AI can do a lot of tasks that used to take human effort, but it can’t think about its own thinking. In this episode, Dan Sullivan and Shannon Waller explain why the right response to AI is to become more conscious, discerning, and intentional so you can use technology with clarity and purpose.

Here’s some of what you’ll learn in this episode:

• Why so many people feel confused and overwhelmed by AI.
• Why the way most people are reacting to AI is completely normal.
• How new technology has increased both personal freedom and global complexity.
• Why AI isn’t the cause of big changes in the world, but the result of them.
• What “mechanical thinking” means, and how it explains what AI actually does best.
• What humans can do that AI will never be able to do in the same way.
• How The Strategic Coach® Program helps you access your own experience and get clear about your thinking.

Show Notes:

AI is doing work that people used to do manually, but that doesn’t make it original thinking.

A lot of everyday thinking is repetitive and mechanical, which is exactly the kind of work AI can handle well.

Every interaction with technology that we take for granted now might have been a troubling experience when it was first introduced.

AI isn’t new. It's just entered the realm of cognition.

Most people think about only three things: things, people, and other people’s thoughts. The fourth level is thinking about your thinking.

If you think about your thinking, you’ll become very discerning and masterful in how you use AI.

Everyone uses AI for different reasons.

A lot of AI’s capabilities probably don’t serve your purposes.

To use AI effectively, you need to be clear on your reasons for using it.

AI is trying to keep up with humanity, not the other way around.

Resources:

Shannon Waller’s Team Success Podcast

Failure never feels good, but trying to dodge it or downplay it keeps you from learning what you most need as an entrepreneur. In this episode, Dan Sullivan and Shannon Waller explore why you should let failure be failure, fully feel the emotion, and then transform that energy into better thinking, better timing, and bigger progress.

Here’s some of what you’ll learn in this episode:

Why people sometimes avoid thinking about a failure.

Why you should allow yourself to fully experience your first failure.

Where entrepreneurs set themselves up for the most unhappiness.

The new Strategic Coach® thinking tool that shows you how you handle your failures and your breakthroughs.

Show Notes:

If you don’t learn from your failure, you’ll fail the same way again.

When you fail, let yourself feel the full negative emotion once, then use that energy to decide what you’ll do differently next time.

A person who keeps failing at the same thing with no learning and no change in behavior becomes a failure in that area.

Repeated failures in the same way can start to erode your sense of who you are as an entrepreneur.

Every failure is sending you a message about your thinking, preparation, or timing, and your job is to pay attention to it.

How you handle your failures and your breakthroughs determines whether you’re actually functioning as an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurism is a daily back and forth between breakthroughs and failures, and both are raw material for new capabilities.

Many people try to avoid intense emotion, but dodging the feeling of failure also cuts you off from the insight it could lead to.

Most people measure their progress against an ideal, but an ideal is not reality; it’s an unreality that guarantees disappointment.

Often the “failure” is not the goal or project itself, but an unrealistic deadline or short game that ignores the actual capabilities and resources you have.

Your emotions aren’t attached to what happens outside you; they’re attached to how you choose to think about what happens, which means you can respond creatively instead of reactively.

Resources:

The Gap And The Gain by Dan Sullivan with Dr. Benjamin Hardy

What You Can Learn From Failure

Everyone knows what cognitive thinking is, but what about metacognitive thinking? Dan Sullivan uses this term to describe the kind of thinking The Strategic Coach® Program develops in entrepreneurs. In this episode, Dan and fellow business coach Shannon Waller explore metacognitive thinking and how it helps the right kind of entrepreneurs achieve their biggest dreams with greater clarity and confidence.

Here’s some of what you’ll learn in this episode:

• The three levels of thinking most people rely on in daily life.
• The fourth level of thinking that unlocks your best entrepreneurial ideas.
• Dan’s first childhood experience of thinking about his thinking.
• The question that set Dan on a completely different life path from his peers.
• Why entrepreneurs gain an unfair advantage when they learn to think about their thinking.

Show Notes:

One level of thinking is thinking about things. People like things, and they often use shared things as common ground for conversation.

The second level of thinking is thinking about people, which is why social media has become such a powerful phenomenon.

For most people, thinking about things and thinking about people uses up almost all of their available mental time.

The third level of thinking is thinking about thoughts, which is the focus of higher education and high-level media.

In higher education, professors typically teach other people’s thinking rather than developing and teaching their own.

The fourth level of thinking, which very creative people—and especially entrepreneurs—can access, is thinking about your thinking.

Thinking about your thinking gives you the ability to deliberately change how you’re thinking about a situation or problem.

Strategic Coach® provides hundreds of thinking tools to help entrepreneurs think about their thinking in structured, practical ways.

Your emotions are not a direct response to what happens outside of you; they’re a response to how you’re thinking about what happens.

Resources:

My Plan For Living To 156 by Dan Sullivan

Unique Ability®