doing what i said i was going to do that will load on the strategy to move the needle to accomplish my vision so you know what the plan tells you what your activities are but then you're going to have accountability your brain's going to hold you accountable you start to wander off it's going to notice that say hey get back on on track think of a pilot i talked about this in the book yeah if you're flying from LA to new york okay she's got a vision the pilots got a vision when she crons into that cockpit of a you know united or american airlines or whatever plane she's got a vision land safely into york we're going to do this she's engaged the talent you got the copilot you got the flight you know you got everybody you're gonna need she has a strategy how are we gonna get there we're gonna fly this plane but there's a flight plan 40 000 feet certain heading going to do that at a certain speed that's her flight plan this is going to make her strategy work all right but then her accountability systems join the party now here's a problem most of us when we think of somebody holding us accountable it goes negative right well crap they're going to spank they're going to spank me for what i didn't do or you know they're going to you know it's like the senator somebody's going to be held accountable for this and it's all about anger and all that you've got to get accountability positive because it is your best friend your brain could not function without an accountability system she would not take off on that plane if her accountability relationships weren't intact the first one's her her instrument panel yeah she's up there her flight plan shows 40 000 feet she dips down at 38 000 beep beep beep altitude low according to plan oh you're right and she adjusts i'm burning too much fuel at 38 000 not going to get there one time she adjusts the accountability system helps you get there and every single performance achievement has some way of asking am i doing what's important to get me there and when i'm not and this is huge and all the research shows this the fifth step is it quickly fixes it because if you don't quickly fix what you didn't do that you said you were going to do or you did it in the way not according way i was supposed to be done if you don't quickly fix it you don't have a problem anymore because it's going to happen again now you've got something called a pattern you're no longer the person who i didn't wake up one morning and and work out like i said i was going to do i slept in fine everybody does that you know we have problems we have bips we have mistakes but that second morning that alarm clock goes off or that second night your kid doesn't do their homework or second week you don't go to your couples group what happens is now you're laying down neurological wiring and here's what the research shows the chances of you continuing down that path after it's like in new year's resolutions after a second miss or a third miss just fall off the chart wow because now you have a pattern and patterns are mutations of the plan and the strategy and mutations what do they do in dna mutations create identity so now you're no longer the person who missed a workout you're the person who doesn't work out you become the dna and that's why accountability is so important now some people have it wired in to whatever they're trying to do they wouldn't miss a day of working out but how many performers have i worked with that are highly disciplined performance but their area of weaknesses is shut your mouth and listen to your kid before you give advice see they may be great at executing something they're already good at but now to make that happen sometimes i gotta get the kid involved say hey when your interruption starts lecturing you before you got the sentence out of your mouth hold up the shallow flag and wait file or an executive team you gotta have real-time observation that's accountability and then deliberately do the new thing that's how neurological wiring is built it's so important it doesn't happen without it i love the example that one of the examples that you gave was really just your book writing so you have 45 books 45 books and you say i'm not an author like as i am not i'm not i am not an author i'm a practitioner you're a practitioner yeah and you say everyone comes and they say we don't have any time yeah i all these people come and say oh i'd love to write a book but i don't have time i don't either i mean i work full-time seriously yeah but here's the deal if you have a path they can get you there and you have a system that's kind of the strategy and the plan yeah anybody can write a book because there's a lot of different ways to pull that off i have big time you know athletes and ceo's to say everybody's telling me write a book i don't know how to write a book i go dude the book's already written it's your story you just gotta get it on paper so the thing about a strategy to do that well i don't talk who cares we're gonna engage some talent we're gonna bring a ghost writer and we'll take you into a room we're gonna get on a whiteboard and you're gonna tell your story and this writer is going to take all this stuff down and they're gonna record it and then they're gonna go write it for you and you've written a book now you're an author no i'm not i'm a ceo exactly exactly or there's 18 000 other ways to do it that's why strategy is so important and figuring out what my system is going to be i don't have time to write books and you have accountability you're like i have a chief nagging officer i do have a chief nagging officer and i've got a system and i gotta i gotta meet meet those numbers you know and it's not it's not burdensome i mean john christian is a great example john christian is and is probably selling more nonfiction books than i mean fiction books than most people at least he was a full-time attorney and a state legislator didn't have time right i mean think of that he's got two careers he's got probably a young family at that time i'm not telling her to write a book you know he did he got 30 minutes early every day or an hour earlier than normal and he wrote one page a day and you add all that up about a year later he's looking at a manuscript called a time to kill and we all saw the movie he didn't have time either but what's your system yeah it's so good it's so good i wasn't expecting a business book you know because you know obviously there's all these books about relationships and you know hold on because it's not a business book right right there's an application of business that's true but if somebody's going to lose weight i talk about my weight loss path because i was in a wheelchair for you know a few years ago for like three years and i i couldn't move there was one muscle that worked well and it was the one that brought food to my mouth and and i had three significant surgeries in all this and i couldn't stand up well i gained close to 40 pounds and i talk about you know the path in there of of and i am i mean i'd love to eat more than anything in the world almost and and without without a path i couldn't couldn't have pulled this off but it's not just business it's my point it's health it's raising kids it's building a family yeah um any of it yeah you say this i have seen what and i thought that i guess it's framed from you working with people who i'm like sometimes it works out you say sometimes it's working out great and sometimes it's not and you say i have seen what seemed impossible be achieved there is a way forward from which success follows and it's just such a positive positive message but also the important message that there is a way to do it there is this universal way to do it whether it's health goals or goals for relationships or goals for business these are the five essential steps i learned a ton i loved it your desired future the five essential steps that take you where you want to go can you tell people about the online course that they can find at drcloud.com yeah um you know a number of years ago not too many but a few i just noticed it really started i mean it blew up in big ways in covid that that people were were going online to learn stuff they needed doing life and and then i thought well i'm sitting on all of this content that i can't be everywhere and and i can't i mean i only work with one person at a time so what i decided to do was create an online uh really coaching system and if you go to the to the website it's now it's now called becoming whole but i think on the website it's still boundaries.me you can you can get in there either way by by going to drcloud.com you'll see it and i have over a hundred courses on there of everything from clinical issues like depression and anxiety to relationship problems marriage parenting extended relationships work relationships all those skills and then performance you know reaching goals and so people go on there and find out wow and the book is the book and when does this air i'm going to air it right when the book comes out so people can get it today there you go it's phenomenal i highly recommend i got so much out of it you know i think to your point you brought up at the very beginning you think you know what you're doing and i i kind of would have been that type of person like i think i know what i'm doing but then you're i'm like no i'm missing nuance here i'm missing entire pieces like the piece of belief you know so i just it's been a very helpful all of your books obviously are like that they're incredibly practical and i got a lot out of it your desired future the five essential steps that take you where you want to go you can get it today it's fantastic and check out all of your other books as well there's necessary endings there's so many phenomenal books this has been such an honor to get a chance to talk with you we always end our show with the same question what's a favorite memory from your childhood that was outside there was what outside oh gosh i lived outside yeah so there's a lot of them two immediately come to mind one is uh riding my horse through the woods by myself it's um it's quiet because it's beautiful it's just me and god and the horse that that's one that came to immediate came to me immediately and i grew up a competitive golfer and the other one that came to mind was my first hole in one on number seven at vixper country club it's about 195 yard part three wow i'm having a little white ball found its way into the hall oh isn't that credible you'll never forget it thank you so much i appreciate your time i mean i know obviously you have so much going on so it's honor to get a chance to talk with you and this incredible book thanks for writing it well jenny can i say this um you know i do a lot of interviews and you you're really good at this but anybody be good at it but it's it's much better conversation if the interviewers actually looked at the book true how is this in the year no more about the book than i know it does help a bit doesn't it i loved the book and it's already helping my life and i just and from a mom's perspective you know to have our kids interacting with your books our my friend nicole uh recommended these for our for our daughter who's you know like when you're 15 60 and there can be friends stuff and um so i just you know you'll never know the ripple effect you know when you read 20 billion books sold whatever it is it's like but that represents so many so many so much more because like that's a ripple generationally that's a ripple in family units you know so um it's like okay you got that number of books sold but how many people have you impacted it's just like uncountable so it's an honor well just sitting around you know one word at a time yeah you never know what it's gonna do but you gotta you gotta take the first step yeah thank you so much for being here thanks janny